Friday Funnies--Ancient Style!

Friday Funnies--Ancient Style!

(Thanks, Justin Mansfield for this one!)

Friday Funnies--Ancient Style!

Friday Funnies--Ancient Style!

Friday Funnies--Ancient Style

In honor of seeing the cover of Anubis Speaks! (due out this October)--which is really, really awesome but I can't show you because it's not final yet--I decided to focus on Anubis and Egyptian funnies. Check out more at:  http://serverustare.deviantart.com/#.

 And, in honor of Passover...

 

Ancient Fun Fact: The Pharaoh was the "King Bee"

Workers using smoke to remove honeycombs.

King Menes, founder Egypt's First Dynasty, called himself "The Bee Keeper."  All pharaohs after him used that phrase to describe their role as leaders of the people of Egypt.

Bees were often portrayed on tomb walls (below) and there are even tomb paintings of bee keepers using smoke to take honey from the hive (above).

Because of its antiseptic properties, honey was widely used in medicine, particularly as ointments on open wounds or cuts, and as a syrup for sore throats. So precious was it, typically only the pharaohs could afford to have jars of honey included in their tombs as burial offerings. 

Beeswax was also a big deal, but the Egyptians didn't necessarily use it for candle making. Egyptian priests used the wax to make models of their enemies which they would then ritually destroy (the original voodoo doll!). Rick Riordan does a great job of capturing the importance of magicians using wax models of servants and monsters to do their bidding in his wonderful Egyptian myth based action series, The Kane Chronicles. 

The Salt Magical Papyrus claims bees were created when the golden tears of Ra, the sun god, fell to the earth.  These magical god-tear-bugs then "work in flowers and trees of every kind and wax and honey came into being."

The next time I make my kid a peanut butter and honey sandwich, I'm gonna tell her to mind her manners--Ra cried a lot of tears for that "sammich!"

Beware this Ancient Egyptian Monster of the Dark!

The ancient Egyptians often represented gods as human with animal heads. Usually, we can tell exactly what kind of animal they meant. But there's one god--Set or Seth, the god of chaos and darkness--whose animal representation remains unclear. 

Dude, what are you--a camel? Anteater? And what's with those ears?

When he's depicted as a full animal, the body is clearly some sort of canine (being the dawg he is), but nobody knows for sure what his head is supposed to represent. Some think it could be the Fennec fox, found in remote areas of southern Egypt. 

Possibly. But I dunno. The ears might work, but these cute little foxes don't seem as if they would be as fearsome as you would expect from the god of chaos, destruction and danger. Also, they don't have the straight tail with the bushy end as shown on the hieroglyph of Set. 

So, basically, nobody knows. But I think I've figured it out, folks. Seriously. You must watch this fearsome creature and see for yourself. Look at the ears! Look at the tail! And then if you don't expire from the cuteness, you too might agree that the Egyptian jerboa--with the legs of a kangaroo, face of a mouse, body of a bird and tail with a bushy tip, might very well embody the pure evil that is Set.*

*Obviously, just kidding! Nobody knows what Set was, but I couldn't resist the winsomeness of the jerboa.

The Case of the Exploding Cheeks

      While doing research for an upcoming book, I came across a photo of one of the world's first cosmetic surgeries featuring cheek implants. If you're not familiar with the procedure, it's where doctors implant a high-density porous polyethylene (commonly known as Gore-Tex) or pockets of firm silicone on top of a person's cheekbones. The idea is to recreate the roundness and softness of youth by lifting sagging skin and smoothing out wrinkles.
      Many Hollywood stars have allegedly had the procedure done, including Joan Rivers, Madonna, Hunter Tylo, Janice Dickinson and others.
That first implant surgery I came across, though, took place more than 3,000 years ago. The embalmers of the Egyptian Queen Henuttawy of the 21st Dynasty didn't use Gore-Tex, of course. They stuffed her cheeks with sawdust, linen and resin, presumably for the same reason modern surgeons perform cheek implants on the living today -- to give her face a plumper, more youthful appearance.
     The ancient Egyptians believed you needed your body for your ka, or spirit/soul to inhabit in the afterword. No body, no afterlife. A statue might do in a pinch, but you really needed the flesh. Hence, mummification.
     You can't blame the queen's embalmers for figuring that she probably wanted to look her best for her eternal afterlife. It's just that, sadly, it didn't quite work out that way for her. The procedure made the queen's face "plump up" out of all proportion. And it made the skin on her cheeks burst open.
     Poor queen had to walk around in her afterworld with a bloated face and ruptured cheek implants.
      While the cheeks of modern women who've had the procedure are unlikely to explode any time soon, I can't quite shake the feeling that the cosmetic surgery industry has moved into doing what the Egyptians did thousands of years ago -- attempting to embalm and preserve the upper classes who could afford it. Only modern plastic surgeons are doing it while their patients are still alive....

(Read the rest of the post here on Huffington Post.)

Friday Funnies--Ancient Style!

Little Known Ancient

Egyptian Inventions

The Porn 'Stache

The Beer Bong

Super Mario Bros

Random Sightings

Walking through the Decatur Public Library, I stopped cold when I came across this: 

At the Decatur Public Library...Mother and daughter.

There. In a case, behind a lovely Cleopatra figurine was...my book! Now, Joe Davich at the Georgia Center for the Book, had mentioned that they'd included my book in the library's princess displays, but I'd forgotten all about it. (Sorry, Joe!)

I knelt in front of the case and coo-ed, then started taking pictures, secretly hoping someone would come up to me and ask me why I was doing this.

"Because this is my book!" I imagined I would answer proudly. "I wrote this. And there it is--in a case. At the library! Amazing, innit?"

But, as so often happens, people pointedly ignored my cray-cray. Which just reminded me how important it is to have friends who "get" you. My writer friends would have squee-d loudly right along with me, shushing-librarians be damned!

Having writer friends is a must. Take, for example, what happened last week when I had lunch with my pal, Elizabeth O. Dulemba. Driving through Avondale Estates, Elizabeth cried out, "Oh my god, did you see that?"

"Huh? What?" I asked in my exceptionally witty way.

"We have to go back and check this out," she said, inspiring me to take the "mom-van" on a turn so sharp, we nearly made it on two wheels.

"Keep going, keep going!" she urged as we approached the parking lot of a church in construction.

And this is what we saw:

Out in the open, in the parking lot! As if Egypt in Atlanta wasn't just a tad...weird.

Right there, in the parking lot!  Isis. Anubis. The sphinx. All out in the open, presumably for the African church next door under construction. How awesome is that? And how awesome that my bud absolutely knew that I had to see it?

The sphinxes (sphinxii?) had tubes in their mouths. Fountains?

 The church under construction seemed somewhat small, so we were intrigued by the size of these decorations. How in the world will they fit it all in?

Elizabeth cozies up to the "big guy."

I can only imagine just how magical it will all look inside. After all, it turned a dreary, wet, ordinary day into something extraordinary--a parking lot full o' wonder.

Friday Funnies--Ancient Style

This Week's Theme: Ridiculous Ads

using Ancient References

(Though it helps if you're an arrogant jerk!)

(I've heard of white-washing history, but that's ridiculous!)

("Will you be super-sizing that?")

(Because pimple creams and ancient mysteries go so well together!)

Ancient Fun Fact: Egyptians Hated Body Hair

Or, at least, it sure seemed that way--especially since they had so many tools to help them get rid of it. The most popular: razors and tweezers, which look very much like our own.

Priests were said to shave their entire bodies--including eyebrows. Men and women shaved their heads--some say in order to keep lice away. Egyptians wouldn't dare enter a temple with stubble of any kind.

They also hated fabric made from wool (preferring linen)--perhaps because they thought wool was too much like hair!

Write Your Name in Hieroglyphics

That's my full name up there in ancient Egypian hieroglyphics! Thanks to World History Teacher's Blog for the heads-up and link.

The site allows you to type in your name so that you can see what your name looks like in the Egyptian "picture-writing." Just remember, you read hieroglyphics INTO the faces of the animals depicted. So here, it would be left to right.

On one of the Old Kingdom coffins at the Carlos Museum, it's the opposite. Like Hebrew, you must read it right to left.

Thanks to Ken Halla for the link!