Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Procrastination? Just a little...

While resting my poor, weary brain from the overly-complex-'Brake Fluid'-timeline, I found this:

An author who writes about Ancient Egypt! Go check out her contest (and my hideous attempt at poetry about Pliny the elder...)

...and, since I'm an incredible nerd in some ways, I've got... probably more books on ancient Egypt than is healthy...

So here's another demonstration of my nerdishness:

In one university class, as a small, fun project, we had to research/translate just our first name (phonetically) into hieroglyphs.

...and y'know, since I'm a tiny bit of an overachiever... and I'll use any excuse to draw cartoons...

...this is what I turned in:

(click for full size)
...which, as you can see, my over-achieving-ways ensured I didn't get to actually finish it. I really wanted to fully decorate the walls with more hieroglyphs and stack more dead-goods in the room, but yeah, I ran out of time :)

Curious what it says?

The first mummy says:
"Who then is it?"

The second mummy says:
"It is the sarcophagus of Thoth's scribe <myname>"

The coffin says (with correct female designations, in the traditional style of what was put on coffins):
"<myname>, the scribe of Thoth said: I am the keeper of the book of that which is, and of that which shall be."*

Above the door are two phrases from the Egyptian Book of the Dead**:
"Give thou to me my mouth [that] I may speak with it"
"May I follow my heart at its season of fire and night."



*Technically, the sentence says: "Saith Thoth, scribe <myname>: I am the keeper of the book of that which is, and of that which shall be." I used four different sentences from different books, took them apart and mashed them together again, always trying to keep the original/correct syntax/composition/etc.


**Yes I own this book 'cause I'm strange. What's stranger is I bought it when I was about 13 or 14. About the same time I was buying books like, 'In Search of Schrodinger's Cat', by John Gribbon, and 'Fermat's Enigma', by Simon Singh

6 comments:

  1. Thanks for the link! I wanted to be an Egyptologist when I was growing up. Maybe one day I'll at least get to visit Egypt!

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    1. No problem! I was super excited to find the link myself.

      ...and what's awesome is that it reminded me I have a 'The Literature of Ancient Egypt' book sitting on my shelf that I have not yet had a chance to crack into...

      Yes, I'm a total nerd with some thing :)

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  2. Yay! Thanks for the shout-out, 1000th Monkey!

    Or is it just Monkey? ;)

    And I love that graphic--very cool, even if it does put you smack-dab in the over-achiever category! (That's where all of us cool kids belong anyway, right?)

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    1. Us over-achievers are the best ;)

      ...and that Egyptian happy dance certainly intrigues me ;)

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  3. as I've said you not strange but one of the most interesting people I've ever met

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Type me out a line of Shakespeare or a line of nonsense. Dumb-blonde-jokes & Irish jokes will make me laugh myself silly :)