Thanks for all the responses:

Anthony wrote: In other words... the hieroglyphs were stolen by medieval alchemists ... sometimes for clarification purposes, but also sometimes to "steal" the prestige and clout of the mysterious Egyptian culture. Remember that hieroglyphs were first thought (centuries ago) to be magic symbols used by priests.

Perhaps. Though I prefer the less sinister word "borrowed" But we mustn't forget that the hieroglyphs had an absolute physical representation and did play a role in Egyptian life. At the Tut exhibit I saw some absolutely huge blue ankhs that had a tiny hole at the top undoubtedly for dispensing some kind of liquid. Ankhs held physical candles or lamps in Tut's tomb. Even though they might have played a purely utilitarian role of lighting up the tomb so the priests and workmen could see what they were doing, I'm sure they also played a spiritual role of lighting the way for Tut's ka. I believe in Ramses the first tomb he is introduced to a giant Tjet knot. Even though there's a lot of speculation as to what the tjet knot is there's no universally agreed upon definition on what it means or what it's role in AE mythology is (BTW Yes I know about the "knot of Isis" and the "blood of Isis". But I for one thing it's a lot of 19th and 20th century misrepresentation of the "knot"). In other words these were not just words or "letters" they operated at several different levels simultaneously depending on the context that they're found in.

DougM: It depends on yourviews of what alchemy is I guess. While there were some famous alchemists who were known for trying to transmute things into gold, there is a lot more to it than that.

Yes I agree. Ask 99 out of 100 people about Alchemy and they'll say they were trying to turn lead into gold or search for the philosophers stone. In addition to that they were complete, total, utter frauds, who held back the course of science for centuries and science didn't advance until we threw off the shackles of these charlatans......Uh huh, yeah right. But these critics also forget that they discovered sulfuric ("sulphuric" for Goaten and our protean english language ) acid, nitric acid, acetic acid and phosphorous and several other industrial chemicals that are the foundation of our industrial society today.In addition to that they discovered or refined distillation and purification of products, much of the design of their equipment can still be found in chemical labs today. Without these chemical geniuses most of us wouldn't be here today and we'd still be chasing a mule around a field planting corn or sorghum or whatever. Hmmm...wait a second maybe we ought to take a moment and study these old alchemical texts to see if there's something else we missed in them. Hey great idea I think I'll do it.

Principia wrote: Interesting concern. I don't know if you remember or not, but this was briefly discussed at Andrew's quite a few years ago. I recall going over the signs used to reference the planets being relative to certain hieroglyphs with Joanne Conman.

Yes I know Joanne is deeply into astrology and I do recall some of the discussions at Guardians however at the time I was hopelessly mired in the Amarna tar pits so I didn't follow those discussions closely then. BTW do you recall the strings that those conversations were on?

Goaten wrote: "English does have a silly little rule for kids though, "i" before "e" except after "c", and I have just had to remind them of it." Indeed it does have a lot of silly rules.

I still get confused between "lay" and "lie". Along with everybody else I know. And give me one reason (that makes sense) as to why I shouldn't end a sentence in a preposition. Why shouldn't we split inifinitives? After all it gaves us the most memorable line in science fiction "To boldly go where no man has gone before."- "To go boldly" falls flat, "boldly to go" sounds absurd.

All these years Rick :-)


Yes indeed and hopefully there will be many, many, many more years ahead of us.