Egyptian Hieroglyphs Quotes

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You might not think a hippo could inspire terror. Screaming “Hippo!” doesn’t have the same impact as screaming “Shark!” But I’m telling you—as the Egyptian Queen careened to one side, its paddle wheel lifting completely out of the water, and I saw that monster emerge from the deep, I nearly discovered the hieroglyphs for accident in my pants.
Rick Riordan (The Serpent's Shadow (The Kane Chronicles, #3))
I wondered if I would appear on a temple wall painting someday. A blonde Egyptian girl with purple highlights running sideways through the palm trees, screaming "Yikes!" in hieroglyphics as Neith chased after me. The thought of some poor archaeologist trying to figure that out almost lifted my spirits.
Rick Riordan
My words were Egyptian hieroglyphics before the discovery of the Rosetta stone; my words were wounded soldiers limping home, guns spent, from a lost battle; my words were dying fish, flipping hysterically as the net is opened and the pile spreads across the boat deck like a slippery mountain trying to become a prairie. My words were, and are, unworthy of Marianne Engel.
Andrew Davidson (The Gargoyle)
Cuneiform. It didn’t have the glamour of Egyptian hieroglyphs - it was made up mostly of dashes - yet it was from these marks that history had officially begun.
Sarwat Chadda (City of the Plague God (Adventures of Sik Aziz, #1))
Before the spread of alphabetic writing, systems making much use of logograms were more common and included Egyptian hieroglyphs, Maya glyphs, and Sumerian cuneiform.
Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel)
the first physician who is known to have counted the pulse, Herophilos of Alexandria (born 300 B.C.), lived in Egypt.
James Henry Breasted (The Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus, Vol 1: Hieroglyphic Transliteration, Translation and Commentary)
In the Nile Valley, civilization resulted from man’s adaptation to that particular milieu. As declared by the Ancients and by the Egyptians themselves, it originated in Nubia. This is confirmed by our knowledge that the basic elements of Egyptian civilization are neither in Lower Egypt, nor in Asia, nor in Europe, but in Nubia and the heart of Africa; moreover, that is where we find the animals and plants represented in hieroglyphic writing....
Cheikh Anta Diop (The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality)
The Ark of the Covenant is a Golden Rectangle because its rectangular shape is in the proportions of the Golden Ratio.
Donald Frazer (Hieroglyphs and Arithmetic of the Ancient Egyptian Scribes: Version 1)
When the injured humerus is accompanied by a serious rupture of the overlying soft tissue the injury is regarded as fatal.
James Henry Breasted (The Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus, Vol 1: Hieroglyphic Transliteration, Translation and Commentary)
Pythagoras was a charismatic figure and a genius, but he was also a good self-promoter. In Egypt, he not only learned Egyptian geometry but became the first Greek to learn Egyptian hieroglyphics, and eventually became an Egyptian priest, or the equivalent, initiated into their sacred rites. This gave him access to all their mysteries, even to the secret rooms in their temples.
Leonard Mlodinow (Euclid's Window: The Story of Geometry from Parallel Lines to Hyperspace (Penguin Press Science))
In the field of Egyptian mathematics Professor Karpinski of the University of Michigan has long insisted that surviving mathematical papyri clearly demonstrate the Egyptians' scientific interest in pure mathematics for its own sake. I have now no doubt that Professor Karpinski is right, for the evidence of interest in pure science, as such, is perfectly conclusive in the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus.
James Henry Breasted (The Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus, Vol 1: Hieroglyphic Transliteration, Translation and Commentary)
But Anra was far cleverer than I at reading. He loved letters as passionately as I did the outside. For him, they were alive. I remember shim showing me some Egyptian hieroglyphs and telling me that they were all animals and insects. And then he showed me some Egyptian hieratics and demotics and told me those were the same animals in disguise. But Hebrew, he said, was best of all, for each letter was a magic charm.
Fritz Leiber (Swords in the Mist (Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, #3))
Damn all hieroglyphics for making the ancient Egyptians look cool. Those old gods were best left in oblivion; you’d think the fact that they appeared most often on tombs would be a big hint that they weren’t friendly.
Kevin Hearne (Grimoire of the Lamb (The Iron Druid Chronicles, #0.4))
The seat of consciousness and intelligence was from the earliest times regarded by the Egyptians as both the heart and the bowels or abdomen. Our surgeon, however, has observed the fact that injuries to the brain affect other parts of the body, especially in his experience the lower limbs. He notes the drag or shuffle of one foot, presumably the partial paralysis resulting from a cranial wound, and the ancient commentator carefully explains the meaning of the obsolete word used for "shuffle.
James Henry Breasted (The Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus, Vol 1: Hieroglyphic Transliteration, Translation and Commentary)
I decided the map was clearly written by masochistic-doodling ancient Egyptians because everything was hieroglyphics and unreadable doodads. I cursed the map. “BY MOTHRA’S NIPPLES! I FUCKING HATE THIS MAP!” Irrational anger bubbled to the surface and all I could think about was murdering the map. I would show the map who was boss. I was boss. Not some evil, wrong map from hell. I had no choice but to hit the map against the steering wheel several times, grunting and releasing a string of curses that would have made my sailor father proud. And maybe blush. Then I opened my driver’s side door, still grunting and raging, and slammed the map against the car, threw it on the ground, stomped on it, kicked it, and just generally assaulted it in every way I could think of. I’m a little embarrassed to admit, in my mindlessness I was also taunting the map, questioning its virility, flipping it the bird, and cursing now in Spanish as well as English. It was the most cardio I’d done in over twelve months. Stupid map, making me do cardio. I’ll kill you!
Penny Reid (Grin and Beard It (Winston Brothers, #2))
According to a well-known hieroglyphic inscription, the tribes of Israel were a significant, established presence in Canaan no later than 1212 BC. There is a vast body of archaeological evidence that demonstrates the ancient Israelite/Jewish presence in Israel/Judea as far back as 925 BC.18 This historical presence is verified in the ancient records of the Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and Muslim empires. The Arab conquest did not occur until AD 638. An exercise in elementary arithmetic reveals that the Jewish people were there eighteen and one-half centuries before the arrival of the Arabs. Despite being conquered many times, the Jewish people have had a constant, uninterrupted presence in the land of Israel for over thirty centuries. The Arabs and Islam have been there less than fourteen centuries. It has conveniently been forgotten that the Jews and Christians were there first. Furthermore, in the thirty centuries preceding the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, there have been only two periods when there was an independent, internationally recognized state in the area that now comprises Israel. Both of them were Jewish states. Even when this land was part of the Arab empire (AD 638 through AD 1099), there was never an independent Arab state in ‘Palestine,’ by that name or any other. No wonder the Arabs are donating millions of dollars to U.S. colleges for Middle Eastern schools of study. They have a lot of hard historical evidence to rewrite in the young minds of students.
Brigitte Gabriel (Because They Hate)
In fact, far from being phonetic, hieroglyphs were designed to be indecipherable unless you possessed the key to their meaning. The Egyptian priests, who were guardians of this information, patrolled the borders of their knowledge in order to keep this tool in their own hands. Ever since, the mastery of writing and reading has been an act of power
Susan Wise Bauer (The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome)
By 2500 BC, kings were using cuneiform to issue decrees, priests were using it to record oracles, and less exalted citizens were using it to write personal letters. At roughly the same time, Egyptians developed another full script known as hieroglyphics. Other full scripts were developed in China around 1200 BC and in Central America around 1000–500 BC.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
Fortunately, the great king did not have to deal with Set on his own. The Egyptians also worshipped Horus, the son of Osiris. Horus took the twin forms of a falcon, the most visually acute of all creatures, and the still-famous hieroglyphic single Egyptian eye (as alluded to in Rule 7). Osiris is tradition, aged and willfully blind. Horus, his son, could and would, by contrast, see. Horus was the god of attention. That is not the same as rationality. Because he paid attention, Horus could perceive and triumph against the evils of Set, his uncle, albeit at great cost. When Horus confronts Set, they have a terrible battle. Before Set’s defeat and banishment from the kingdom, he tears out one of his nephew’s eyes. But the eventually victorious Horus takes back the eye. Then he does something truly unexpected: he journeys voluntarily to the underworld and gives the eye to his father.
Jordan B. Peterson (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos)
Here we see the word "brain" occurring for the first time in human speech, as far as it is known to us; and in discussing injuries affecting the brain, we note the surgeon's effort to delimit his terms as he selects for specialization a series of common and current words to designate three degrees of injury to the skull indicated in modern surgery by the terms "fracture", "compound fracture," and "compound comminuted fracture," all of which the ancient commentator carefully explains.
James Henry Breasted (The Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus, Vol 1: Hieroglyphic Transliteration, Translation and Commentary)
Why do we bury our dead?” His nose was dented in at the bridge like a sphinx; the cause of which I could only imagine had been a freak archaeological accident. I thought about my parents. They had requested in their will that they be buried side by side in a tiny cemetery a few miles from our house. “Because it’s respectful?” He shook his head. “That’s true, but that’s not the reason we do it.” But that was the reason we buried people, wasn’t it? After gazing at him in confusion, I raised my hand, determined to get the right answer. “Because leaving people out in the open is unsanitary.” Mr. B. shook his head and scratched the stubble on his neck. I glared at him, annoyed at his ignorance and certain that my responses were correct. “Because it’s the best way to dispose of a body?” Mr. B. laughed. “Oh, but that’s not true. Think of all the creative ways mass murderers have dealt with body disposal. Surely eating someone would be more practical than the coffin, the ceremony, the tombstone.” Eleanor grimaced at the morbid image, and the mention of mass murderers seemed to wake the rest of the class up. Still, no one had an answer. I’d heard Mr. B. was a quack, but this was just insulting. How dare he presume that I didn’t know what burials meant? I’d watched them bury my parents, hadn’t I? “Because that’s just what we do,” I blurted out. “We bury people when they die. Why does there have to be a reason for everything?” “Exactly!” Mr. B. grabbed the pencil from behind his ear and began gesticulating with it. “We’ve forgotten why we bury people. “Imagine you’re living in ancient times. Your father dies. Would you randomly decide to put him inside a six-sided wooden box, nail it shut, then bury it six feet below the earth? These decisions aren’t arbitrary, people. Why a six-sided box? And why six feet below the earth? And why a box in the first place? And why did every society throughout history create a specific, ritualistic way of disposing of their dead?” No one answered. But just as Mr. B. was about to continue, there was a knock on the door. Everyone turned to see Mrs. Lynch poke her head in. “Professor Bliss, the headmistress would like to see Brett Steyers in her office. As a matter of urgency.” Professor Bliss nodded, and Brett grabbed his bag and stood up, his chair scraping against the floor as he left. After the door closed, Mr. B. drew a terrible picture of a mummy on the board, which looked more like a hairy stick figure. “The Egyptians used to remove the brains of their dead before mummification. Now, why on earth would they do that?” There was a vacant silence. “Think, people! There must be a reason. Why the brain? What were they trying to preserve?” When no one answered, he answered his own question. “The mind!” he said, exasperated. “The soul!” As much as I had planned on paying attention and participating in class, I spent the majority of the period passing notes with Eleanor. For all of his enthusiasm, Professor Bliss was repetitive and obsessed with death and immortality. When he faced the board to draw the hieroglyphic symbol for Ra, I read the note Eleanor had written me. Who is cuter? A. Professor Bliss B. Brett Steyers C. Dante Berlin D. The mummy I laughed. My hand wavered between B and C for the briefest moment. I wasn’t sure if you could really call Dante cute. Devastatingly handsome and mysterious would be the more appropriate description. Instead I circled option D. Next to it I wrote Obviously! and tossed it onto her desk when no one was looking.
Yvonne Woon (Dead Beautiful (Dead Beautiful, #1))
We could argue that the ancient Egyptians were positively constrained by their hieroglyphic system of writing to express abstract qualities in a crudely physical way. Against such an interpretation, it is important to bear in mind that language is not simply the vehicle of expression of a given mentality, it actually is that mentality giving expression to itself. The very structures of language are the articulation of the mentality. We should be wary of thinking that the ancient Egyptian mind was “really” like ours, but was constrained by the hieroglyphic script. Rather, the hieroglyphic script was the medium most appropriate for the articulation of the ancient Egyptian mentality. Far from being crude, it reflected richly symbolic modes of conceiving and relating to both the physical and the psychic spheres of existence. It has already become apparent that these two spheres were not experienced as separated from each other—as we today tend to experience them. It is now necessary to go further, and seriously consider the idea that psychic attributes were indeed experienced as “situated” in various parts of the body. The pictorial character of the hieroglyphic form of writing made possible a quite effortless translation of this experience into the written word. For the hieroglyphic script, because it was pictorial, had not yet created a division between concrete and abstract, between “outer” and “inner.” And it had not done so just because the ancient Egyptian mentality had not done so.
Jeremy Naydler (Temple of the Cosmos: The Ancient Egyptian Experience of the Sacred)
As the company went in to dinner, a moment of perplexity ensued when it was discovered that the twins had written the name cards in hieroglyphics. “We thought everyone might want to guess which one was theirs,” Pandora informed them. “Thankfully, I’m at the head of the table,” Devon said. “This is mine,” Winterborne said, gesturing to one name card, “and I believe Lady Helen is seated next to me.” “How did you know?” Cassandra asked. “Are you familiar with hieroglyphics, Mr. Winterborne?” He smiled. “I counted the letters.” Picking up the name card, he regarded it closely. “It’s cleverly drawn, especially the little bird.” “Can you tell what kind of bird it is?” Pandora asked hopefully. “Penguin?” he guessed. Cassandra told her sister triumphantly, “I told you it looked like a penguin.” “It’s a quail,” Pandora said to Winterborne, heaving a sigh. “My penmanship is no better in ancient Egyptian than it is in English.
Lisa Kleypas (Cold-Hearted Rake (The Ravenels, #1))
The following falsifications to be deleted from the proposed language: The IS of identity. You are an animal. You are a body. Now whatever you may be you are not an “animal,” you are not a “body,” because these are verbal labels. The IS of iden­tity always carries the implication of that and nothing else, and it also carries the assignment of permanent condition. To stay that way. All name calling presupposes the IS of identity. This concept is unnecessary in a hieroglyphic language like ancient Egyptian and in fact frequently omitted. No need to say the sun IS in the sky, sun in sky suffices. The verb to be can easily be omitted from any language and the followers of Count Korgybski have done this, eliminating the verb to be in English. However, it is difficult to tidy up the English language by arbitrary exclusion of concepts which remain in force so long as the unchanged language is spoken. The definite article THE. THE contains the implication of one and only: THE God, THE universe, THE way, THE right, THE wrong. If there is another, then THAT universe, THAT way is no longer THE universe, THE way. The defi­ nite article THE will be deleted and the indefinite article A will take its place. The whole concept of EITHER/OR. Right or wrong, physical or mental, true or false, the whole concept of OR will be deleted from the language and replaced by juxtaposi­tion, by AND.
William S. Burroughs (The Revised Boy Scout Manual: excerpt (cassette # 1))
Chapter 1, “Esoteric Antiquarianism,” situates Egyptian Oedipus in its most important literary contexts: Renaissance Egyptology, including philosophical and archeological traditions, and early modern scholarship on paganism and mythology. It argues that Kircher’s hieroglyphic studies are better understood as an antiquarian rather than philosophical enterprise, and it shows how much he shared with other seventeenth-century scholars who used symbolism and allegory to explain ancient imagery. The next two chapters chronicle the evolution of Kircher’s hieroglyphic studies, including his pioneering publications on Coptic. Chapter 2, “How to Get Ahead in the Republic of Letters,” treats the period from 1632 until 1637 and tells the story of young Kircher’s decisive encounter with the arch-antiquary Peiresc, which revolved around the study of Arabic and Coptic manuscripts. Chapter 3, “Oedipus in Rome,” continues the narrative until 1655, emphasizing the networks and institutions, especially in Rome, that were essential to Kircher’s enterprise. Using correspondence and archival documents, this pair of chapters reconstructs the social world in which Kircher’s studies were conceived, executed, and consumed, showing how he forged his career by establishing a reputation as an Oriental philologist. The next four chapters examine Egyptian Oedipus and Pamphilian Obelisk through a series of thematic case studies. Chapter 4, “Ancient Theology and the Antiquarian,” shows in detail how Kircher turned Renaissance occult philosophy, especially the doctrine of the prisca theologia, into a historical framework for explaining antiquities. Chapter 5, “The Discovery of Oriental Antiquity,” looks at his use of Oriental sources, focusing on Arabic texts related to Egypt and Hebrew kabbalistic literature. It provides an in-depth look at the modus operandi behind Kircher’s imposing edifice of erudition, which combined bogus and genuine learning. Chapter 6, “Erudition and Censorship,” draws on archival evidence to document how the pressures of ecclesiastical censorship shaped Kircher’s hieroglyphic studies. Readers curious about how Kircher actually produced his astonishing translations of hieroglyphic inscriptions will find a detailed discussion in chapter 7, “Symbolic Wisdom in an Age of Criticism,” which also examines his desperate effort to defend their reliability. This chapter brings into sharp focus the central irony of Kircher’s project: his unyielding antiquarian passion to explain hieroglyphic inscriptions and discover new historical sources led him to disregard the critical standards that defined erudite scholarship at its best. The book’s final chapter, “Oedipus at Large,” examines the reception of Kircher’s hieroglyphic studies through the eighteenth century in relation to changing ideas about the history of civilization.
Daniel Stolzenberg (Egyptian Oedipus: Athanasius Kircher and the Secrets of Antiquity)
The word Punt is always written without the hieroglyph determinative of a foreign country, thus showing that the Egyptians did not regard the Punites as foreigners. This certainly looks as if the Punites were a portion of the great migration from Arabia, left behind on the African shore when the rest of the wandering people pressed on northwards to the Wadi Hammamat and the Nile.
Leonard William King (History of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia and Assyria in the Light of Recent Discovery)
ANNALS OF LANGUAGE WORD MAGIC How much really gets lost in translation? BY ADAM GOPNIK Once, in a restaurant in Italy with my family, I occasioned enormous merriment, as a nineteenth-century humorist would have put it, by confusing two Italian words. I thought I had, very suavely, ordered for dessert fragoline—those lovely little wild strawberries. Instead, I seem to have asked for fagiolini—green beans. The waiter ceremoniously brought me a plate of green beans with my coffee, along with the flan and the gelato for the kids. The significant insight the mistake provided—arriving mere microseconds after the laughter of those kids, who for some reason still bring up the occasion, often—was about the arbitrary nature of language: the single “r” rolled right makes one a master of the trattoria, an “r” unrolled the family fool. Although speaking feels as natural as breathing, the truth is that the words we use are strange, abstract symbols, at least as remote from their objects as Egyptian hieroglyphs are from theirs, and as quietly treacherous as Egyptian tombs. Although berries and beans may be separated by a subtle sound within a language, the larger space between like words in different languages is just as hazardous. Two words that seem to indicate the same state may mean the opposite. In English, the spiritual guy is pious, while the one called spirituel in French is witty; a liberal in France is on the right, in America to the left. And what of cultural inflections that seem to separate meanings otherwise identical? When we have savoir-faire in French, don’t we actually have something different from “know-how” in English, even though the two compounds combine pretty much the same elements? These questions, about the hidden traps of words and phrases, are the subject of what may be the weirdest book the twenty-first century has so far produced: “Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon,” a thirteen-hundred-page volume, originally edited in French by the French philologist Barbara Cassin but now published, by Princeton University Press, in a much altered English edition, overseen by the comp-lit luminaries Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood. How weird is it? Let us count the ways. It is in part an anti-English protest, taking arms against the imperializing spread of our era’s, well, lingua franca—which has now been offered in English, so that everyone can understand it. The book’s presupposition is that there are significant, namable, untranslatable differences between tongues, so that, say, “history” in English, histoire in French, and Geschichte in German have very different boundaries that we need to grasp if we are to understand the texts in which the words occur. The editors, propelled by this belief, also believe it to be wrong. In each entry of the Dictionary, the differences are tracked, explained, and made perfectly clear in English, which rather undermines the premise that these terms are untranslatable, except in the dim sense that it sometimes takes a few words in one language to indicate a concept that is more succinctly embodied in one word in another. Histoire in French means both “history” and “story,” in a way that “history” in English doesn’t quite, so that the relation between history and story may be more elegantly available in French. But no one has trouble in English with the notion that histories are narratives we make up as much as chronicles we discern. Indeed, in the preface, the editors cheerfully announce that any strong form of the belief to which their book may seem to be a monument is certainly false: “Some pretty good equivalencies are always available. . . . If there were a perfect equivalence from language to language, the result would not be translation; it would be a replica. . . . The constant recourse to the metaphor of loss in translation is finally too easy.” So their Dictionary is a self-exploding book,
Anonymous
How the resurrection of Hittites has been accomplished, by putting together the fragmentary evidence of Egyptian and Assyrian inscriptions, of strange-looking monuments in Asia Minor, and of still undeciphered hieroglyphics
A.H. Sayce (The Hittites: The Story of a Forgotten Empire (Original Illustrations))
The Saqqara necropolis was the most ancient of all Egyptian sites and was one of, if not the, earliest massive stone structures man ever attempted to build. Recorded man, that is. The writings on the walls, or pyramid texts as they were called, were the oldest in all of Egypt, dating to before 2700 BC. Saqqara was built by the great Egyptian architect Imhotep, and was located about thirty minutes outside of Cairo. Inside the temple of Unas was an amazing room, with ancient hieroglyphic writing covering every inch of the walls.
Hunt Kingsbury (The Moses Riddle (Thomas McAllister 'Treasure Hunter' Adventure Book 1))
One-quarter of what you eat keeps you alive. The other three-quarters keeps your doctor alive.” —HIEROGLYPH IN AN EGYPTIAN TOMB
Sarah Ballantyne (The Paleo Approach: Reverse Autoimmune Disease, Heal Your Body)
In Ancient Egypt names were thought to have magical powers. Losing one’s name is the same as losing his access to eternity. The ancient Egyptian logo-phonetic writing known as hieroglyphs was considered words of the divinity. Thus the religious and spiritual texts in ancient Egypt were sacred. According to the indigenous oral tradition, the ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic writing found carved on temple walls was called Sufi language. That’s why Sufism, inner enlightenment thru gnosis, is originally rooted in Egypt.
Ashraf Ezzat (Egypt knew neither Pharaoh nor Moses)
That ancient Egyptian hieroglyph could not have represented a Horned Viper. It is obviously a slug! A good evidence which supports my assertion is that this symbol shows up together with other symbols referring to the Sun either actively as in the case with the fork-end of a sceptre (i.e., abundance without authority), or passively as in the Ankh. Therefore it resembled an evolution of a snail into a slug by eventually freeing itself from its shell, which properly symbolized for the heretics their liberation and deliverance out of the upper heavens' mandate. We also see it with the feather/reed hieroglyph signalling maybe the Winged Sun. What is even more significant is the meaning of slowness this emblem conveys; as if it were meant to represent a lower speed (minutes and hours) than that of the upper heavens (seconds). This is surprisingly what differentiates the perpendicular authority from that of the parallel one. The slug exists after all and is seen in twos as well, referring probably thereby to the parallel authority of the two smaller pyramids out of their shell (i.e., Great Pyramid).
Ibrahim Ibrahim (Quotable: My Worldview)
Another indication of the slug hieroglyph serving merely as a reference to its shell (i.e., Great Pyramid) is the fact that in the ancient Egyptian texts it can be found commonly [used as the possessive pronoun, namely as, his, hers, or its].
Ibrahim Ibrahim (Quotable: My Worldview)
Based on the list in Gardiner's Egyptian Grammar, James P. Allen tells us about W10 as being a variant of N41 which resembles a well with water in it. That is beautifully aligning with my discovery of the link between Egypt and Mecca! Not only that, but phonetically speaking, W10 is 'jab', and this is the exact word for 'well' in Arabic. Looking at the two eyes of Horus embracing the hieroglyphs for water and cup as if there is a message of unity therein leads us directly to the variant N41 referring to a well with water in it. Viewing the two eyes with the Shen (which literally means, to protect) ring in the 'Stela of Harpist and Ra' is a direct reference to the ZamZam well of Arabia. The BenBen is flipped (i.e., to Tawy, to pleat) upside down in it (because it is folded) signifying its link with the well (i.e., Sema). Ancient Egypt yearned and ached for Arabia's heritage and portrayed that in the core of its tradition. After all, 'ZamZam' was protected and kept away from Egyptians' outreach. It became to them as a prayer of hope as in Psalm 33:2, and one can literally see the 10 tuners in the 'Stela of Harpist and Ra' image.
Ibrahim Ibrahim (Quotable: My Worldview)
The 'astronomical chronology' is a framework of the scientific structure of Egyptian history and, consequently, of the history of the ancient world. . . . The specialists in astronomical chronology made their calculations and announced their expert results. The specialists in pottery took the results of the specialists in Sothic computation as a firm base on which to build. Specialists in the history of religion, philology, and history in general followed. Difficulties were swept away. . . .The readers of cuneiform borrow dates from the readers of hieroglyphics; the Bible exegetes from the archaeologist; the historians from all of them. Thus there came into existence an elaborate entrenched system that bears very little resemblance to the real past. . . . The Sothic scheme of ancient chronology of the world is built on this chronology.
Immanuel Velikovsky (Peoples of the Sea : A Reconstruction of Ancient History-A Continuation of the Ages in Chaos Series (Ages in Chaos series, #2))
The general creation story contains within it two aspects that are crucial to understanding all of the myths of ancient Egypt: maat and isfet. Isfet represents chaos or disorder, generally speaking, and it was seen as a fundamental element of everything in existence. There was no notion of trying to eradicate isfet from their general lives in ancient Egypt; after all, it was said to be one of the elements that was present in the limitless ocean at the dawn of creation. The only desire for ancient Egyptians was that isfet never became more prevalent than maat, its opposite: justice. Maat was often depicted as a goddess wearing a feather on her head, which was also the hieroglyph that represented her.[8] She, or simply the concept of justice, was believed to be present in all aspects of life and if it was broken by anyone, there would be a punishment. According to the Middle Kingdom “Coffin Text” it was believed that Atum, the “Great Finisher” of creation,[9] inhaled maat in order to gain his consciousness: “Inhale your daughter Maat [said Nun to Atum] and raise her to your nostril so that your consciousness may live. May they not be far from you, your daughter Maat and your son Shu, whose name is “life” … it is your son Shu who will lift you up.
Charles River Editors (Horus: The History and Legacy of the Ancient Egyptian God Who Was the Son of Isis and Osiris)
Unas Pyramid Text Possibly the next most influential source came from the Roman era. Plutarch was a Greek historian and priest who lived in the late 1st and early 2nd century CE. He traveled to Egypt, it seems, but once he arrived there he was incapable of reading any hieroglyphs, so he largely depended on conversations with the locals and also a smattering of earlier literature that speculated on the identity of Egyptian gods and compared them with the Greeks’ own pantheon. For instance, to the ancient Greeks the god Amun was Zeus, and the same applied to Hermes and Thoth, Apollo and Horus, and Dionysus and Osiris. The connection between Greece and Egypt was an ancient one and continues to have an influence on modern readers since many of the cult centers of ancient Egypt are referred to by their ancient Greek names, such as Hermopolis the City of Hermes, rather than their ancient Egyptian names, most likely because of the troublesome nature of transliterating Egyptian words.
Charles River Editors (Horus: The History and Legacy of the Ancient Egyptian God Who Was the Son of Isis and Osiris)
The general creation story contains within it two aspects that are crucial to understanding all of the myths of ancient Egypt: maat and isfet. Isfet represents chaos or disorder, generally speaking, and it was seen as a fundamental element of everything in existence. There was no notion of trying to eradicate isfet from their general lives in ancient Egypt; after all, it was said to be one of the elements that was present in the limitless ocean at the dawn of creation. The only desire for ancient Egyptians was that isfet never became more prevalent than maat, its opposite: justice. Maat was often depicted as a goddess wearing a feather on her head, which was also the hieroglyph that represented her.[10] She, or simply the concept of justice, was believed to be present in all aspects of life and if it was broken by anyone, there would be a punishment. According to the Middle Kingdom “Coffin Text” it was believed that Atum, the “Great Finisher” of creation,[11] inhaled maat in order to gain his consciousness: “Inhale your daughter Maat [said Nun to Atum] and raise her to your nostril so that your consciousness may live.
Charles River Editors (Osiris: The History and Legacy of the Ancient Egyptian God of the Dead)
The Coptic Achievement In vivid contrast, the Egyptian churches certainly did reach the hearts of their natives, and from early times. Even the name Copt is a corruption of Aigyptos—that is, native Egyptians, whose language descends from the tongue of the pyramid builders. (The word Aigyptos derives from the name of ancient Memphis, the city of Ptah.) When nineteenth-century scholars translated the hieroglyphics on the Rosetta Stone, they did so by using the language they found spoken in the liturgies of the Coptic church. Though Alexandrians wrote and thought in Greek, Coptic was from the earliest years a sophisticated language of Christian literature and theology, making it easy to spread the faith among ordinary Egyptians. The famous Nag Hammadi collection of alternative scriptures, probably written in the fourth century, is in Coptic.
Philip Jenkins (The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia--and How It Died)
Faraday's self-education was deficient in one significant respect: he had learned no mathematics. For him, Ampère's equations might as well have been written in Egyptian hieroglyphics. We shall never know what Faraday would have achieved had he mastered mathematics, but, paradoxically, his ignorance may have been an advantage. It led him to derive his theories entirely from experimental observation rather than to deduce them from mathematical models.
Nancy Forbes (Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics)
In the past, the Egyptian Hieroglyphs and the Cuneiform scripts were deciphered because bilingual and multilingual texts were discovered. The Egyptian Hieroglyphs were understood once the Rosetta stone was found in Egypt by soldier in the army of Napoleon in 1799. The cuneiform too was deciphered once the Behistun trilingual inscriptions were found in western Iran. There have been no corresponding inscriptions found for the Harappan script, yet. Since the seals have also been discovered in Mesopotamia and we know that there were trade relations between the two civilisations, it is likely that there might, one day, turn up a Rosetta stone for the Harappan script.
Vijender Sharma (Essays on Indic History)
At the moment she was reading a story about an archaeologist who had uncovered a plot to kill an Egyptian nobleman when he read the hieroglyphics in a previously unopened tomb in the Valley of the Kings. They revealed a curse on the nobleman’s family through time, all the way back to Ramesses. She’d had a marvellous time reading up about the tombs across the Nile from Luxor in Egypt and saw some truly graphic pictures of people who were now blind because of the river blindness caused by the blackfly there.
Jean Grainger (Last Port of Call)
In ideographic writing systems, for example Egyptian hieroglyphics or modern Chinese characters, the symbols used offer no clue to pronunciation,
David Hornsby (Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself (Ty: Complete Courses Book 1))
The first stop in the oft-repeated looking up of a word is the massive Egyptian-German dictionary, Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache, a project begun in 1897, its five volumes of entries eventually published between 1926 and 1931. The archive of note slips that were used to compile this dictionary—still a standard reference for hieroglyphic texts—has now been digitized. By inputting the page number and word entry from the published Wörterbuch, we can scroll through scans of paper slips containing handwritten copies of snippets of ancient Egyptian texts containing a particular word.
John Coleman Darnell (Egypt's Golden Couple: When Akhenaten and Nefertiti Were Gods on Earth)
The legacy of ancient Egypt is known to few. Its truth lies buried beneath false beliefs. You may have heard that the Egyptians of old worshiped many gods. This belief is from a mistranslation of a single hieroglyph, - Neter. Today Neters is translated as "gods." An entire world of falsification has grown from this stumbling block, obscuring their ancient teachings' true meaning.
Rico Roho (Beyond the Fringe: My Experience with Extended Intelligence (Age of Discovery Book 3))
Three thousand, three hundred and seventy years is a remarkably long time for knowledge of the events of a single day to survive. On the day in question, February 22, 1347 BCE (give or take a week or two), there were only a few places in the world where such knowledge even had a chance of surviving. Of course, Egypt had hieroglyphs—the “word of god” as the Egyptians termed it. The ancient Near East employed the cuneiform script, first developed for Sumerian in the southern portion of Mesopotamia (roughly the modern countries between the eastern Mediterranean coast and the Tigris River), then adapted for Akkadian and later for Hittite (and other languages). Early Greek was written in the syllabic Linear B script of the Mycenaean world, while in Shang Dynasty China, written characters were in use as aspects of divinatory practices. As far as we know, no other culture possessed a writing system at this time.
John Coleman Darnell (Egypt's Golden Couple: When Akhenaten and Nefertiti Were Gods on Earth)
Picture writing, as in Egyptian hieroglyphics?" "Very similar." "What we might call an illustrated comic strip." "Only without the panels. The panels were never fully deciphered.
Clive Cussler (Inca Gold (Dirk Pitt, #12))
These hieroglyphs are known as the Edfu Texts, and most of them tell the story of the creation of the world.
Billy Wellman (Ancient Egypt: An Enthralling Overview of Egyptian History, Starting from the Settlement of the Nile Valley through the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms to the Death of Cleopatra VII (Civilizations))
Hausa, Urdu, Yoruba, Arabic, Efik, German, Igbo, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Sanskrit, even one written in a language Chichi called Nsibidi. “Can you read N—
Nnedi Okorafor (Akata Witch (The Nsibidi Scripts #1))
In an Asiatic (Semitic) settlement (c. 1876–1560 B.C.) that was discovered at Avaris (Tell el-Dab’a), there is a monumental tomb where archaeologists found fragments of a colossal statue of an Asiatic dignitary that had been broken up. The statue had been deliberately destroyed and defaced. The original statue of the seated official was 150% of life size, approximately 2 m high, made of limestone and carved by Egyptian sculptors. This Asiatic man has a red mushroom-shaped hairstyle, yellow painted skin (traditional color of an Asiatic in Egyptian artwork), a long multi-colored cloak (red, white, and black stripes) which is non-Egyptian, and a throw stick (the Egyptian hieroglyph for a foreigner) held against his right shoulder. There is no name on the statue to identify the person, but the size of the statue indicates a person of great importance. Although some have suggested that this is Joseph, a more plausible explanation is that it is Jacob, the patriarch of the family. The clothing on the statue and its color are Asiatic; Joseph was clothed in Egyptian garments of fine linen (Genesis 41:42). The hairstyle on the statue is distinctly Asiatic; Joseph’s hairstyle would have almost certainly been Egyptian given that his brothers did not recognize him when they saw him (Genesis 42:8). Also, a fragment of the statue’s base shows that it was inscribed with the Egyptian word sntr = incense (a word used on funerary inscriptions), which signifies death. The statue was apparently built to commemorate a dead person. The style of the fragments that come from this statue are in harmony with statuary that came from a facility that produced statues during the reign of Amenemhat III, who came onto the throne the year Jacob died (1859 B.C.).34 It makes perfect sense that the statue is made to honor Jacob, who was not buried in Avaris but in Canaan (Genesis 47:29–30, 49:28–30).
Simon Turpin (Adam: First and the Last)
On the evening before the Battle of the Pyramids, Napoleon and a few of his officers were riding past a pyramid. A man wrapped in a red cloak stepped out of the pyramid and motioned to Napoleon to come forth. Napoleon obliged, telling his officers to wait outside as he stepped into the pyramid with this red-mantled stranger. After an hour of uneasiness, the officers were ready to enter and ensure Napoleon’s safety, but Napoleon stepped out of the pyramid. With a satisfied smile, he demanded they prepare for battle with the Egyptians. The officers were confused, given his previous reluctance, but they followed his orders, leading to their victory in the Battle of the Pyramids. The Great Pyramid of Giza The year after his invasion, Napoleon returned to Egypt, to the Great Pyramid of Giza. After discovering the Rosetta Stone—an ancient stone that helped scientists to understand how to read hieroglyphics—Napoleon began to believe that the pyramids held great mystique and spirituality. He spent the night inside the Great Pyramid of Giza, inside the king’s chamber that was about 32 feet long and 16 feet wide. For seven hours, he sat in the dark room, not emerging until sunrise. However, when he stepped out of the pyramid, his face was pale. Visibly shaken and terrified, he refused to tell anyone what he’d experienced, saying, “If I told you the truth, you would not believe me.” Even years later, when one of Napoleon’s men asked about the experience, Napoleon considered telling him but then decided against it, saying, “No, never mind” (Shkuro, 2019, para. 2). Considering Napoleon admired Alexander the Great, who had also spent the night in the king’s chambers and had an experience, some believe he may have been trying to claim a piece of Alexander’s legacy in that respect. He’s even been said to have created stories about himself that aligned with Alexander. Though, even his officers said he was clearly disturbed by whatever he saw.
Alda Dagny (Secrets of the Nile: An Archaeological Journey to the Land of Pharaohs)
The perpetrator of such a misdemeanor must have a motive. Is UMMO the private joke of a group of Spanish engineers? Is it a psychological warfare exercise, as some French analysts suspect? Or is the truth more complex, rooted in a social reality where the ideas and symbols of UMMO have acquired a life of their own, their special mythology, and a set of beliefs that feed on themselves? We can at least be certain of one thing: the UMMO documents do not come from advanced beings trying to demonstrate their existence to us. But try to explain it to their disciples! Very few UFO believers, and even fewer of their New Age counterparts, have any formal training in science. They are easily awed by any document that contains a few equations and a numerical system of base 12. Yet if they had some awareness of modern technology, they would realize how easy it should be for an advanced race to prove its genuine skill to a society like the human race. After reading the masses of documents purportedly coming from the planet UMMO, I asked myself: if I had the opportunity to communicate with intelligent beings of an earlier time, such as the high priests of Egypt, how would I establish a meaningful dialogue? I certainly would not insult them by sending a letter beginning with ”We are aware of the transcendence of what we are about to tell you”—especially if I had an imperfect command of hieroglyphics! Instead, I would concentrate on a few points of valuable, verifiable information. Since the Egyptians already knew how to make electrical batteries and were aware of the magnetic properties of certain minerals, I would send them a simple set of instructions to make a coil and a compass. I could explain resistance and Ohm’s Law, a simple equation that was easily within the grasp of their mathematicians. Or I would tell them about making glass and lenses from sand. If they wanted proof, I would not bother to reveal to them set theory or the fact that E is equal to mc2. Instead, I would send them a table predicting future eclipses, or a diagram to build an alternator, or Leonardo da Vinci’s design for variable-speed cogwheels. That should get the attention of the top scientists in their culture and open up a dialogue. Unfortunately, the extraterrestrials of UMMO and other planets never seem to communicate at this level. Are they afraid of collapsing our society by appearing too advanced with respect to us? This hypothesis does not hold, since they have chosen a very obvious way of showing themselves in our skies.
Jacques F. Vallée (Revelations)
found that by copying the distinctive prints and scratches made by other animals we could gain a new power; here was a method of identifying with the other animal, taking on its expressive magic in order to learn of its whereabouts, to draw it near, to make it appear. Tracing the impression left by a deer’s body in the snow, or transferring that outline onto the wall of the cave: these are ways of placing oneself in distant contact with the Other, whether to invoke its influence or to exert one’s own. Perhaps by multiplying its images on the cavern wall we sought to ensure that the deer itself would multiply, be bountiful in the coming season…. All of the early writing systems of our species remain tied to the mysteries of a more-than-human world. The petroglyphs of pre-Columbian North America abound with images of prey animals, of rain clouds and lightning, of eagle and snake, of the paw prints of bear. On rocks, canyon walls, and caves these figures mingle with human shapes, or shapes part human and part Other (part insect, or owl, or elk.) Some researchers assert that the picture writing of native North America is not yet “true” writing, even where the pictures are strung together sequentially—as they are, obviously, in many of the rock inscriptions (as well as in the calendrical “winter counts” of the Plains tribes). For there seems, as yet, no strict relation between image and utterance. In a much more conventionalized pictographic system, like the Egyptian hieroglyphics (which first appeared during the First Dynasty, around 3000 B.C.E. and remained in use until the second century C.E.),4 stylized images of humans and human implements are still interspersed with those of plants, of various kinds of birds, as well as of serpents, felines, and other animals. Such pictographic systems, which were to be found as well in China as early as the fifteenth century B.C.E., and in Mesoamerica by the middle of the sixth century B.C.E., typically include characters that scholars have
David Abram (The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World)
The supreme irony in this is that though written texts were never at the heart of pharaonic culture, those that have survived have played a major role in the construction of modern ancient Egypt. Such a fundamental role, in fact, that ever since Jean François Champollion deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs in the early nineteenth century, the study and translation of pharaonic texts has continuously distorted a broader understanding of that ancient culture.
John Romer (A History of Ancient Egypt Volume 2: From the Great Pyramid to the Fall of the Middle Kingdom)
Let the reader peruse the following statement of Sir G. Wilkinson: "A still more curious fact may be mentioned respecting this hieroglyphical character [the Tau], that the early Christians of Egypt adopted it in lieu of the cross, which was afterwards substituted for it, prefixing it to inscriptions in the same manner as the cross in later times. For, though Dr. Young had some scruples in believing the statement of Sir A. Edmonstone, that it holds that position in the sepulchres of the great Oasis, I can attest that such is the case, and that numerous inscriptions, headed by the Tau, are preserved to the present day on early Christian monuments." The drift of this statement is evidently this, that in Egypt the earliest form of that which has since been called the cross, was no other than the "Crux Ansata," or "Sign of life," borne by Osiris and all the Egyptian gods; and the ansa or "handle" was afterwards dispensed with, and that it became the simple Tau, or ordinary cross, as it appears at this day, and that the design of its first employment on the sepulchres, therefore, could have no reference to the crucifixion of the Nazarene, but was simply the result of the attachment to old and long-cherished Pagan symbols, which is always strong in those who, with the adoption of the Christian name and profession, are still, to a large extent, Pagan in heart and feeling. This, and this only, is the origin of the worship of the "cross.
Alexander Hislop (The Two Babylons)
the tradition of the thousands of ancient parchments saved when the Alexandrian library was destroyed; the thousands of Sanskrit works which disappeared in India in the reign of Akbar; the universal tradition in China and Japan that the true old texts with the commentaries, which alone make them comprehensible—amounting to many thousands of volumes—have long passed out of the reach of profane hands; the disappearance of the vast sacred and occult literature of Babylon; the loss of those keys which alone could solve the thousand riddles of the Egyptian hieroglyphics records; the tradition in India that the real secret commentaries which alone make the Veda intelligible, though no longer visible to profane eyes, still remain for the initiate, hidden in secret caves and crypts; and an identical belief among the Buddhists, with regard to their secret books.
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (The Secret Doctrine Volume One)
The letter M is the 13th letter of English, Greek and Hebrew alphabets. M is also the astrological symbol for Virgo. In Ptolemaic Egyptian Hieroglyphs, the letter M was represented by an owl—a creature that can see in darkness. The owl was also the companion of Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, an incarnation of Isis. In Egyptian hieroglyphs of the Owl, the letter M is clearly depicted on the top of its head.
David Flynn (The David Flynn Collection)
The ancient Egyptian hieroglyph for the star Sirius was a pentagon.
David Flynn (The David Flynn Collection)
There is more to America’s past than appears on the surface. A strange unrest is apparent among many of the younger historians and archaeologists of the colleges and universities, a sense that somehow a very large slice of America’s past has mysteriously vanished from our public records. For how else can we explain the ever-swelling tally of puzzling ancient inscriptions now being reported from nearly all parts of the United States, Canada, and Latin America?...These inscriptions are written in various European and Mediterranean languages in alphabets that date from 2,500 years ago, and they speak not only of visits by ancient ships, but also of permanent colonies of Celts, Basques, Libyans, and even Egyptians – Barry Fell (America BC) Lewis Spence, one of the latest writers on the subject, concludes that the Toltec and Maya civilizations never originated on American soil but appeared there full blown, with a well-defined art and system of hieroglyphic writing which possesses affinities with the Egyptian – Comyns Beaumont (The Riddle of Prehistoric Britain) There seems little doubt but that the Irish had intercourse with America far earlier than any definite records, nor would it be surprising in view of the comparative proximity of the two – ibid As to so-called Druidical monuments, no argument can be drawn thence, as to the primary seat of this mysticism, since they are to be seen nearly all over the world – James Bonwick (Irish Druids and Old Irish Religions, 1894)
Michael Tsarion (The Irish Origins of Civilization, Volume One: The Servants of Truth: Druidic Traditions & Influence Explored)
Civilisation once looked to art as the means of passing wisdom from one generation to the next. Writing itself was invented in part to convey the sacred: permanent things deserved a permanent place, hence the hieroglyphs on Egyptian tombs. But a modern civilisation that no longer believes in permanent things, one that accepts no certain narrative of meaning,
Philip Yancey (Vanishing Grace: What Ever Happened to the Good News?)
Civilisation once looked to art as the means of passing wisdom from one generation to the next. Writing itself was invented in part to convey the sacred: permanent things deserved a permanent place, hence the hieroglyphs on Egyptian tombs. But a modern civilisation that no longer believes in permanent things, one that accepts no certain narrative of meaning, resorts to deconstruction, not construction.
Philip Yancey (Vanishing Grace: What Ever Happened to the Good News?)
What do the hieroglyphs tell us of what it was like to live under the lash, building the pyramids? Do we talk of that? Do we? No, we talk of the magnificence and majesty of the Egyptians. Of the Romans. Of Saint Petersburg, and nothing of the bones of the hundred thousand slaves that it is built on.
Richard Flanagan (The Narrow Road to the Deep North)
More than 150 types of boats appear in Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Stewart Gordon (A History of the World in Sixteen Shipwrecks)
The Egyptian goddess Seshat, credited with the invention of writing, astronomy, architecture and mathematics, is portrayed in hieroglyphics with a cannabis leaf above her head.
John Brown (1000 Shocking Facts You Might Not Have Known)
most authorities believe that the proto-Semitic inscriptions the Petries first found at Serabit derived from Egyptian hieratic or hieroglyphic writing.
William J. Bernstein (Masters of the Word: How Media Shaped History from the Alphabet to the Internet)
From the early days of its existence, cryptology had served to obscure critical portions of writings dealing with the potent subject of magic—divinations, spells, curses, whatever conferred supernatural powers on its sorcerers. The first faint traces of this appeared in Egyptian cryptography. Plutarch reported that “sundry very ancient oracles were kept in secret writings by the priests” at Delphi. And before the fall of the Roman empire, secret writing was serving as a powerful ally of the necromancers in guarding their art from the profane. One of the most famous magic manuscripts, the so-called Leiden papyrus, discovered at Thebes and written in the third century A.D. in both Greek and a very late form of demotic, a highly simplified version of hieroglyphics, employs cipher to conceal the crucial portions of important recipes.
David Kahn (The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet)
In languages spoken all over the world, the word for “home” encompasses not just shelter but warmth, safety, family—the womb. The ancient Egyptian hieroglyph for “home” was often used in place of “mother.
Matthew Desmond (Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City)
Any picture could be employed either as (1) a pictograph or logogram or (2) a phonetic symbol. A sailboat image might mean “boat” or “to sail”—or it might simply contribute certain consonant sounds to help spell a different word. In hieroglyphics, an owl and a reed together meant “there,” not “an owl and a reed.” Read phonetically, the two pictures approximated the sound of the Egyptian word for “there.
David Sacks (Letter Perfect: The Marvelous History of Our Alphabet From A to Z)
Less rigorous was the second Egyptian writing system, hieratic. (The name, which is misleading, means “priestly,” but other social classes used it.) Hieratic was a simplified hieroglyphic script, designed for ink and brush on papyrus or textile: Pictures were converted to stylized outlines or strokes, with a far reduced vocabulary. Hieratic writing in its most basic form was accessible to most of the Egyptian upper and middle classes: landowners, certain merchants, and military officers.
David Sacks (Letter Perfect: The Marvelous History of Our Alphabet From A to Z)
Pyramid Texts" is the name now commonly given to the long hieroglyphic inscriptions that are cut upon the walls of the chambers and corridors of five pyramids at Sakkārah.
E.A. Wallis Budge (The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians)
In the hieroglyphic script, the power of the words were matched by the power of the symbols themselves. The symbols were regarded as being so powerful, precautions had to be taken to prevent them from taking on a life of their own.
Storm Constantine (Bast and Sekhmet: Eyes of Ra)