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[someone_elses_one]

sorry forgot to properly quote the rest of ur message

[madindehead]

hi all. totally new to this whole thing. but loving it already. and well done for the puzzle i just think we all got to work together on this!

[madindehead]

One other thing...where on earth does that take us now? Knowing that it means the river Nile...

[DogsHead]

Re: Master of secrets

[Scott]

Actually i'm sticking with The Nile. But that's me. maybe it's cos i like salkunh. maybe it's cos it seems like the sort of thing a person could guess randomly and get right. or the other dozen reasons stated.

eh.

[Salkunh]

[gjindancer]

Salkunh - I would be interested to here your own opinion on the Alan Gardiner theory, without bias comments about whether he was any good or not.

I have no idea about egyptology; and you deserve HUGE kudos for your translation - but its unfortunate someone has come along and proffesses to know better, in such a way to swing a lot of us to their theory:

Its just a game, and in this field your WAY ahead of most of us - but you cant get miffed if someone else comes along who possibly may know a little more than you. After all we are all playing this togeather

Personally I think since this is a black card, "the river nile" sounds waay too easy to me, considering what we found in the wordsearch.

But what do I know??

[someone_elses_one]

ok, so, what now? Do we just wait?

[someone_elses_one]

The official title of 'Master of secrets' was given to the god Anubis

Alan Gardiner was present at the opening of the sarcophagus of Tutenkhamun. An inscription was found at the burial site on a shrine to Anubis which was translated to mean:

"It is I who hinder the sand from choking the secret chamber. I am the protection for the deceased and I will kill all those who cross this threshold into the sacred precincts of the Royal King who lives forever."

Maybe its just me but i think i've found something.

check it out for urself http://www.catchpenny.org/tut.html

[Seej]

[cassandra]

I too am leaning towards the Gardiner answer, not because of any convincing proof but because of the reference to the Tale of Sinuhe in Adrian Hon's "Reality Artificers" ARG essay (with help from Margaret Maitland, who no doubt counseled him on Egyptology), posted on his blog and linked to from Mind Candy. Excerpt:

[invfish]

[Leeravitz]

My theory on this is that hieroglyphs, remember, are not an alphabet - they are a mixture of logographic and syllabic signs (i.e. some stand for sounds and some stand for whole words).

Basically, like many an ancient script, there are only so many things you can say in hieroglyph, because of the context through which the language evolved...it's a bit like that old saw about the Inuit having 500 separate words for snow, or whatever...

Now, I'm not a hieroglyphic expert, but I do assume that it's easy in hieroglyph to come up with references to things like growing grain, watering fields, talking about gods, talking about kings and servants etc., because all these things were of great importance to Egyptian society...

But they'll still be plenty of ideas that are hard to encapsulate...In Hebrew (which is an ancient language I know a lot better than ancient Egyptian) there are innummerable ways of stating things about metaphysics, but no very easy way to write about the abstract emotions, whereas in Classical Greek, there are plenty such abstractions available...

Given that it's even harder in hieroglyph (because it's not alphabetic) to mainpulate the signs to spell out an equivalent to a word which did not originally exist in Ancient Egyptian conception (how would you write about a computer programme in hieroglyph, for example?? - when you have no ready way to actually refer to computers, or programming???), then you have to rely on the language materials that you have to hand...

So, it seems to me that the *whole thing* is a very elaborate pun. It *could* be that the answer here is something like the Nile, or a mythological figure like the god Osiris (who, in Egyptian terms, made the crops grow, was traditionally said to have been torn apart and scattered in the Nile - maybe his remains ended up in the Bosphorus??).

But it seems oddly more likely that this is a double - bluff. The joke is that Gardiner (if he, is, indeed, the answer) is being written about *as if* those qualities he possessed could have been spoken of by an ancient Egyptian (which is apt enough given his profession).

So, everything is working at dual levels: plenty of servants, including, I believe, the guy in the Sinuhe papyrus would traditionally refer to themselves as 'beloved of the king' - I assume it's a fairly easy hieroglyphic transcription to formulate because of this. But in the Gardiner context, it may well be a joke about a much more Victorian/Edwardian tradition - namely, his knighthood. And, again, yes, perhaps the 'Ford of the Bull' construction is an ancient one referring to the Bosphorus (sounds likely to me) - but the joke maybe is that's it 'Oxford' as well. And 'Master of Secrets' is both appropriately Egyptological, and a nod in the direction of Gardiner's research. And so on.

So, why keep reiterating clues to the 'Gardiner' identity?? Because maybe there are only so many clues easily constructed out of hieroglyphic signs.

My problem remains - not whether this sounds like a likely answer (I think it's too ingenious not to), but what relevance it could possibly have in the wider terms of the game.

[^J^]

Just another little point in favour of the Gardiner theory - the Nile wouldn't be reverred by a king, persay, because Egypt was ruled by a Pharoah. Gardiner was also knighted in 1948, which (in my mind, at least) fits better.

[Violet]