Anniversaries

Hieroglyphs, poems, hiking and a marriage

Nov 18, 2022

Quote of the week

In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs.

Edith Wharton

Hello,

This last week has been very busy. All of a sudden I had a lot of things to do with my blog and writing. Trying to update my blog, it behaved in a very strange way, and it took hours trying to solve it. It is not solved, but works, sort of. Well, that is technology.

I evening I visited the library where a talks was held with Ethiopian author Maaza Mengiste. Her novel The Shadow King has got very good reviews. It is about a set of characters during the Italo-Ethiopian wars during the 1930s. Mengiste has taken a look at ordinary people and how they are affected by war. She also takes a look at the power struggles in society. Mengiste talked about her characters and how they came to life. The novel is based on a lot of research. A book for our next book club, I can imagine.

Anniversaries

200 years ago - The decoding of the hieroglyphs

200 years ago, French philologist and orientalist Jean-François Champollion deciphered the hieroglyphs. He discovered that the hieroglyphs were a combination of phonetic and ideographic signs, the first such script discovered. Several scholars tried to decipher the old signs, but it was a difficult task. It was only in 1799, during the Napoleonic campaign in Egypt, when French officer Pierre-François Bouchard found a stone carved during the Hellenistic period. The stone was named the Rosetta stone after the place where it was found, todays Rashid, in the Nile Delta. It was carved in 196 B.C. when the Ptolemaic (Macedonian Greek) dynasty was ruling.

The significance of the stone is its carvings in three languages: hieroglyphs, Demotic scripts and Ancient Greek, which was the key to deciphering the hieroglyphs. Champollion knew both Greek and coptic, and was able to figure out what the demotic signs were in coptic by comparing the languages. That lead him on to the hieroglyphs. It must be one of the most significant decoding of ancient languages in history. It opened up the world of Ancient Egypt and its rulers.

Today the Rosetta stone is in the British Museum. I saw it some years ago and it is a magnificent piece. One of the most visited objects in the museum. I am not going into the very infected discussion on where artefacts belong.

100 years ago - The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot

One of the great poems is T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. He wrote it in 1922 and it is considered one of the most important poems of the 20th century. I have not read it, but it might be time to do so.

“The poem is divided into five sections. The first, "The Burial of the Dead", introduces the diverse themes of disillusionment and despair. The second, "A Game of Chess", employs alternating narrations, in which vignettes of several characters address those themes experientially. "The Fire Sermon", the third section, offers a philosophical meditation in relation to the imagery of death and views of self-denial in juxtaposition, influenced by Augustine of Hippo and Eastern religions. After a fourth section, "Death by Water", which includes a brief lyrical petition, the culminating fifth section, "What the Thunder Said", concludes with an image of judgment.” (from Wikipedia)

Famous lines: "April is the cruellest month" and "I will show you fear in a handful of dust." Included are various legends like the Holy Grail and the Fisher King, he is touching on Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Dante’s Divine Comedy, as well as Shakespeare, Buddhism and the Hindu Upanishads. It contains “satire and prophecy featuring abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location, and time and conjuring a vast and dissonant range of cultures and literatures.” (Wikipedia). I understand it is not entirely easy to read and grasp, but feel I will give it a go … one day.

80 years ago - Hiking group

A more humble celebration took place last weekend. My hiking group is celebrating 80 years on the go. It started 1942 with a few people interested in walking, and is still going strong. We took a walk in the park and forest of an old, small farmhouse at the outskirts of Malmö. Once upon a time, owned by a rich merchant as the family summer retreat. It was also a working farmhouse, as the land is today. The old house is today a museum, and the area contains a museum shop, antique shop and a very good restaurant/café. We enjoyed a cup of coffee and a blueberry tart after the walk. As a bonus I managed to find a few, very nice, things at the antique shop.

68 years ago - my parents married

A more personal anniversary is the marriage of my parents on 5 November 1954, that is, 68 years ago. Imagine being married for such a long time. I am sure they have had their ups and downs like all people have, but still enjoy life together. They especially appreciated life together during the pandemic. They live a quiet life in a small town in the south of Sweden. Hurrah for them.

Musings this week

I have been watching two very good documentaries on Netflix. Vatican Girl, The Disappearance of Emanuela Orlando. She disappeared in June 1983 when she was 15 years old. It is a very interesting, disturbing and touching story. It investigates different theories on what happened.

The other one is Ancient Apocalypse. Journalist Graham Hancock travels the globe in search of evidence of mysterious, lost civilisations he thinks date back to the last Ice Age. He is a controversial fellow, known through his pseudoscientific theories on ancient civilisations, on which he has published twelve books.

It is nevertheless quite interesting, and my mind goes back to another pseudoscientist and -archaeologist namely Erich von Däniken. His idea was that Earth had been visited by “ancient astronauts” who had shared their knowledge to early human culture. He published several books in the 1970s and 80s. I am bound to think Hancock has more to give than von Däniken. His ideas are based on archaeological finds, which is interested in itself. It is his conclusions that differ from established archeologist. One has to keep in mind that archeologists are bound to make their theories out of actual evidence. Hancock do put forward some interesting aspects of the life after the last ice age.

The Content Reader - Newsletter

Discussion about this post