Champollion and Me
Egyptian hieroglyphics are extremely well understood, since the early 19th century efforts of ThomasYoung and Jean-Francois Champollion, aided by the recovery of the Rosetta stone during the start of French/English intervention in Egyptian affairs. Compared to Mayan epigraphy, Egyptian writing is rather well standardized, without the artistic flights of fancy and idiosyncrasies of the Mayan scribe's games with order, size and placement.
While 'real' hieroglyphs normally read right-to-left, Roger follows common academic convention and presents his message in our familiar orientation. Even with 'real' texts, when the reading direction reverses, the asymmetric signs like feathers, cups and hawks all helpfully reverse direction, too! So there is no problem figuring out the way to read.
(TH)(I)(I) (F)(I)(R)(S)(T) (KH)(I)(I) is what the first panel comes out to:
(S)(T)(A)(R) (Q)(R)(A)(D)(R)(D)
(I)(N) (TH)(I)(I) (M)(OU)(N) is what the second panel says, from fairly simple tables.
Looks like Egyptians did not have some of our consonants and vowels - some references say the Egyptians did not have the 'TH' sound, like most of the world. And they may have been missing the 'L' sound, too. But we are close enough to make it out - and the star cradled in the Moon is one of the 'reverse video' buttons, also! A happy augury!
We'll go try this and report back, next time.
I have been exploring the options at the 4 lock gate. Many of the selections immediately kick you out of the game, but most of them let you click 4 times, and then the fifth time you get this graphic. This is a Mayan 'skull rack' or tzompantli. From the style of the posts and skull presentation, looks like this one is from Chichen Itza:
Although I can't find this exact view (I had wanted to see if 30 years of acid rain had noticeably degraded the limestone). This may be a personal photo that Roger took. Which once again makes me wonder about Roger - how is it that he could live a dozen leisured lives to my hurried one?
Hernan Cortés is getting shortchanged, this quincentenary of the fall of Tenochtitlan (May-August 1521). Cortés may have been deeply flawed as a person (such an odd mix of Indiana Jones, Joel Osteen and Bernie Madoff!) but the world is better off without the depraved death-cult rampant in the New World, and the epidemics would have raged through their society no matter how enlightened the contacts were.
Cortés comes off much better than his cheap imitations the Pizarro brothers were in South America. There's a good reason the Gulf of California should really be called the Sea of Cortés.
I highly recommend William H. Prescott's luminous History of the Conquest of Mexico. A half-blind Yankee scores against the Spanish empire by writing their history for them.
In the year between Cortés's wild retreat from T-town and his triumphant, bloody return, the skull racks got fancy with people with beards - and horse's heads, too! Keeping up to date!
You will notice a cultural feature here, too - Mayan skull racks mounted their trophies on vertical shafts, where the Aztecs did it horizontally. You say potato, I say pahtatoe ...
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