[aliendial]

!! !!

Good on you!

[gabeshep]

It's amazing how the mind works (or, as is more often the case, doesn't!)

Spoiler (Rollover to View):

So, I'm going along, trying to translate the signs, learning about all sorts of new things - like uniliteral, biliteral and triliteral hieroglyphs, the 'Manuel de Codage' and the 'Gardiner Sign List' - and eventually, I discover, among all the hieroglyphs with multiple, seemingly unrelated meanings (who knew a striped ball over a mouth could mean either 'with' or 'fall' - or, if followed by a spoon, a duck and a thinking guy, 'voice'?), a string of signs that has only one, non-abstract meaning: 'gardener'. Now HERE'S something I can work with! So, I start by googling 'ancient egypt gardener', and after a bit of scrolling, I find a promising reference to a book called "The Ancient Egyptians", by an author named J. Gardener Wilkinson. Aha, maybe it's not about a gardener, methinks, but a guy NAMED Gardener! (this thought brings back fond memories of 'Being There' and its hero, Chance the Gardener, a.k.a. Chauncey Gardner.) Anyway, so I do a bit more digging, and I realize that it's not, in fact, J. Gardener Wilkinson, but J. GARDNER Wilkinson! "What a stroke of luck", I think. "If they hadn't misspelled his name, I never would have found the poor sod!" Now I'm starting to feel the excitement; I'm getting close to the answer. Next, I surf over to that old standby - Wikipedia - and start reading up on 'JGar', as I like to call him. However, after reading his bio, something in my gut tells me this isn't the guy. There's far too much in there about topography and manners, and not enough about hieroglyphics. So, now I'm all discouraged again. Back to the drawing board. But I notice a link on the page called 'English Egyptologists', and on a whim, I decide to check it out. Turns out, there's a whole whack of 'em, and for some reason, I start looking for my buddy JGar on the list. Can't find him. What the heck? Oh yeah, he's not in the Gs, you dolt - his last name is 'Wilkinson'. But wait a sec, who's THIS? Some other guy named 'Gardiner'! Hmm. This is followed by at least another hour's worth of surfing and scrolling and linking and reading before I decide that I am, indeed, on the right track with this other guy. I start closing all the tens of thousands of windows I had opened during the course of my research, when suddenly, on one of the very first pages I had read, a title catches my eye: 'Gardiner's Sign List'. OMG! (Oh My Gard!) The answer had been staring me in the face for hours. I'd even used Gardiner's list to decypher the hieroglyph for 'gardener', but I had never made the connection until a series of unlikely errors (misspellings, mistaken identities and misalphabeticized last names) led me full circle, right back to where I'd started. That's my story. Goodnight.

[Platinumflux]

Read through this entire thing as I didn't want to repeat someone else's post. I managed to transpose each glyph (Is that right?) using:

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/index.htm

Managed to do the ENTIRE card before realising

1. I dont speak ancient Egyptian.

2. I dont speak Eyptian.

3. I can barely speak English.

4. I dont know ANYONE who speaks it.

So thank you all

[dmatos]

I am absolutely amazed and impressed by anyone who manager to transliterate and/or translate it. I ended up just checking here for some help and it turned out the answer was right in front of me the whole time

Spoiler (Rollover to View):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gardiner%27s_Sign_List was what I was using to attempt to translate

[Magma]

Way beyond my ability to solve, this one - but I have had a go at it myself and managed to get a very crude partial translation that seems to match on a lot of key words. I know it's already been solved, but I felt that for a black card it would be such a waste to just fill in the answer without trying to see how the translation was arrived at in the first place. My previous experience in heiroglyphics consists mostly of writing my name back in school when I was 5, so I feel this approach is something that anyone who is unable to actually read hieroglyphics can attempt.

In my searching, I found an application called "JSesh" in which you can select heiroglyphs from categories and recreate the message on the card exactly.

http://www.iut.univ-paris8.fr/~rosmord/JSesh/

It's a Java based program, so it runs on most platforms, including Windows! Something of a novelty in this game, I have noticed...

From there I found that the save files that the program made used the same notation of a searchable English-Ancient Egyptian dictionary, which had a lot of the individual words in its database. Using a combination of looking up the English words that I was trying to match in the translation, and searching for words containing individual hieroglyphs from the puzzle, I managed to fill in a lot of the blanks:

http://hieroglyphs.net/0301/cgi/pager.pl?p=01

Like I said, I still only have a partial translation at the moment, and it reads like a conversation between Tarzan and the Incredible Hulk, but it's nice have a vague idea how the structure of the language works.

[Riiick]

The solve I have had accepted on the ppc website is:

Spoiler (Rollover to View):

Alan Gardiner

Well done beano³ and Sarah!

[Violet]

Leeravitz wrote:

My problem remains - not whether this sounds like a likely answer (I think it's too ingenious not to), but what relevance it could possibly have in the wider terms of the game.

I think it's just the fact that it's a puzzle, it's really hard, and the PMs probably have a friend who set it because it looks impressive and it's plausible that it was written by a society of intelligent puzzle-lovers who study ancient Earth cultures

(btw, I mean puzzle-lovers in a nice way, not a chicken-lover South Park way)

[^J^]

Just another little point in favour of the Gardiner theory - the Nile wouldn't be reverred by a king, persay, because Egypt was ruled by a Pharoah. Gardiner was also knighted in 1948, which (in my mind, at least) fits better.

[Leeravitz]

My theory on this is that hieroglyphs, remember, are not an alphabet - they are a mixture of logographic and syllabic signs (i.e. some stand for sounds and some stand for whole words).

Basically, like many an ancient script, there are only so many things you can say in hieroglyph, because of the context through which the language evolved...it's a bit like that old saw about the Inuit having 500 separate words for snow, or whatever...

Now, I'm not a hieroglyphic expert, but I do assume that it's easy in hieroglyph to come up with references to things like growing grain, watering fields, talking about gods, talking about kings and servants etc., because all these things were of great importance to Egyptian society...

But they'll still be plenty of ideas that are hard to encapsulate...In Hebrew (which is an ancient language I know a lot better than ancient Egyptian) there are innummerable ways of stating things about metaphysics, but no very easy way to write about the abstract emotions, whereas in Classical Greek, there are plenty such abstractions available...

Given that it's even harder in hieroglyph (because it's not alphabetic) to mainpulate the signs to spell out an equivalent to a word which did not originally exist in Ancient Egyptian conception (how would you write about a computer programme in hieroglyph, for example?? - when you have no ready way to actually refer to computers, or programming???), then you have to rely on the language materials that you have to hand...

So, it seems to me that the *whole thing* is a very elaborate pun. It *could* be that the answer here is something like the Nile, or a mythological figure like the god Osiris (who, in Egyptian terms, made the crops grow, was traditionally said to have been torn apart and scattered in the Nile - maybe his remains ended up in the Bosphorus??).

But it seems oddly more likely that this is a double - bluff. The joke is that Gardiner (if he, is, indeed, the answer) is being written about *as if* those qualities he possessed could have been spoken of by an ancient Egyptian (which is apt enough given his profession).

So, everything is working at dual levels: plenty of servants, including, I believe, the guy in the Sinuhe papyrus would traditionally refer to themselves as 'beloved of the king' - I assume it's a fairly easy hieroglyphic transcription to formulate because of this. But in the Gardiner context, it may well be a joke about a much more Victorian/Edwardian tradition - namely, his knighthood. And, again, yes, perhaps the 'Ford of the Bull' construction is an ancient one referring to the Bosphorus (sounds likely to me) - but the joke maybe is that's it 'Oxford' as well. And 'Master of Secrets' is both appropriately Egyptological, and a nod in the direction of Gardiner's research. And so on.

So, why keep reiterating clues to the 'Gardiner' identity?? Because maybe there are only so many clues easily constructed out of hieroglyphic signs.

My problem remains - not whether this sounds like a likely answer (I think it's too ingenious not to), but what relevance it could possibly have in the wider terms of the game.

[invfish]

Seej wrote:

Just to weigh in with my POV to support the Alan Gardiner solution: invfish wrote: If it wasn't for the "I make the plants and the trees grow" I would be inclined to think it is Alan. Make plants grow like a gardener? Gardener = Gardiner? Personally I don't read Egyptian, ancient or otherwise (tch - I prefer Sanskrit ) but this feels like the sort of punning answer to the riddle that ought to be right.

True, but why have two puns? i.e. the green of his thumb and what you are stating above? two puns for the same play on words is weird. One pun that has a play on the word is all cool and I can see that happening.. but why would they do two? *scratches head*

[cassandra]

I too am leaning towards the Gardiner answer, not because of any convincing proof but because of the reference to the Tale of Sinuhe in Adrian Hon's "Reality Artificers" ARG essay (with help from Margaret Maitland, who no doubt counseled him on Egyptology), posted on his blog and linked to from Mind Candy. Excerpt:

Quote:

Going back further still to approximately 1875 BC, the most popular ancient Egyptian story ever (measured by number of extant copies), The Tale of Sinuhe, is written in the format of a true autobiography of the type found on stelae and uses precise dates, all presumably to increase the readers' belief in the story's reality. Parts of the story are also presented as copies of real letters, written between the King and the protagonist.

The reference link Adrian provides to the tale gives us Alan Gardiner's 1916 translation from his Notes on the Story of Sinuhe.

[Seej]

someone_elses_one wrote:

The official title of 'Master of secrets' was given to the god Anubis Alan Gardiner was present at the opening of the sarcophagus of Tutenkhamun. An inscription was found at the burial site on a shrine to Anubis which was translated to mean: "It is I who hinder the sand from choking the secret chamber. I am the protection for the deceased and I will kill all those who cross this threshold into the sacred precincts of the Royal King who lives forever." Maybe its just me but i think i've found something. check it out for urself http://www.catchpenny.org/tut.html

Sorry, but I think it is just you. AFAIK *looks in Jo's direction for an expert opinion* they wrote this sort of stuff all over the place in Egypt. At least that's what the movie The Mummy led me to believe

Seriously though, the quote doesn't match the riddle at all other than speaking in the first person while not actually giving the speaker's name - there's no indication that this (or the dozens of similar quotes I'm sure are out there) is related to the game.

someone_elses_one wrote:

ok, so, what now? Do we just wait?

Pretty much - I've been here almost 6 months and most of that time has been spent waiting . Welcome to the game

[someone_elses_one]

The official title of 'Master of secrets' was given to the god Anubis

Alan Gardiner was present at the opening of the sarcophagus of Tutenkhamun. An inscription was found at the burial site on a shrine to Anubis which was translated to mean:

"It is I who hinder the sand from choking the secret chamber. I am the protection for the deceased and I will kill all those who cross this threshold into the sacred precincts of the Royal King who lives forever."

Maybe its just me but i think i've found something.

check it out for urself http://www.catchpenny.org/tut.html

[someone_elses_one]

ok, so, what now? Do we just wait?

[gjindancer]

Salkunh - I would be interested to here your own opinion on the Alan Gardiner theory, without bias comments about whether he was any good or not.

I have no idea about egyptology; and you deserve HUGE kudos for your translation - but its unfortunate someone has come along and proffesses to know better, in such a way to swing a lot of us to their theory:

Its just a game, and in this field your WAY ahead of most of us - but you cant get miffed if someone else comes along who possibly may know a little more than you. After all we are all playing this togeather

Personally I think since this is a black card, "the river nile" sounds waay too easy to me, considering what we found in the wordsearch.

But what do I know??