Goodie gumdrops. What's not to like?
The eyes go directly to the hieroglyphics and the instant they come into focus I'm disappointed. Dadgum these gumdrops.
The beetle is seen first and three marks under it, a half circle (basket) at bottom and sun disc Re on top Kepher-y neb Re, the becoming, the images lord Re. It just looks like "the images of Lord Re" and that's Tut. Come on. We talked about this before. All of us recognize this. Does it have to be so common?
Skip the squarish thing, it's nonsense. It's a 3 and the symbol O33, a palace facade, itself sometimes used as cartouche in oldest style hieroglyphics, this time inside a square cartouche.
The proper rounded cartouche on the left is instantly recognizable as Tut, the most common cartouche in all history by that quail that sticks out. The hieroglyph quail chick with the two semi circles placed in the negative space of the ligature creating a sort of percent sign says, Tut, or more often twat. Maybe twet. It's more often a w than it is a u but we'll give them Tut for tradition.
Because nobody wants to go around saying Twatankhamun.
Because nobody wants to go around saying Twatankhamun.
And they never say what the rest of that means. The top is very common ligature in royal names, "Amun" more exactly Eh men (redundant) n, again, the frond is "eh" the game board is "men" and the zigzag water is redundant "n" and we see why these pictures went out of style. Those zigzags are hard to draw and even more difficult to carve in stone, one wrong move and the whole row is messed up, and all for a redundant sound to fill negative space in a ligature satisfyingly artistically. It's ridiculous.
Anyway, from the top to the middle, it says, Amun ankh Tut. They switched it around to give the god written priority out of respect. It's confusing because sometimes they don't. So far, Amun, Tut, life.
They say it means "the living image of Amun"
But "tut" means courageous or strong, not image, kepher means that. We already know that from the beetle. This whole time all over the place they're telling us the wrong thing when you break it down to its bits.
The bottom row are shepherd's hook and symbols for places and most translations never even bother with these. The hook refers to dominion of royalty the thing that looks like a butter churn is actually an architectural column with a peg on the top of the sort to fit into a cross beam or into an empolia, a centering hole in another column. The symbol is translated "Iunu", their name for a place at the far southern border, Heliopolis in Greek, also "On." The plant is translated "sw" or "swt" and refers to the northern Egypt, the delta area, rather like saying, "rules from New York to Los Angeles" and they always leave that part off in translations.
Disappointingly common. After all the resources Shaq makes available and nice as it is, this is the best they can do. Surely they know there will be people coming through who recognize all this on sight and know it for the tritest of all possible trites. I could dip into my laptop's trash bin and pull out the addresses of a dozen avid student Egyptologists who would all eagerly fill all the available space on those walls and throughout that aquarium with authentic hieroglyphics that say whatever you want them to say. They'd cheerfully take up the project for free as homework and discuss their production between them with no goofy nonsense or anything trite. What a bummer, with all that money and end up with basically a gift shop. Set designers do better.
It's a very cool room if you don't care anything about Egyptian script.
The wall paper looks similar to the tomb of Ti who followed Tut. The carving style is similar and blue background is similar but there are significant differences too. Ti's tomb is mostly pleasant scenes of daily life and less scenes formal religious scenes of Going Forth by Day. I've used pictures of his tomb many times. Ti has boat scenes as do other tombs with bas reliefs with blue background but they're all different from these. There are cartouche hieroglyphs showing but they're too tiny to read. Google images: [Dendera Temple, near Qena] looks similar.
The wallpaper beats the rest of carvings on the aquarium. They could have done much better with all that. Had they only asked we could have helped Shaq have a better more convincing Egyptian lounge room. But NooOOoooo.
The wallpaper beats the rest of carvings on the aquarium. They could have done much better with all that. Had they only asked we could have helped Shaq have a better more convincing Egyptian lounge room. But NooOOoooo.
3 comments:
Have you people heard about "affluenza" teen Ethan Couch? I think that I've found out something that has plagued my entire life. I'm suffering from unfluenza.
The squarish thing filled with straight lines doesn't look Egyptian to me AT ALL.
What's the figure on the left with the body of a man and the head of a dog all about? Ubiquitous in Egyptian art.
Anubis. Central figure in funerary rites.
I was thinking today, Shaq could have his own story told instead of these trite things. He really is at pharaonic level. His commission would actually be realistic in that he can enjoy it in life. His brags exceed the typical Egyptian brags. The Egyptology students would delight in applying the standard Egyptian brag templates onto Shaq's stats, or apply his stats to their templates, however. Change the wording of standard formulaic Egyptian brags to be Sahq brags. And FILL all the wall with them. You know how amusing it is when Diana Troy's mother lists all her titles and how ridiculous and ancient they all sound. The vignettes are already available. They need only change the wording. I do this for cards all the time and I'm not that good at it. These students are hardcore, they're into perfect sentence structure, moods, tenses, intentions, puns, the whole lot, aspects of language you don't even think about, past perfect and past pluperfect third person plural, gender agreement, that kind of stuff. I just blurt things out and I don't care if it's perfectly right, but they do.
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