To illustrate how the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic language and symbolism worked, I'll repeat a metaphor that I offered up on a recent Facebook thread.
Einstein's famous formula E=MC2 defines the relationship between energy, mass and light, also with direct implications for how the concept of time works. The dynamic defines how mass emerges from a wavelike state of energy, and requires that localized timeframe slows down for an object as its mass increases.
However, each character of Einistein's formula also relates both symbolically and intuitively to a specific concept. E is energy, M is mass, the equal sign = implies an equivalence, and C is the speed of light, which is indicated by the number 2 as squared.
Had Einstein been an ancient Egyptian priest and us modern academics approaching the symbols from a perspective of how the English and French languages work, we might take E=MC2 for a simple word, and neglect to grasp the significance of the component figures. Unless we were aware of cosmological science, we might not notice that the letters and numbers that comprise the formula actually define the underlying concept for us.
As a shorthand to all of this, an ancient Egyptian would also likely have picked an animal whose attributes appropriately convey the idea of a creature that emerges from water and moves ever more slowly as it grows larger. Working within the mindset of the ancient cosmology, my choice for that would be a walrus.
Within the mindset of the Egyptian hieroglyphic language, one spelling of the word 'relative' would be with a single walrus glyph. The word for walrus would be E=MC2 [Walrus glyph]. If we wondered what the walrus glyph represented, we would search for words that end in a walrus glyph and then interpret the glyphs that lead up to it - the glyphs that, in my understanding, define the meaning of the trailing glyph.
[www.amazon.com]
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Einstein's famous formula E=MC2 defines the relationship between energy, mass and light, also with direct implications for how the concept of time works. The dynamic defines how mass emerges from a wavelike state of energy, and requires that localized timeframe slows down for an object as its mass increases.
However, each character of Einistein's formula also relates both symbolically and intuitively to a specific concept. E is energy, M is mass, the equal sign = implies an equivalence, and C is the speed of light, which is indicated by the number 2 as squared.
Had Einstein been an ancient Egyptian priest and us modern academics approaching the symbols from a perspective of how the English and French languages work, we might take E=MC2 for a simple word, and neglect to grasp the significance of the component figures. Unless we were aware of cosmological science, we might not notice that the letters and numbers that comprise the formula actually define the underlying concept for us.
As a shorthand to all of this, an ancient Egyptian would also likely have picked an animal whose attributes appropriately convey the idea of a creature that emerges from water and moves ever more slowly as it grows larger. Working within the mindset of the ancient cosmology, my choice for that would be a walrus.
Within the mindset of the Egyptian hieroglyphic language, one spelling of the word 'relative' would be with a single walrus glyph. The word for walrus would be E=MC2 [Walrus glyph]. If we wondered what the walrus glyph represented, we would search for words that end in a walrus glyph and then interpret the glyphs that lead up to it - the glyphs that, in my understanding, define the meaning of the trailing glyph.
[www.amazon.com]
