Maxims 15 & 16

These are about first leadership, very short, and about addressing petitioners, also short.

These are getting easier as I go. Things are repeating. However, the second one has one of the most obnoxious sentences I've ever seen in any language. The translation bears zero resemblance to the actual words. And the translation itself is nearly senseless.

Here. I'll show you. It starts with a phrase, and has the same phrase again a few words later. The phrase means something airy-fairy. So you're thinking, okay, two near meaningless airy-fairys that can be left out of translation. But they mean separate things. In the first instance it is an emphatic that means, "the following is true in the situation that is uttered" as we do in English, start a sentence "now" or "right" contrasted with starting a sentence "as always."

Fine. But the dictionaries says it means "welcome, is, are, whereas, as while, when or humpback."

And translators say it means in the second instance "to what end"

And neither of those, "emphatic opening" nor "to what end" match dictionary resources. It's like they pulled it out of their butt to force it to work. Or else their collective experience is so vast we can just add this great insight to our own internal dictionaries. While for now my own insight tells me, there's that jackass phrase again. And again. Ew I hate this sentence.

Another phrase in the same sentence is described at ridiculous length as meaning "wandering off the path, or misled or misleading, or trespassing, being in the wrong place," a hundred things similar to that. While translators who've published globally force it to mean "contravene."

This one.  Right to left. Backward.

I-w. The sedge frond and the chick. Again after the second chick. I dread seeing that combination because it can mean anything and my dictionaries don't help. 

Know what else is bogus? 

There I am re-reading Ancient Evenings and to my surprise the book has decorative hieroglyphics. 

Classy.

You got me right there.

That's really cool. Are they real? Delightfully, yes! The title page and the very nice cover actually do say "Ancient Evenings" in hieroglyphs. 

Except the second glyph is a poor drawing of Y1, a rolled scroll. Have you ever seen a scroll like that? You cannot just chop the tip off a papyrus scroll and expect it to stand for Y1. 

And the last glyph is a very poor drawing of "night." It has the "sky" right but there is no glyph with an ankh draped over it. Here are the expanded choices involving "sky" 

The closest one is N3B a second variation of N3, the actual glyph, and hardly anything at all like the one carefully drawn for Ancient Evenings. 

Then the second book we expect glyphs that read "book of one man dead" but instead the glyphs read "name." 

Okay. Fine. They're not going to match so well as the title does. I can live with that. It'll be a game then, figure out what the glyphs say that's different from section title. I like that. This will be fun. Trying to figure out why he chose to use "name" instead of "book of one man dead." It's mentioned in the book. The portion of the soul named "name" flies off first in a blink of an eye once a person is dead. The other soul portions behave differently. 

The second glyph is not a real glyph. Although there are several down arrow glyphs. They're rather important too standing for the sound "sn" and used in words involving "sister."  

But nothing that matches the arrow in Ancient Evenings. And there is no combination of snxm or ssnxm that means anything. x standing for a harsh "h" sound such as in the German word "ach." sn-xm, sn-x-m, nor s-sn-x-m nor s-sn-xm, no combination works to mean anything. 

And that's a BUMMER!

Now I've lost hope that the rest of the hieroglyphs will make sense. 

The next chapter has the jabiru bird symbol for "ba" 

The next chapter has this other symbol for "ba," a small bird with the head of the deceased. A portion of the soul that has a decent part in the section. 

  

All the rest are simple ordinary glyphs. Ka, and the like.

I cannot understand why they did this. Why did they go only part way with the hieroglyphs? It's a fantastic idea from the publishers, but why didn't they do a complete job of it? It would have been so easy to contact a linguist and give them $100 bucks, or whatever,  to show them the glyphs for their titles. Double check them with another linguist. Then their decorations would be complete.

Linguists are a dime a dozen. The whole place is lousy with linguists. Why didn't they just ask one? 

You're thinking, "there he goes again." 

Yes. I'm going again. I just cannot get it through my thick head why they chose to be 95% excellent instead of 100% excellent, when that small gap is so easily closed. 

Think about this. Mailer is writing a seminal work. One that defines the genre for decades. All solid readers will pick up this book. ALL Egyptophiles will certainly pick up this book. Of those obsessives there will be many who read hieroglyphs, and the publishers led them along and then dropped them, as I've shown.  Everyone who reads hieroglyphs will know these are bogus. It's not just me disappointed, it's everyone who bothers with this crap. 

Forever.