Hieroglyph Magic

The last Intro to Hieroglyphs Class was the other week, and I've been spending some time writing various words in hieroglyphs, making flashcards, and going through Sir Alan Gardiner's "Egyptian Grammar, edition three."  "Egyptian Grammar," is interesting and informative (and funny in some places), but I did have a moment about two days into it where I had to admit to myself that I had secretly hoped it would be filled with Ancient Egyptian Spells (cue DeForest Kelley as Dr. McCoy asking High Priestess Natira of Yonada about The Book of The People concealed within an obelisk, "Don't you long to know its secrets?").  

While I have found a section to a "spoken offering" frequently carved in mortuary temples, so far there hasn't been a Middle Kingdom version of "Oh Zephyr Winds / which blow on high: / Lift me now / so I can fly!"  

What is intriguing about hieroglyphs to me is that their use of unvoiced determinatives, which are frequently ideograms, at the end of words. Written English doesn't use them, but the closest thing I can think of that would be like them was if we wrote the word "stop" and then added a red octagon at the end. Or, I suppose, the word "poop" and then added the poop emoji (eye roll).   Ideograms and determinatives give Egyptian hieroglyphs an appealing graphic design element.

One word I thought I would like to try out is "ḥekꜣ," or, to give it's English translation, "magic."  It's spelled wick, ka, vulture, man pointing to his mouth.  The wick is a twist of flax used in oil lamps.  The ka is a soul or spirit.  The vulture is a vulture.  The determinative of the man pointing to his mouth ends words related to voice, eating, or the mouth.   

I went to the Unicode web site, found the hieroglyphs, arranged them in InkScape, then imported the InkScape SVG into Blender.  After a while fiddling with Blender meshes -- I need to re-import the SVG and close up holes in the individual meshes -- I had some objects I could render.  Unfortunately, importing the unicode characters, especially complex characters with lots of loops and holes, results in confused meshes that aren't manifold (or "air-tight"); so I couldn't use what I'd created to engrave hieroglyphs from a solid block using a Boolean difference function.  Oh, well; only embossed figures for me.  

I'm ambigious about the result.  On one hand, it's cool to see the Ancient Egyptian word for "magic" glowing on a computer screen.  On the other hand, there's room for improvement.  The unicode characters are great for sending Tweets, IM, or e-mail messages; but they don't scale up well.  The way the characters are constructed doesn't give me much room to play with stroke weight, so some hieroglyphs look chunky.  Granted, this is a typeface and not graphic art, but because they're designed for an 8 or 12 point, there's no option for fine details like fingers or eyes, and so things look utilitarian and over-simplified.  I'm thinking that I might improve this render if I'm able to bevel the hieroglyphs so they don't look quite so blocky.  Finally, these simply might look better engraved instead of embossed. 

Perhaps I can use photos of the Sarcophagus of Harkhebit for more finely crafted examples