Connor Mudrick -- The Experiment of Psammetichos

   General comment to everyone:  Be sure you articulate why you are calling some things 
   *borders* or *boundaries* (i.e. things that divide some place from another place or 
   some people from others, while at the same time forming a connection between them).  
   Some of you seem to be using those words almost as synonyms for "differences," but there is 
   more to it than that because you aren't always working in the idea of simultaneous 
   *separation* and *connection*. 

   Connor, the main problem I see in your paper is that you haven't really identified
   enough specific borders/boundaries that are involved in the Psammetichos story.  So 
   I think you found that you didn't have enough to say and that led you to include other, 
   essentially unrelated things to get up to the page count for the assignment.  To start 
   working on your rewrite, I think you need to come up with one or two other specific
   borders that are involved in this story (that is, other than the geographical 
   separation between Egypt and Phrygia).  For instance, you might want to think about
   the way the experiment was set up to introduce a border between the children and
   the rest of human society, so that the usual ways children start to learn language 
   from their parents and other family members could not take place.  In the process
   they were supposed to make a connection with the original, oldest human language.
   You might also think about the question whether this sort of experimentation
   crosses some kind of ethical border between allowable and unallowable behavior.
   After all, as newborn children, the "subjects" of Psammetichos's experiment certainly
   could not give informed consent to being treated that way. This is admittedly 
   anachronistic (i.e. it's not something that Herodotus would have worried about
   because people just didn't think about issues like this at that point in history).  
   But it's a valid question for us and it's interesting to ask why Herodotus is not
   bothered by something that probably seems like child abuse.    

   I don't quite understand why you are saying Psammetichos's experiment had a "high 
   margin of error" and I would disagree that answering the question of which people
   had the oldest language or civilization "seems simple by today's standards."  I think that 
   what you are getting at is that what Psammetichos is said to have done doesn't 
   seem to make much sense to us as a way to answer that underlying question. 
   I think we need to cut Herodotus some slack because even the idea of devising an 
   experiment to try to answer that sort of question would have been a rather unusual 
   and interesting idea for his audience when he was writing.  

   The way Xerxes counted his army in Book 7 doesn't seem to have any connection with
   the rest of your topic.  I don't see why you included that and it seems a bit like
   "padding."  Plus, it is sort of stuck into the middle of a longer paragraph that
   touches a number of different subjects without any clear structure. 

   There is quite a bit of duplication between the end of the big paragraph on page
   2 and the start of the following paragraph at the bottom of that page.  At the 
   top of page 3, I don't think there's any evidence that Herodotus actually visited
   "much of the Persian Empire" other than Egypt and the Ionian coast. 

   In terms of the attached writing rubric, I think parts of the "Content," "Evidence,"
   and "Structure" categories are at the "Proficient" level, but others are at the "Basic" 
   level. See especially the comment above about the inclusion of the material from Book 7.
   The "Execution" category is Proficient to Advanced.

   Content:  B-

   Mechanics: B