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There is a YouTuber named Chris Ramsay (not the chef, Gordon Ramsey) who is both a magician and a puzzle solver. He has two channels, one for solving physical puzzles and one where he solves computer-game puzzles, sometimes with an active chat running. A lot of the computer "escape rooms" are really impressive, and I find them to be more enjoyable than the typical shoot-em-up first-person war games I see on some of my computer nerd channels.
When I saw Chris solve this set of virtual escape rooms (split into two videos) I started thinking of a physical puzzle based on Ancient Egypt. As part of the research for it, I started learning a little about the Ancient Egyptian language. I original called the Hieroglyphics, then Hieroglyphs. Then I saw one set of tutorial videos where the instructor made the distinction that the language is Ancient Egyptian, and presumably the hieroglyphs are just the equivalent of letters.
First, here are the virtual and physical puzzles based on Ancient Egypt that Chris has solved somewhat recently. I am not including the one where he got frustrated with his inability to solve a physical pyramid puzzle so he sawed the puzzle in half to see how it worked. He later felt a lot of regret and apologized.
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So, since I wanted to make my own puzzle, I started looking into learning Ancient Egyptian. I first found Voices of Ancient Egypt, and attended a single chat-based course and downloaded the Half-Hour Hierogplyphs Guide. https://www.voicesofancientegypt.com. One thing I learned is that Ancient Egyptian can be read in 3 directions: left-to-right, right-to-left, and top-to-bottom (with left-to-right or right-to-left being a sub-option while reading top-to-bottom). The way you figure out which direction to read is to look at symbols and faces which have a particular "look direction", which faces and bodies being the easiest to figure out. If everybody (including animals) is facing to the right, then the line is read right-to-left. Everybody looks towards the beginning of the line. If everybody is facing left, then the line is read left-to-right. And if the glyphs seem to be arranged vertically, then they are read top-to-bottom. Each "line", as you are reading top to bottom, can contain multiple glyphs arranged either left-to-right or right-to-left. I have not seen an example where line directions were mixed in a single top-to-bottom strip. Either every line is left-to-right, or right-to-left. In tombs, the strips seem to always be separated with long vertical lines.
So, using the Half-Hour Hieroglyphs guide, I made a cartouche with an attempt at transliteration of my name (making sounds in Ancient Egyptian that come as close as possible to the way my name sounds in English):
Ancient Egyptians did not write most of their vowels. If a vowel seems needed, most Egyptologists try inserting "eh" (beta, meta, theta, bread, not the Canadian "That hoser stole my beer, eh!")
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I then watched Charlie Chan in Egypt. I probably watched this as a Saturday afternoon movie as a kid, but I was binge-watching a bunch of Charlie Chan movies within the last year. Now I was able to see that the cheeky prop folks put a little foreshadowing into one of the props (or perhaps the script writers had them do it). The necklace with the "identifying seal of Ahmeti" actually says something like "Asheti equals god plot". The rectangular block is pronounced "sh", as in "ship". An "m" sound, as used in "Ahmeti", which is what all the actors are saying, would be an owl. So maybe they didn't want to bother drawing an owl, or the name of the god changed after the prop was made. I have a little problem with the arrangement of the glyphs, however. The reed (which I always thought was a feather, but feathers have a little curvy blob put on the "blade" side to distinguish them from reeds) is tall enough to cover not only the "shet" part of Asheti, but also the two lines (which really mean "duality"). To me, that means "Ashet(equals)i god plot", which is incorrect.
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Using the graphics mostly from Half-Hour Hieroglyphs, with the last two from (gardiners) and correcting for the way the actors are saying the name "Ahmeti" instead of "Asheti", I would prefer something like this:
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Since a reed is easily recognizable even when shrunk, I chose to combine it with the "t" instead of combining the "t" with the "m": Ah-m-(eh)-tee instead of Ah-m(eh)t-ee.
I later found these videos from another guy who apparently actually is Egyptian (modern-day, of course). I found them very instructive for getting further into the language. He has some pretty neat videos. https://www.youtube.com/@guideofegypt8409/videos
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Then I realized I already had enough information to make my puzzle, and I lost interest in the actual vocabulary of the language. The Ancient Egyptians weren't paragons of virtue, so other than their cool sense of artistic style in their language and their pyramids, I am not interested in their history or culture. I am more interested in Hollywood's Ancient Egypt than the actual one. Futurama made a cute joke: they envisioned a planet whose inhabitants the came to earth and learned most of their science from the Ancient Egyptians, including how to prepare their dead so as to scare Abbott and Costello (and the Wolfman).
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