𓆣 Easter Eggs

This year for Easter, I decided that I would attempt to use the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph, hpr, ( or 𓆣  ) on dyed eggs.  Hpr is an ideogram of a dung-beetle, and is used in words like "manifest" and "becoming."    In ancient Egyptian iconography, the dung-beetle is shown with a sun disk, and is symbolically related to the beginning of a new day and regeneration.  I used photos I'd taken of various ancient Egyptian artifacts as the basis for the design and fired up Inkscape.  Several hours later, I had a DFX file that I could import into Silhouette.  

In the past, I've used painter's tape on eggs to resist the dyes.  I purchased a one inch wide roll, the widest I could find.  I thought I might be pushing the limits of the cutter-plotter's ability to incise the tape without shredding it, but it turned out that that wasn't a problem.  Also, if the tape was too wide, there would have had difficulty applying it evenly to the curved surface of the eggs.

I shrunk down the design, placed a strip of the tape on an older Silhouette mat that had lost some of its stickiness, and set the software for washi paper.  Moments later I had a flawless cut (beginner's luck) of the hpr hieroglyph, and I laughed with a crafter's glee.

While I was at it, I had the cutter-plotter cut out some painter's tape stars.  If I had been thinking, I would have made them duat, or netherworld, stars, (𓇽 ) but they were plain, regular ones.     I also cut out two larger beetles out of 3x5 index cards with a vague notion that they might be able to roll the eggs like their live counterparts will roll dung balls.  

After that, it was a matter of setting up the dye from a kit and dunking eggs.  Neither Mark nor The Child were really into the process, although Mark was interested in natural dyes and tried out onion skins and some Earl Grey tea as dyes.  

The most difficult part was waiting for the eggs, and more importantly, the painter's tape, to dry so that there wouldn't be smudges.  There were some places where the tape had buckled a bit:  worst-case they made some smudged boundaries; best-case there was a kind of marbling effect in some of the stars.  

Next time I will re-work the wing-case design to simplify it and make it less of a T-shape and more of a Y-shape.  It might be possible to stencil a short word or phrase and have it wrapped around the widest part of the egg.  

The eggs were received well (at least on social media) and added to the decor of my folks' Easter table.  

MET Adventure 2021

Thursday was MET day.  We got up bright and early and managed to get to Dwyer Manse by eight-twenty.  Mark had ordered tickets several weeks ago for our timed entry.  V, The Child, Mark, and I climbed into the car and we were off.  

The drive into the city was mostly uneventful -- contrary to rumor, NYC drivers are relatively nice, and will make opening in the traffic and allow one to merge.  When the NYC skyline came into view, an orangey haze smudged it.  So many new buildings that are taller than the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building have gone up that it's difficult to see them.

We parked at the MET.  I wasn't expecting the checkpoint into the lot:  there was a little hut for the security guards, and a plate in the road angled up to prevent cars from moving forward (at least it didn't have little spikes on it).  A Very Cute and Ripped Guard came out with his Very Cute Golden Retriever and asked Mark to pop the trunk.  I was too distracted by the sheen of sweat across the top of his pectorals to read the text tattooed across them.  As the guard and dog circled around our car, he was telling the dog to look for things -- my window was closed so I didn't catch what he said, I think it was something like "Seek, Rusty, seek."  The dog looked like it was having fun.  

Since we didn't have any contraband, we got waved through.  V, Mark, and I all said something about how the Very Cute and Ripped Guard could search our car anytime, and The Child was mildly mortified. 

We were early, so there was a side-trip around a block to find a coffee.  I took a few shots of the architecture, which amused V.  Eugene is so frumpy and post-modern brutalist / farm shack that visiting New York City's Art Deco / Art Nouveau is like Dorothy Gale and Company stepping out of the dark forrest and seeing the Emerald City.  

If I had the means, I would take a year to research, locate, and photograph architectural details on New York City buildings.  While staying in a secret garret room in the MET.

Getting into the MET was hassle free.  We were all set to have to show proof of vaccination, get zapped by a heat gun, and everything.  But we simply showed our tickets and waltzed in.  Now that I think of it, I don't recall a bag check the way that we've had to go through in the past (although none of us had a backpack).

We made it to the Eighteenth Century Decorative Arts wing, and managed to stay together as a group until the Faberge Eggs, at which point Mark went off to look at portraits.  Portraits are Mark's Thing (and Madonna and Child -- he could look at Madonna and Child after Madonna and Child all morning), and he enjoys them more on his own.

In the 18C French gallery, I found a huge malachite vase with over-the-top angel handles that made me squeal loudly enough to be heard two galleries over.  V said it was fun going through the MET with someone who enjoyed it as much as -- if not more -- than she did.  Apparently I was adorable as I went from exhibit to exhibit pointing and squealing, and occasionally channeling my inner History Chanel host.  The Child was a good sport, and tolerated going along with us on our scavenger hunt fairly well.  There was a teen-level of disinterest, but every now and then he would snap a photo with his mobile. 

After an early lunch (The Child was hungry) in the cafe, we went to the Egyptian Wing.  The Middle Kingdom "Hetep di wesir" offering formula was everywhere, and I could read snatches of other inscriptions.  It was like going into a kindergarten room and being able to read "cat" and "dog," and I took a five-year-old's delight in being able to read.  

As I was pointing out bits of inscriptions to V, and stumbling a bit, this Very Tall, Handsom Black Man sidled up and began pointing out signs and sounds.  V insists that he was batting his eyes and leaning in toward me in a very flirtatious manner -- which I was totally oblivious to.  When he shared a printout of book information he was recommending (Papyrus Ebers, Die groBte Schriftrolle zur altagyptischen Heilkunst; by Popko, Lutz; Schneider, Ulrich Johannes; and Scholl, Reinhold), she almost thought he was giving me his phone number.  While I did sense there was some subtext I was missing, I mostly thought that it was a case of one exited student of Ancient Egyptian Writing meeting another.  Mark, who wasn't there, reminded me later that the flirting of my Canadian Boyfriend at Ocean City was probably overblown by his family (and that I get very focused on geometry or hieroglyphs or whatever and completely tune out social cues).

The three of us re-connected with Mark while on a quest to find George Washington Crossing the Delaware for The Child.  He regaled us with the Tale Of Blood in the Medici Exhibit (a woman tripped over the Very Low Art Barier Wire -- I think she was okay in the end, but the fall precipitated a nose bleed of titanic proportions).

We walked through more galleries, saw Edwin Church landscapes, Madame X, hookers, and Monets.  We also had to stop for a moment to visit with Mark's Lover, Captain George K. H. Coussmaker.  Mark has known Captain Coussmaker since 1985, long before he met me.  I am familiar with the captain, as a miniature of this portrait floats between various places in our home.  As we were paying our respects to the captain, we noticed Aoife's likeness in a nearby portrait.  

We took a detour through the music rooms to see The Cow, the Lamasu, and a quick browsing of the Mesopotamian Wing, and then it was time to go to the Gift Shop!

The hope while in the gift shop is that one will stumble across The Perfect Gift (on sale!), one that will encapsulate the experience of viewing  Or at least a Really Cool Book.  The trick with books is to find one that's not too introductory, not too specialized, not too secondary/trashy/sensationalist, and not too expensive.  

There was a book on Egyptian Magic that I was tempted by, but it looked too secondary.  There was a survey of a Egyptian archeological site that looked too specialized.  I wound up buying a gift book for our cat sitter, a gift book for my folks, and a bunch of other general survey books on stain glass, mechanical wonders, and The Cloisters.

The Child purchased some Egyptian cat figures for his friends; V purchased gifts and practical things like Persian rug coasters, a sweater, and fancy thank you notes. 

Then it was off to meet Lime Green Larry for a light snack outside the Hemsley Building, and afterward Mexican cuisine with Dwyer Family Friend, D (from Ireland).  

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 

Art Imitating Egyptology

For the longest time, I've always enjoyed the love duet sung in Philip Glass's Akhenaten.  I'm not sure if my favorite lines are "I behold thy beauty every day," or "it is my desire to be rejuvenated with life through love of thee," or, "give me thy hands, holding thy spirit, that I may receive it and live by it," or "call thou my name unto eternity, and it shall never fail."   Okay--it's the last line with its image of a lover invoking their beloved's name and the sound rippling through time and space in a sustaining wave that speaks to me the most.   

The opera's libretto notes that this is a love poem found in a royal mummy of the Amarna period, from Journal of Egyptian Archæology, translated by Sir Alan Gardiner.  I imagined that a strip of poetry was wrapped up with other amulets and talismans, maybe even written by the surviving partner.  

Fast forward--for fun I'm taking an introductory class in Egyptian hieroglyphs, and I thought, if I'm learning how to actually read the things I'm seeing at the MET, I should see what the original love poem looks like.  If Gardiner translated it, that implies he worked from hieroglyphs.  And maybe I could reproduce the hieroglyphs into a translated piece of art for the home.  So I started to search.

I wound up on JSTOR, and spent what felt like six hours trying various searches of Journal of Egyptian Archæology AND Gardiner, or Gardiner AND "love poem", or Amarna and poem (it was here that I discovered the libretto I was working from had spelled Amarna "Armarna").   The problem was that the Journal spans over a hundred years of articles, and the libretto didn't specify which volume it was referencing.  It looked like I was going to need the services of an Honest to Horus Reference Librarian.

When I told Mark, and he realized I was working from an opera, he said, "Uh, John; maybe they made the poem up.  You know, it's art."  I protested that the journal and Gardiner were real, but Mark just smiled. 

I went back to JSTOR and figured that I had to do a different kind of search.  Somehow, I hit the right combinations of Akhenaten and Glass and came up with a Egyptologist's review of the Philip Glass opera.  While he didn't quote the poem, he did mention in the footnotes that it was from the King's Valley Tomb 55, and that Gardiner had written an article, "The So-Called Tomb of Queen Tiye" in the Dec 1957, 43rd volume of the Journal of Egyptian Archæology.   I would have never found it using the keywords I had been using.

I skimmed the article... old French archeologists..., haphazard tomb..., so-and-so can be forgiven for..., souvenirs..., this translation is gibberish..., is it a man or a woman in this sarcophagus, ... and I got to a description of bands of gold foil that had been affixed to the inside of the sarcophagus but had fallen onto the mummy... very likely Akhenaten's name had been removed from the gold foil and someone else's name replaced... and Gardiner's actual translation.  

Which was similar to the English words in the libretto.  But some phrases from the original had been omitted in the libretto, and the libretto's transliteration in general was short, present-tense declarations, instead of a long future-tense affirmation.  The result is that Glass's wording is more ambiguous, whereas Gardiner's translation is more firmly a prayer from a woman (probably Nefertiti) to a divine being (the Aten, or Akhenaten as the emissary of the Aten). It wasn't even wrapped in the mummy, the gold bands of a funerary prayer or spell had fallen off of the inside of the lid of the sarcophagus and onto the mummy.  

"It's not the real grail?!?!" I said, quoting Micheal Palin as Galahad in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  Mark was right, sort of, Glass had taken artistic license with the poem.

Oh well.  I've got the original hieroglyphs now, I suppose I can work with Gardiner's scholarship and see what design I can come up with.

Sunday Morning Writing

Last night I stayed up way too late reading old "Dykes to Watch Out For" (the moving van volume).  As a result, I had some weird dreams about moving into an old house that had its front end on a fraternity row (in the dream it was a cross between 26th Street between Monroe and Tyler Streets in Corvallis and a mashed-up quad from Carleton College and the UO), had its middle in a New York City Times Square shopping mall, and its end and garage near an ocean (which required a twenty minute drive through winding coastal hill forest roads just to get around to the front).   I remember liking the house's interior, but other than a vague recollection that I was starting a new job with academia, I don't remember much.  

The yard is blooming in a haphazard way.  Mark would like more formal plantings, but neither of us has the inclination to plan that far ahead.  It doesn't help that our soil has a high clay content and probably has orchard chemicals in its past.  Mark does have many bonsai and other potted plants outside, and he did build a raised bed, but the effect is more like the back-side of a gardening store than an actual formal garden.  Oh well... Mark has some plans for arbors, so that will be nice.

Mark has taken Aoife on a hike, so I'm writing in the garden circle.  We'll see how long I last before the pollen overcomes me.  Since the dog is gone, I've opened up the garage for cross-ventilation and have just been visited by Cicero's brother, Spencer.  It remains to be seen if our cats will actually venture into the yard -- oh!  and here comes Smokey now, to sit on my keyboard and shed all over everything.  

(On cat session and tea-refresh later)

I'm continuing to study Egyptian hieroglyphs: I've got the uniliteral "alphabet" ones down and I'm slowly adding bi- and trilteral signs to my pile of flashcards.  𓆣 is a trilateral sign pronounced (by Egyptologists, at least) as kheper, and has the same phonetic value as   𓐍 𓊪𓂋 .   I've got a few more on-line classes, and by the end of them I should be able to do a translation of an offering formula.   I'm hoping that I can find the siting of a love poem from the Journal of Egyptian Archæology, translated by Sir Alan Gardiner, and used in Philip Glass's, Akhnaten, (I breathe the sweet breath that issues from thy mouth / I behold thy beauty every day...) but so far I haven't located it (reading ninety-year-old oh-so-polite arguments of how to translate three-thousand-year-old poetry is amusing, however).  Thinking about it some more, I suspect the original is in hieratic and not hieroglyphic, but it would fun to see the original and see how "call thou my name unto eternity, and it shall never fail" was written:  was it "give voice" to my name ?  or "invoke" my name ?  or "speak" ?   Given the ancient Egyptian attitudes toward magic and the written word, I'm curious how how much of the poem is a spell.  

Hieroglyph Flashcards

As part of my Intro to Hieroglyphs class, I've made some flashcards as a memory aid to the uniliteral phonetic hieroglyphs used during the Middle Kingdom period in Egypt.  Between visits to the MET and various books I've picked up over the years, I seem to have about half of them memorized already.  For the ones that I don't know, I've had to make up little stories to remember their sounds.  

𓄡  is a mammal's belly (and tail), and makes the "ch" sound in the German word, "ich;" so I had to come up with the rhyme, "We want a pitcher, not a belly "ich"-er.   Not to be confused with

𓍿 which is a rope hobble, and makes a "tch" sound, like in "itch."  

𓐍 is something Egyptologists debate (is it a loaf of bread or a placenta?), and makes the "ch" sound in the word "loch", so I pretend this is Nessie's (the Loch Ness Monster's) eye.  

𓂝  looks like a Boston valet's arm and hand as they offer to "park the car", and it makes the ayin sound, which is broad "a" sound.

I'm not sure if I have a favorite hieroglyph.  It would be something like 𓀆 (to purify?) or 𓇽 (star) or 𓇱(night?) or  𓇰(storm?)  or 𓆈 (a gecko) or 𓆣 (scarab; to manifest ,to become)

I'll have to make flashcards for bilateral and trilateral signs next.

Researches

It has been a slothful Sunday morning.  I woke up a little sore, and elected to transition form sleep to waking in a hot bath.  Further indulgences included an outside breakfast of half an avocado, black tea, and Pop Tarts.  

Mark, ever more industrious than I am, especially in the early mornings, has already varnished a new bench he is building, planted lavender seeds, reduced a pint of raspberries for a desert topping, harvested some poppies and foxglove seeds, and done general weeding.  

Spurred to some action, since breakfasting, I've photographed some new sunflowers, photographed some violet flox, trained stray grape vines back onto their "arbor," spread a few poppy and foxglove seeds, and now I'm writing while finishing up the last remains of the tea.

On the writing front, "Doors of the Past" has been released at Abyss and Apex Magazine.  So far the reader feedback I've gotten has been very good, and I'm pleased that the story has found a home.  

On the NeoPagan Readings Front, I picked up a copy of Storm Faerywolf's Betwixt and Between (2017).  No Hot Gay Male Pagan Secrets so far--and it may be a bad assumption on my part, based on Faerywolf's orientation, that there are.  Some of the "poetry is truth" and pedigree statements about Feri in the introductory chapters in B&B prompted me to dig up my old copy of Fifty Years in the Feri Tradition (1994), by Cora Anderson.   I'm not the biggest fan of the testimonial style in Fifty Years, (although it does remind me a little of the cloak and dagger insinuations of Dion Fortune) and Anderson has a whole pile of axes she grinds in her sixty-three page book.  But it does explain some of secret traditions and midichlorian count faerie-blood claims (and in turn reminds me of some of the writings of William Butler Yeats on Fairy Doctors).  I'm also tempted to contrast and compare with Starhawk's Spiral Dance (1979).  B&B appears to pick up in chapter three; I really appreciated the part where Faerywolf brings up time management as a skill witches should have in their toolkits.  

In other news, I'm taking an on-line introductory course in reading Middle Kingdom Egyptian hieroglyphs.  I'm telling myself it's Story Research, but really, it's so I can have a better idea what is written on various artifacts at the MET.  The biggest insight so far (which I should have realized before the class) is that Middle Kingdom Scribes had a C.S. Lewis-Discarded-Image-esque symbolically mystic relationship to their written language that is different from the modern, Western, information-revolution, scientific tool of description relationship with our modern alphabet and written English.