It looks to be based on a golden decoration on King Tut’s sarcophagus, depicting Isis’s guidance toward the afterlife. You can see it at 2:10 of the video here.
The glyphs on the thrift store find appear to be different so this may just be a souvenir from an exhibit.
the glyphs on the thrift store version do appear to be real hierogylphs.
but… the bird glyphs in particular are causing me consternation, as they seem to mirror flip their orientation occasionally, for no apparent reason, and are also… done in such a style where i cannot make heads of tails of which specific actual avian hieroglyph is being represented by which ‘modern repro’ hieroglyph.
Or perhaps the mirroring is an element of egyptian grammar/language i am unaware of?
For example, the left most column, i think is ->
htm-(idm/sdm)?-t
(w)?
r
t
where i am not sure whether it is idm or sdm… and i am assuming the bird is w.
second column ->
im
dz-j-ti
n
bottom half of third column ->
nb
(w)?
(tym/m)?
Now I do not actually know ancient egyptian at all so I have no idea how to attempt to translate the characters into words that have meaning.
…and it could be the case that whoever created this is trying to use determinatives, in which case this is even more complicated… the glyph i have as (w)? could actually indicate (small-bad-weak).
But it seems at least seems possible that this could be non total gibberish.
I think, in this context, the circle above the scarab is meant to be the sun literally, which is then figuratively Ra, which then even more figuartively basically means ‘Divine’.
Many cartouche encapsulated pharoah names start with this kind of circular/sun figure as the first element.
I am again not 100% sure, but i think that… if we are going with bottom to top, then left to right…
Well best case scenario we end up with a bunch of determined symbols that have hopefully unicode equivalents (yes many hieroglyphs are in unicode), or could follow another standard of conversion to latin style characters…
So if you don’t know the language at all, you’d have no idea where to break apart chunks into words.
So… maybe, you could feed that into some kind of a text to text translator.
Tesseract OCR is opensource, but doesn’t appear to support hieroglyphs.
I couldn’t find any online image to text converters that supported hieroglyphs either.
So yeah I tried to do it manually, got frustrated lol.
I guess its worth noting that, as far as i know, egyptian does allow for compound characters that represent combinations of phonemes… and/or convey an entire concept, not as phonemes.
So sometimes, when a glyph element is present or not present, it still means something, just a different something.
I found this page about it.
It looks to be based on a golden decoration on King Tut’s sarcophagus, depicting Isis’s guidance toward the afterlife. You can see it at 2:10 of the video here.
The glyphs on the thrift store find appear to be different so this may just be a souvenir from an exhibit.
Thanks for the amazing resources! 🩵
My pleasure!
… ok so…
www.omniglot.com/writing/egyptian.htm
the glyphs on the thrift store version do appear to be real hierogylphs.
but… the bird glyphs in particular are causing me consternation, as they seem to mirror flip their orientation occasionally, for no apparent reason, and are also… done in such a style where i cannot make heads of tails of which specific actual avian hieroglyph is being represented by which ‘modern repro’ hieroglyph.
Or perhaps the mirroring is an element of egyptian grammar/language i am unaware of?
For example, the left most column, i think is ->
htm-(idm/sdm)?-t
(w)?
r
t
where i am not sure whether it is idm or sdm… and i am assuming the bird is w.
second column ->
im
dz-j-ti
n
bottom half of third column ->
nb
(w)?
(tym/m)?
Now I do not actually know ancient egyptian at all so I have no idea how to attempt to translate the characters into words that have meaning.
…and it could be the case that whoever created this is trying to use determinatives, in which case this is even more complicated… the glyph i have as (w)? could actually indicate (small-bad-weak).
But it seems at least seems possible that this could be non total gibberish.
???
… any on call egyptologists potentially present?
You’ve got me beaten on deciphering it!
I saw some symbols were in similar spots like the beetle in a circles up top, but the waves to the bottom left weren’t there at all.
Maybe some consolidation was done to make as much fit within the limits of the accuracy of the mold used or something along those lines.
Oh shit you’re talking about the cartouche!
Ok yeah that should… those are drawn around names of very important people or gods… so the one we have here would be uh…
Ok yeah, that is the cartouche name for Tutankhamen… they’ve kinda stylized the third (second? lol) symbol into 3 perfect squares though.
Usually its closer to 3 strokes than rectangles or squares… I think this is just Z2 by Gardiner’s classification.
So there then! That’s not gibberish!
A modern repro of his name done by presumably actually qualified people, shown as part of an exhibit:
https://thaddeusnowak.com/2014/05/21/pharaoh-tutankhamun-union-station/
I think, in this context, the circle above the scarab is meant to be the sun literally, which is then figuratively Ra, which then even more figuartively basically means ‘Divine’.
Many cartouche encapsulated pharoah names start with this kind of circular/sun figure as the first element.
I’m getting quite the education here! I will have to read more on this when I get home!
I am again not 100% sure, but i think that… if we are going with bottom to top, then left to right…
Well best case scenario we end up with a bunch of determined symbols that have hopefully unicode equivalents (yes many hieroglyphs are in unicode), or could follow another standard of conversion to latin style characters…
Butthenwewouldendupwithasentencelikethisinancientegyptian.
So if you don’t know the language at all, you’d have no idea where to break apart chunks into words.
So… maybe, you could feed that into some kind of a text to text translator.
Tesseract OCR is opensource, but doesn’t appear to support hieroglyphs.
I couldn’t find any online image to text converters that supported hieroglyphs either.
So yeah I tried to do it manually, got frustrated lol.
I guess its worth noting that, as far as i know, egyptian does allow for compound characters that represent combinations of phonemes… and/or convey an entire concept, not as phonemes.
So sometimes, when a glyph element is present or not present, it still means something, just a different something.
But there are a lot of glyphs.
Ah, I forgot that like many written languages of the eras, hieroglyphs (generally) don’t have vowels.