Week Two #4

The text I chose to decipher was The Code of Hammurabi at the Louvre museum in Paris. I chose this piece because when I was in Paris I was really looking forward to going to the largest museum, the Louvre. What I actually ended up decoding in reality was the map itself to navigate the Louvre. The exhibit that I was most looking forward to seeing was the ancient civilization exhibits, and within the Mesopotamia exhibit is the Code of Hammurabi. (Seeing that I am a History teacher, I have to include how dorky I truly can be, after all I am blogging!) Hammurabi was a Babylonian King who is credited with writing the first written laws. His laws followed a format of: "If you do this, than this is the consequence..." Obviously I can not decipher ancient Akkadian language, but I expected the Louvre to summarize and explain the significance of the set of laws that they had on display in some kind of caption next to the item itself. Much to my dismay though, everything in the Louvre is in French. Not a single caption next to the millions of items that the Louvre has on display is in any language other than French. Even the map to get around the Louvre is in French. The only thing you can do to get around all of the French is to buy a "whisperer," an ear piece that you take a tour with.
The first thing I did to try and decode the Louvre map and to find the Code of Hammurabi was look at the pictures on the map. From the pictures I was able to figure out what ancient civilization each particular floor the Louvre was featuring. I used my background knowledge to say to myself, "Okay these are pictures of ancient Greek Gods and Goddesses, so this is not the direction that I want to go in this museum, and these are pictures of famous are paintings, and I know that the Code of Hammurabi is a temple like fixture so I don't want to go there."
I scanned the map I was using to look for pictures that reminded me of Egypt. Once I found those pictures, I found that the name of the floor that I was looking for was going to be called "Sully." I figured out that Sully was the name of the floor because it was big and bold compared to the other words on the map. I used the organizational structure of the map to figure out that all the featured exhibits were listed under big bold names. These big bold names corresponded with the many entrances within the Louvre. I also noticed that the map was color coded. Once I found the Egyptian exhibit I knew that the Mesopotamian could not be far. And I was correct. The Code of Hammurabi was on the ground floor in the Sully wing in the orange section. I will admit that I did everything correct in finding the right entrance, but instead of going to orange area that symbolized ancient Mesopotamia, I went into the turquoise area, which was ancient Egypt. Once I was actually in the right area, I could tell because the French word for Mesopotamia is Mésopotamie. The words are close, so I assumed based on background knowledge on cognates I had to be in the right area.
Overall, I will say trying to find particular items in the Louvre is an all day task. The place is so large and foreign! It was really difficult, frustrating, and sometimes disappointing because I could not figure out many of the featured items within the museum because I do not read in French. I had to guess and assume on a large majority of the featured items, and I admit that I gave up reading the captions and eventually went to strictly looking at items.