Tomb of Our Expectations
iay@there: Musings on a Virtual World
Above the door to the tomb in (There) Egypt, an inscription in hieroglyphics caught my eye. Being a suspicious kind of person, I wondered whether this was perhaps not some ancient language, but rather an English phrase transliterated using an ancient alphabet (people do this kind of thing for a laugh all the time, even in children’s books).
Assuming the black dots were word boundaries, a bit of work with an alphabet chart from the Royal Ontario Museum gave me “TUMB UF UR AXPAKT?TEUNS”, or more smoothly “Tomb of Our Expectations”.
I’m not sure whether this is some kind of morbid joke about a project that went wrong, or an uplifting statement about the kind of visual detail and quality There’s art team can produce when appropriate. Either way, the inscription sounds like it is a quotation from somewhere, and if you have any idea where it might originate I’d be interested to hear from you. Google, usually my friend in times of need, came up with only one hit for the phrase in an article by the Bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Spokane…
I think there were a couple of similar but not identical glyphs there, which improve the transcription (only a little):
(See http://members.aol.com/egyptnew/hiero.html)
Whoever wrote it tried to use phonetic equivalents rather than a direct transliteration BUT didn’t use the “SH” sound where it could have been used but stayed with the “TAT” spelling which would be pronounced wrongly!
I tried running a few alternative transliterations through some decryption software (http://www.gtoal.com/wordgames/cryptograms.html) without making any assumptions as to the content, but I think we have been stymied by someone who is simply semi-literate and probably thinks EXPECTATIONS is spelled EXSPECTATIONS.
G
— Graham Toal on February 22, 2004