Shaq O'neal's aquarium

He has two of them installed by the Acrylic Tank Manufacturing featured on Animal Planet's television show Tanked. His new one is Egyptian. It takes up the whole room. The team was assigned the project of designing the entire room. The team got their idea from a Las Vegas lounge.

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.

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. 

Khufu

I forget now what I was looking at when incongruently I was shown this hieroglyphic.

The birds look like ibis or heron to me. Some kind of crane. The circle has a smudge in the center. The two birds could be identically poorly drawn, the scribble in the middle looks like "water." 

All of that is wrong. 

 Egret

 Ibis

Quail chick, this is what they actually are. The sound for "w" and sometimes "u." 

The hieroglyphs are painted red, they are circled in a cartouche. So what pharaoh's name is "___ w  ___ w" or "___ u ___u"?  

Turns out, the circle with a smudge is not "Re" or "Ra" as you can expect in a royal name, rather, it is that very odd sign that is not even classified, and guessed as "placenta." How they get placenta is beyond me. I never did like that answer. I have no idea how placenta is arrived at. But neither do they. The sign is not listed under "human parts of the body" instead it is classified under Aa for "unclassified." So, that is admission of not being sure. Let's call it a sieve instead. To me, the sign means "sieve" and not placenta. That's gross.

Phonetic designation, "ḫ" That's where you work up moisture at the bottom of your throat and make a gargling "kh" sound such as you hear in Hebrew, Arabic, and German. 

The scribbly bit in the middle is not water.

Water, an "n" sound.

Nor is it a stick "ḫt," a kht sound.

"F," sound,  honed viper, sign for "father" 

The cartouche is part of graffiti considered a hoax, due in part to its mistaken hieroglyphics but also because of monkeyshines by German anthropologists removing the portion, and did so at the point that they needed more funding. There are a lot of theories about what happened. So much hinges on proof that the pyramid was built at the time and for the person of Khufu. 

This is what they are trying to draw.

The bird is different from all the others because its little beak is a mere thumbtack on the front of its head. It's head and beak are not drawn as the rest of the birds. It is different too in the parallelism is greater in the legs. Most but not all other bird's legs are spread. The owl's legs are parallel also but its face is oddly straight on. The owl = "m" sound, among other things, and this chick ="w" sound and often "u" sound, so, both very common birds. Nobody painted them as hieratic scribbles that early. Hieratic writing came much later after Khufu as scribes really couldn't take all the serious bird differentation anymore and began scribbling a sort of shorthanded cursive.

When you see the name printed clearly like this there is no mistaking Khufu. It jumps right out at you. The simplicity of it with two quail chicks gives it away, and the circle that is not the sun sign confirms the name Khufu.