Sinuhe comes home, does well

I just now finished studying the 25th episode of the story about Sinuhe. It's done now.

This was starting to resemble my last year of university. They kept finding requirements I needed to graduate, this class, then that class, then one last requirement, for awhile there I thought that I'd never get finished for administrators kept moving the goalpost.

And this professor finds all kind of errors made by ancient scribes by comparing sources and concentrating on difficult spots. So I'm counting along and episodes begin having multiple parts, the twenty-fourth episode had five segments, like five walls of text, and worse than that, there are two twenty-fourth episodes, erroneously.

Yeah. I said erroneously.

Because that's what the professor says about all the mistakes the scribes made thousands of years ago.

And those guys were using scritchy-scratchy craptastic paper made from reeds, and their pens and ink totally sucked. What a mess. Ink all over the place.

"Hey you wanna go to Walmart and buy some new pens?"

"Nah, I'll just go down to river, pluck a few reeds and smash the ends with a rock to form fibrous bristles and use them for brushes. And I'll use this charcoal and water for ink."

"Sheesh. No wonder your handwriting looks like crap."

I'm combing this book tediously. It's getting a serious workout. And I mean serious. Nobody studies a book this thoroughly. Nobody. Nobody literally rakes every single symbol. Showing it is the same thing as doing it, that is, making the thing to show, is the raking. Instead of putting it in a notebook I put it in a Photoshop transparency layer. This is over 500 transparencies in a stack like a ream of paper. Some layers have only a single mark, like an apostrophe. Displaying the layers is like playing chords on a piano. Exactly like that.

Except you'd need twenty-five fingers.

You've seen the videos of Bach concerto electronically displayed with keys going boop boop boop, and other chords sustained like h-u-u-u-u-u-u-m-m-m. The Photoshop transparency layers running in sequence are the same thing. Some transparency layers are partially opaque blocking out portions of layers beneath them in the stack. Some layers run for 25 frames while other sets speed by. Other frames hold for a few hundred frames. And those partially opaque layers are themselves played like piano chords, switching off from one to another. It's fun!

There are columns of text and each symbol has its own little world; its pronunciation, its usefulness in grammar, its place and function in a sentence. It can mean a sound or it can mean an idea, or it can clarify the preceding sounds and ideas immediately in front of it. So a lot of the symbols are not spoken. They're not part of the translation that way, except to keep you on track.

So every single symbol is examined for its properties. To see how they're used. To see how the translator gets English from that.

The whole time I'm thinking, man, being a scribe must have really messed with their heads. They're compelled to use so many puns, and I can see how this would infect their personal speech such that their jokes among themselves would be vasty different from the population that didn't write. Other writers would know what is so funny. They could appreciate the source of the humor.

Then, conversely, their metaphors are blown by the writing. Penetrating this is where the professors are really helpful.

I'm a literalist. Sinuhe is talking about being set up with a tomb. He's explaining where it is placed, on the plateau, while the fields that support the temple that goes with the tomb are nearby, lower and closer to the Nile, in front of the harbor. His land is a basin that gets flooded. He's been speaking about ships the whole time, so central to life at the edge of the Nile, So when he finishes by saying he has the blessing of the king until the day of mooring has come, he was just talking about a harbor. We have the picture of land near the Nile. But "mooring" is euphemism for dying, with life as a voyage the metaphor. If I was reading without the professor's help then I'd miss that. Except for the euphemism is self-exploding by the symbol for death with the determinatives. Imagine speaking in metaphors and expressing euphemisms within them, then showing the keys to the metaphor in symbols at the end of it.

It's this thing:

It's in the unclassified sign section for things that are too hard to draw. It's a man tipping over. It's the last word in the story. It means "death."

The guy writes a story in couplets with a kind of meter. Like Shakespeare.

Duh-duh, duh-duh, duh-duh.

Duh-duh, duh-duh, duh-duh.

Duh-duh, duh-duh, duh-diddly-duh

Duh-duh, duh-duh, duh-duh.

And the whole thing goes like that, on and on and on, with occasional breaks in meter for relief. 

And after all that fear and loathing in Lisht, all that escaping to the Asiatics, all the trial and tribulation, rearing of family and estate, then abandoning it all to return to the court, after all the good living and at the epitome of wealth, the last word of the work is "death." That clarifies the words that precede it, clarify the words that make euphemism so that the actual subject isn't spoken directly. The euphemism is carefully spelled out. Then its meaning shown. It's weird. 

It would be like me telling you the early cigarette commercials led us ashtray. Then put a symbol for traffic sign that reads "WRONG WAY" at the end of it, and there goes my finely crafted pun.

In writing, all your jokes are explained, By the requirements of writing the joke. 

The book does not come with a sign list. And that's a problem.

JSesh has an extensive sign list. It's impressive. But they don't match exactly the shapes in the book. I also have James Hoch's sign list to help. I'm using all of them at once.  I have an impressive PDF Egyptian dictionary with every symbol there is. There is also online help. There are standard lists all over the place. But I cannot find this symbol Allen uses quite a lot. 

It looks like a hook on the end of a string. Here it is right in the middle.

  

I drew that. Logically, it'd be listed under "Rope, fiber, baskets and bags." That category has a lot of random lines and weird shapes, like these.

Nope. And these things all mean something.

Maybe it is hook on a string, with emphasis on hook. Maybe its in the category of "Warfare, hunting, Butchery." That category also has a lot of weird random shapes that don't match anything logical. Like these: String for bows.

Nope. 

Maybe it not something so harsh as warfare and butchering, Maybe some other profession. Maybe it's in the category for "Agriculture, Crafts and Professions." That category has wild illogical shapes all over, like these inexplicable items:

Maybe it's in unclassified. The oddness never stops.



Maybe it's in catchall category "Strokes," crazy crap people just made up.



"Trees and Plants" has things that don't even look like anything seen in nature.
Maybe it's there. Bulbs with roots, weird fruit. Things definitely not seen at the grocery store.



"Parts of Mammals has shapes not seen on any animal. Like these.


And these:



I'm sick and tired of looking for this stupid shape. I don't know what it is, and I don't know what sound it represents. Every time it's used, it's surrounding is not helpful. It cannot be reverse engineered. So far.  If it's a logographic symbol, I don't know what it represents. It's bumming me out.

The universal computer font for Egyptian hieroglyphs does not have it. Other fonts online do not have it. Where Allen came up with this piece of shit symbol to vex us is beyond me. If it's hieratic, I cannot find it. Here's a million of 'em. Nothing matches.

Maybe it's in "Sky Earth and Water." That category has bizarre shapes and patterns in it that don't have anything to do with sky, earth or water. Face it, Egyptians were always out of the minds. This much is clear by their extensive semiotic record.




Do these symbols appear to have anything to do with the "Parts of the Human Body"?
These are supposed to be toes.



Wtf?

My fishhook on a line could be anywhere!

There are thousands upon thousands of symbols. My eyeballs hurt from scanning all of them, and repeatedly, to no avail.

I'm starting to really hate this guy.

And when I do find this thing, I'm going to crap a brick.

And throw it at someone.

It's not very often I get stumped like this, but this time I'm genuinely stopped.

And it PISSES me off.

I find it better to simply list everything I can find for each sign then examine what the translators used for their English version.

Every single individual sign in the whole book. And it turns out very similar to watching videos of songs translated into ASL. Examination at the granular level. You end up asking, "Why did you leave this out? And why leave out that? Why doesn't your translation include this here or that there?" And where in the heck did you come up with this and with that?" Translators take a great deal of creative license.