declaration of serviceability in Egyptian hieroglyphics

This phrase is among the most touching sentiments I've seen. On the wall of a burial chamber, I suppose, a noble is commending their own intimate butt-kissing relationship with pharaoh. Although wealthy enough for funerary decoration, still liege.

This is typeface but in hand drawn pictures it would make an excellent tattoo.

   r-kh          n-f                    b3-kh                       n-f         ib       y

rekh nef bakh nef iby.

For a slave.

For the slave-minded. For someone devoted to a relationship. For a religious person. This would be a good tattoo for all those people, it says:

"He knew I was serviceably-minded toward him"

Is that gay or what? Ha ha, what a sub. What a bottom. What an ultra maroon-pants. 

The circle with horizontal lines we saw already in the name "Khufu" so we even know they sound like a gurgling "kh."  The smashed football above is a stylized mouth and it means the sound "r" so "r-kh."  Rekh means "know." (The mouth also signals "speaker" "he who speaks" administrator.) The flat thing is a document rolled up. It is a determinative sign meaning the word in front of it is in the conceptual world not the concrete world, as law, loyalty, math, and the like, words such as "know," "feel" and "think,"  things that happen in the mind.

Zig-zag water is "n" sound and also prepositional "to, for" 

Horned viper is masculine "father, he, him, his," and the like. It represents the sound "f." 

The bird is jabiru, b3, ba, a portion of the soul, ba+k means "do work," "do service," "serve," "deal with." Drawn with a little kneeling man ba+k+little man means "servant." There are other ways to say servant, a baseball bat "hn" biliteral. 

servant, b3-k, bak

The little man kneeling means "I" or "me" and this would make a great part of the tattoo. He wears a little skirt and a broad necklace and wide arm bracelets, eye kohl. 

The jug means "heart" The stroke under it means "the previous thing is real", a real heart, not just the sound "ib." The heart jug is another great tattoo element. It is a valentine, but right after the heart and "one" stroke are two diagonal strokes meaning precisely "two." 

Two hearts.

I can see how that could be confusing. They just said "a heart" and then they said "two." 

Two is exactly two. Never "a few" or "some."  

But three can be any plural three or beyond. 

Whereas in English we add an "s" sound to pluralize a word, ancient Egyptians added a "w" or "u" sound. The "y" sound expresses duality, depicted by two sedge fronds, two strokes, or repeating the noun once. Pluralizing to three and beyond, by drawing three of the same noun, or three strokes or "w" or "u."

"know to him service I to him two hearts."

"he knows my service to him is double hearted."

Good Lord, that is gay. 

Pay an artist to paint that across your interior mausoleum wall. For eternity.

By way of bragging, your boner fides as royal sub. 

He urgently wants to ease the way for himself into the afterlife. To all concerned he is bragging about knowing his place and keeping to it. He wants terribly to pick up where he left off. He is announcing his concern about his superior's awareness of his own slave-mindedness and his adherence to structure, his willingness to maintain order by hierarchy in pursuit of maat by obsequious servile compliancy. 

A better gay brag would be:

I fucked the pharaoh. And I also fucked the deputy. 

They said that's what they wanted so I honored their seniority.

It just sounds so weird when splayed out like that in little pictures then translated to English but it does have its Christian corollary.

"Thy will be done on Earth as it is in heaven."

"I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me."

The idea is your personal salvation is in your aligning all your desires with the urgency of divinity.

Ramses III

The man reads left to right.

Birds and animals are facing left so the inscription is read left to right. Read into the faces of people and animals. Sometimes they do face each other as over a doorway, the inscription or painting reads half one way and half the other way, but never together on the same line of writing or in the same phrase.

First, the writing considered sacred in front of the cartouches. It means we'll be looking at regular royal titular, standard formulaic writing: This is the stuff for beginner students because every pharaoh had them throughout all Egyptian history. And this is only a portion of the full blown formal deal.

tattoos

What I got up to when you weren't looking. This is about hieroglyphics, skip if you like, I will not be offended. Not one bit.
A visitor from Japan dropped into one of my other little sites where I tack up various nonsense, a visit from photobucket hieroglyphic set and that is unusual so I looked to see which hieroglyphic chicken scratch would interest a viewer in Japan and it turns out to be the word for "old". 

From there the visitor went to a page with beginner phrases. And there are some really cool phrases too that I think would make decent tattoos. If they were drawn better than mine. 

I remembered a guy with a large ankh drawn on his torso. You rarely see that glyph on its own in real glyphics. And here are all these nice phrases available, nothing at all tricky with grammar.  

I looked in images to see if other hieroglyphic tattoos would be that single ankh. If so, I am ready to ridicule them completely. But it turns out I'm wrong. They are all rather nice, sophisticated in fact, and better than I draw them myself. 

Let's read them.

Focus, Dude. 

Oh, that means disease. It's an oval tipped over, there are two types of this symbol and he picked the squishy one, this one has tendril and looks like a big fat sperm with ears, but they mean disease. And with the tail, the person is saying it's bad. That's what sticks out among all of that. It's odd and sticks right out. It is the last character of four characters printed on somebody's back. They are excellent unadorned stark glyphs as if typewritten. The b/w photograph stark too in its low quality. 

The first character is a standing eagle, "ah," when you sound it out in your head, and the second character looks like a feather is a sedge frond, "ei" when you sound it out in your head, and the third is a tall incomplete inverted u representing folded linen meaning the sound for "es" when you sound it out in your head, and I suddenly felt sad.

He has AIDS and is saying so with his tattoo, and sad too because he left out the "d" which would be a flat hand.  

Wait. I'm wrong again.  "ahies" means brain. Really now. When you have that determinative symbol for "disease" sticking right out like that. Meaning "body organ" for this and not necessarily a diseased body organ, I did hear Egyptians regarded the brain as junk but I did not hear it regarded as disease, and he did select the symbol with stuff squirting out, the other non-squirting symbol less interesting, I suppose. For some reason he says "brain" quite clearly on his back. That's the problem with sounding things out phonetically, a portion of your thinking goes to assembling as you go and it's zipping around drawing conclusions for you based on everything there and gets it wrong. It's why I come off as such a dunce all the time.

This one has a wadjet eye and a stylized cartouche containing a lion, "leh", standing eagle, "ah", baby chicken  "weh" or "eu", stylized human mouth "ar", standing eagle, "ah."  leh -ah-ew-ar-ah, l. The name is the modern name "Laura." I double-dog betchya.

One more. 

Tattooed leg or arm, I do not know, one or the other. Like a typewriter inside a cartouche. Royal names go in cartouches so expect the name of royalty. Owl, "em",  string with a knot, alternate "oh", half circle "tee", simple maze, "heh", forearm "eh", stylized human mouth, "ar" so then, em-oh-tee-heh-er-ar, the English word "mother"

Isn't this fun?  I'm impressed with these thoughtful tattoos. They completely surprise me and there is real art too. I do appreciate these.

I was thinking the way to go is put a protective symbol across your whole back possibly embellished with a simple spell, something along the lines of, "whosoever messes with this human being while he is here on Earth I shall break their neck like a bird." And, this is important so that it works, the subject must forego idle conversation with the artist and slip into a meditative trance while enduring the prolonged torture of being tattooed and that will serve as required ritual for both artist and subject that imbues the symbol energizing it with protective magic.