I am particularly strong on urging
every single person to make a best effort every day to do what’s at the top of
his or her TO DO list.
So when I found out that Dr. Toby
Wilkinson, an Egyptologist at Clare College, Cambridge, has published a
translation of Egyptian hieroglyphics intended for a mass audience, my first
thought was “Go for it, Toby!”
Now I’m having second thoughts. Roughly
a couple million books are published every year. The books in my personal
collection are stacked higher than my head along a wall in the basement. I
haven’t read all of them yet. I think I’m going to pass on Writings from Ancient Egypt.
Here are a few excerpts, courtesy of
TheGuardian.com
Letters
written by a farmer called Heqanakht date from 1930BC but reflect modern
concerns, from land management to grain quality. He writes to his steward: “Be
extra dutiful in cultivating. Watch out that my barley-seed is guarded.”
Turning
to domestic matters, he sends greetings to his son Sneferu, his “pride and joy,
a thousand times, a million times”, and urges the steward to stop the housemaid
bullying his wife: “You are the one who lets her do bad things to my wife …
Enough of it!”
Other
texts include the Tempest Stela. While official inscriptions generally portray
an ideal view of society, this records a cataclysmic thunderstorm: “It was dark
in the west and the sky was filled with storm clouds without [end and thunder]
more than the noise of a crowd … The irrigated land had been deluged, the
buildings cast down, the chapels destroyed … total destruction.”
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| from kingscrossexpress.wordpress.com |
If you were thinking maybe it would be
something like “Downton Abbey,” or maybe Fifty
Shades of Grey, or maybe “The Simpsons” with cats and pyramids, think again….
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016
All rights reserved.
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