This is a pretty cool video put together by a guy named Jason Clay that shows the Pyramids of Giza in a kind of stop-motion progression.
Clay writes that he took one picture every ten steps as he made his way in a long walk around the pyramids, and the effect is pretty interesting.
For those who never got to see King Tut the first time around, well you are lucky little devils. Why? Because Tut is back. And he’s mad as hell. In fact, he’s especially angry because they are sending him to Chicago instead of New York, here he really wanted to go. He’s been dying (ha ha!) to see Spamalot, and just can’t get his bony hands on tickets. But in Chi-town he will be, as part of a traveling exhibit called “Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs” which opens Friday at The Field Museum.
The expectations are high, with exhibit organizers saying the show could draw 1 million visitors before it closes on Jan. 1, 2007. And, of course, businesses, restaurants and L’il Tut trinket makers are working overtime to be able to sell you as much Tut-related crap as you can pay for. The show features more than 130 treasures from the resting place of the “the boy king” and other royal tombs, all between 3,000 and 3,500 years old. Will New York get its own Tut? Well, hard to say. All I know is that he will go on display next February at The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. After that, bets are off.
I’m a real big geek when it comes to lights, light shows, pyrotechnics, and the whole shebang. My face gets all twisted covered silly with excitement. That being said it’s no wonder that I would select and suggest a trip to the Pyramids of Giza and the Sphinx in Egypt. This archeological site is one of the Seven Wonders of the World and one of the oldest tourist attractions known to man. By day you can explore the two sites with herds of shutter bugs, hoping to capture a something in their frame that could solve years long mysteries in how they were built and what they were used for as there are some who refuse to believe they were built by the ancient Egyptians. At night the same hot site from the daytime can be seen in a spectacular light show in cooler temperatures. Lonely Planet calls the show cheesy and pricey, but the Travel Channel places it in their list of world’s best top 10 light shows. Either way it’s Egypt, the real deal and not some goofy Vegas attraction.
As much as language is spoken it is written and instead of learning Egypt’s most widely spoken language today I thought it would be fun to explore the puzzles that lie in hieroglyphics. Used by the Ancient Egyptians in a combination of logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements one of the earliest inscriptions was on the Narmer Palette, found during the excavations at Hierakonpolis (Kawm al-Ahmar) amongst several others in different locations as noted in Wikipedia. If further study of hieroglyphics is what you’re looking to get into start there. Right now I’m just going to dive into things.
Today’s letter is a character in the Hieroglyphic alphabet used in Ancient Egypt:
placenta – represents kh and pronounced like Scotch ‘loch’
Now to me this looks more like a vent from an air conditioning unit, but seeing how the Ancient Egyptians didn’t have metal vents or recycled air filtering through their homes this probably does resemble a placenta. But you’ll need a lot more tools than this small piece of information. Take this next example for instance.
When a set of characters hands, lions, or watering jugs a.k.a alphabet is placed together they create words like the one above which says GADLING. National Geographic and Virtual Egypt are both fabulous resources for generating words in hieroglyphics. This Great Scott website is also a great place to visit to better build your skills in writing this very ancient and cool lang.