F I S H I N G

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When Napoleon and his army were in Egypt to fight the British, they thought it would be over in no time. But the British destroyed their ships, and the French could not go back to France for three years. So they began to dig themselves in and when they enlarged their defenses near the harbour of Rosetta  they discovered this strange stone :

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The Rosetta stone is a large block of black basalt with very old engravings of a decree issued by the Pharaoh and written in classical Greek and in two Egyptian languages. It was originally about six feet tall and had been set up in 196 BC. A stone of this kind is called a stela.

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By comparing the three texts, the scientists were able to decode the hieroglyphics they had seen on the walls of Egypt’s royal tombs.

It was a complex system that gave a lot of power to those who knew how to read.  Some of those shapes can still be seen reflected in the letters of our alphabet :

The zig-zag line represented water, and it evolved into our letter M

and this ox head stood for a glottal stop, but the Greeks used it to represent their letter alpha which later became our A.

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However, hieroglyphs, unlike our letters, could represent either a sound or a thing or even some abstract indication like a plural or a future tense, all depending on context.

They were read from right to left, and so the first of these is a stick, followed by a vulture and the last one is a folded cloth . Apparently the stick and the vulture meant “enemy action”, and the complete set may have meant the underworld, where the souls of the dead are kept.

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……… At the top there is a sign that looks like a snail. It is a horned viper, and it is famous because according to legend Cleopatra tested its venom on her captives to decide whether the bite was a good way to die.  She was looking for the best way to kill herself.

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The hieroglyphs were very long to decode. And there are hundreds of tablets. Most are simply invocations and data of the royal agenda. The idea behind the invention of writing was to make words more permanent and to prevent them from blowing in the wind as Dylan and even John Paul II used to say.

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The drawings are so modern that they feel like a spook. The pictures are from the Molon gallery. According to Wiki, “hieroglyph” is from Greek ἱερογλύφος and means “sacred carving”.

To get the complete set of letters  click on the thumbnail below from the web page of http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/alphabet.html

There is  something awful in how attractive this looks to most people now, as if the Egyptians were closer to us than for instance the people of the Renaissance……There is a portrait bust of Cleopatra in Berlin’s Altes Museum where she looks exactly like a modern woman:

And below is the burial chamber of Sennefer, who was the mayor of Thebes:

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