Every Day Is Special: Ancient Egypt

Showing posts with label Ancient Egypt. Show all posts

January 22 - “Cleopatra's Needle” Installed in NYC's Central Park

Posted on January 22, 2022

This is an update of my post published on January 22, 2011:

This 68-foot-tall, 224-ton Egyptian obelisk stands in New York City's Central Park, behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Staring up at the huge chunk of stone, we might wonder how it got all the way from Egypt to the U.S.

By ship, of course—but it wasn't easy. Apparently Lt. Commander Henry Honeychurch Gorringe, U.S. Navy, wasn't able to get an Egyptian crew to sign on and sail to America, so he brought in a Serbian “crew” that—it turned out—not only didn't speak a word of English, but also didn't have any experience at sea!

The ship with the monument arrived at Staten Island in July of 1880. It was floated up the Hudson River and unloaded at the 51^st Street dock, where 32 horses were hitched to it. The horses slowly pulled the stone to Central Park, where it was finally erected about half a year after its arrival in the U.S., on this date in 1881.

Curiouser and curiouser...

Although the obelisk is a genuine Ancient Egyptian monument, it had nothing to do with Cleopatra. As a matter of fact, the “needle” was already about 1,000 years old when she lived! ...Instead, it was carved and erected in the Egyptian city of Heliopolis on orders of the pharaoh Thutmose III, around 1450 BC.

The twin of this monument, built at the same time and place and also referred to as “Cleopatra's Needle,” was installed a few years earlier in London, England. A third Egyptian obelisk, which was erected at Ancient Egypt's Luxor Temple under the pharaoh Ramesses II, was installed in Paris earlier in the 1800s.

According to Sharon Waxman, author of Loot, “Storms and pollution [in New York City] have erased most of the hieroglyphics on a monument that had survived for some 3,500 years in Egypt without substantial damage.” Present-day Egypt is wisely reluctant to let go of any more of its precious historical and artistic treasures.

Learn more about Ancient Egypt

Try Mr. Donn's website.

Or King Tut One – which has pictures to color and puzzles to solve!

Also on this date:

Birthdays of new kinds of celebrities

Data Innovation Day

Choreographer George Balanchine's birthday

St. Vincent's Day in Valencia

Answer Your Cat's Questions Day

Space-stuff Day

St. Vincent's Day in St. Vincent and the Grenadines

Anniversary of an Evo-Victory

Day of Unity in Ukraine

Plan ahead:

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And here are my Pinterest boards for:

February holidays
February birthdays
Historical anniversaries in February

December 23 - Happy Birthday, Jean-Francois Champollion

Posted on December 23, 2021

This is an update of my post published on December 23, 2010:

Born on this day in 1790 in France, Champollion became a scholar who specialized in languages. He is remembered because he deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphics, thus helping to illuminate much of the history of the Ancient Egyptian civilization.

The Rosetta Stone was discovered in 1799 by a French soldier in Egypt. (The discovery was made near the town of Rashid, which is translated in French as Rosette, hence the name of the stone.) Carved into the stone is a decree (or royal order) from the year 196 BC, on behalf of King Ptolemy V—but the important thing about this stone is that the decree was stated in three different scripts: in Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, in Egyptian “demotic” script (related to hieroglyphs and to modern Coptic), and in Ancient Greek. Because the latter script was known to scholars, this relatively small stone was gigantic in importance—the key to a language and centuries of recorded history!

Still, there was a lot of work to be done to figure out exactly what each hieroglyph meant. It was especially a problem because much of the top of the original stone stele was broken off—and that was the part with the hieroglyphs!

Jean-Francois Champollion

Obviously, since the Rosetta Stone was discovered when Champollion was only nine years old, it took years to decipher it. Scholars didn't just sit around twiddling their thumbs, waiting for Champollion to grow up! Lithographic copies and plaster casts circulated among European scholars, and in 1803 (13 years after the discovery of the stone) the Ancient Greek was fully translated. A Swedish man named Johan David Akerblad worked on translating the Demotic text (pictured below), which was related to the modern form of Ancient Egyptian, the Coptic language.

Akerblad was only partially successful because he assumed that each character (symbol) stood for a sound, as our letters do.

A student of Chinese suggested that some of the symbols were ideographic, standing for an object or idea rather than for a sound, and Thomas Young ran with the suggestion and was able to figure out that the Demotic script had similarities to the hieroglyphic script and that both used phonetic symbols (“letters”) to spell out names but had some ideographic symbols as well. Young published his findings around 1814.

Champollion first got into the project when Young sent him a letter in 1814. He was able to create a phonetic alphabet of hieroglyphs by 1822, and he figured out that, not just names were spelled out phonetically, but some words were as well. Champollion drew on many other ancient texts as he continued to create a hieroglyph dictionary and grammar.

Champollion suddenly died in 1832. However, thanks in part to his work, we can now figure out what all those hieroglyphs on all those scrolls and statues and monuments and tombs and sarcophagi say!

Ahhh....the Rosetta Stone...

At the British Museum, there are an amazing assortment of incredible displays, including huge statues and facades of ancient buildings and even entire temples! Yet my blood was stirred most when staring at the 45-inch-by-28-inch broken chunk of rock called the Rosetta Stone. I remember standing there, thinking, “Wait—this is THE Rosetta Stone? The original? The real deal?” It was a bit like looking at the Mona Lisa and realizing that it was THE Mona Lisa.

I am not alone in my interest in this "rock of ages"—according to Wikipedia, the Rosetta Stone is the most-visited object in the British Museum. (And did I mention that that museum is FULL of crazy-cool stuff?)

The term “Rosetta Stone” is sometimes used to mean the key to unlocking knowledge. For example, people have said that a particular discovery turned out to be the Rosetta Stone of modern physics. A brand of software that teaches foreign languages is called Rosetta Stone, and some translation services and software use the name Rosetta as well.

Find out more...

Here is a short bio of Champollion.

Ever wonder what your name would look like in Egyptian hieroglyphs? Here is a text-to-hieroglyph converter.

Learn ALL about hieroglyphs here.

Also on this date:

Royal Rulers' birthdays

Human Light

Flight Firsts Day

Anniversary of Benjamin Franklin's shocking mistake

Anniversary of a man crossing the ocean with no food

Night of the Radishes

Festivus—the Holiday for the Rest of Us

Birthday of entrepreneur Madame C. J. Walker

Birthday of portrait photographer Yousuf Karsh

Queen's Birthday in Sweden

Metric Conversion Day in the U.S.A.

Plan ahead:

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December holidays
December birthdays
Historical anniversaries in December

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March 18 - Anniversary of the First Electric Shaver

Posted on March 18, 2021

This is an update of my post published on March 18, 2010:

On this day in 1931, the first practical electric shaver went on sale.

Jacob Schick was the inventor. He served in the U.S. Army, and during the Spanish-American War was in the Philippines; he got dysentery, a disease common in the tropics.

After Schick recovered (which took a year!), the Army transferred him to Alaska—the opposite of the tropics. There Schick helped lay down a thousand miles of telegraph lines.

After retiring from the Army, Schick explored for gold in Alaska and Canada. He hated shaving with water in the bitter cold and tried to invent a better (drier, less cold) way to shave. He came up with an electric shaver that was bulky and required two hands: one hand to hold the shaving head, and the other to hold the bulky motor, which was connected to the shaving head by a cable.

Image: National Housewares
Manufacturers Association

Manufacturers didn't like his idea.

During World War I, Schick served in the Army again. After the war, he started working on his idea again. He manufactured it himself and brought it to market in 1929—just in time for the Great Depression!

Schick's razor didn't sell well. But he didn't give up. He mortgaged his house to get enough money to keep the business alive, and he finally got the motor and shaving head to the size so that the razor was handy instead of clumsy. With the entire razor-and-motor in one unit that fit comfortably in one hand, the electric razor that Schick brought out in 1931 finally began to sell...and sell, and sell.

Actually, it's almost surprising that this early razor sold as well as it did. It cost only $25—but that's like $350 in today's money! Still, customers compared that cost to the cost of blades and shaving cream and other expenses of a wet shave, and decided the price was just fine.

In just 6 years, 1.5 million razors sold. Schick's “Schick” razors made him rich.

(By the way, Schick invented several other things in his life, before he made a hit with his electric razor.)

Do you know...?

How do you think astronauts shave? Remember, whiskers or hairs floating around the space station or shuttle would not be a good thing!

It turns out, most astronauts use an electrical razor because it automatically collects hairs! Find out more here.

How did ancient peoples shave? You've seen pictures of ancient Egyptians, right? Don't most of the men look clean-shaven? By and large, the pharaohs had skinny beards, but most men apparently shaved.

What do you suppose they used for razors?

According to the "Tour Egypt Net" website, early shaving tools were sharp stone blades set into wooden handles. Later, Egyptians learned how to make copper razors, and in the Middle Kingdom, they began to use razors made of bronze. Barbers also used pumice stones to rub short hairs off and exfoliate and smooth skin.

Apparently fine barbers lived in the homes of the very wealthy; other barbers made house calls to shave clients with moderate wealth and set up outdoors salons, of sorts, to shave lower-class customers.

Now, about those skinny beards on the pharaohs—turns out, they were fake beards that were tied on as a sign of manliness!

Hatshepsut, who was one of very few female pharaohs, tied on a fake beard, too.

It's not so strange that rulers used fake beards on carefully shaved chins—because it turns out there was a lot of “fake” about Ancient Egyptian hair. Many men and women shaved their heads and then wore wigs. This was partly to achieve coolness in the hot Egyptian temperatures and partly had to do with cleanliness and avoidance of lice.

The idea of cleanliness going along with lack of hair got taken to extremes with the priesthood, whose members apparently even shaved their eyebrows! By eliminating almost all body and facial hair, Ancient Egyptians were probably trying to separate themselves from both hairy animals and foreigners, who they thought uncouth in their full mustaches and beards.