unforum

[step]

I found this site which has a nice list of hieroglyphs listed by Gardiner code.

Used in conjuction with the site mentioned above, and others, it should make things a lot easier for us non-egyptologists

[Salkunh]

Never fear I is here...

Transliteration:

iw=i m SAs Hr pA hr tA n lndn niwt
iw=s wA n=i Hr twt nt mrwt
aHa wr n it Knbt n dHr xnt-S
ptr pA xnw nn

I travel on the under land (subway) of London town
far to him from the statue of love
The great palace of the sovereign court of hide (or leather) garden
Who/what is this the seating place

The transliteration is using semi-standard computer transliteration. When I find my transliteration font I'll post it properly.

[Seej]

The statue of love is probably Eros in Picadilly Circus

The hide garden probably means Hyde Park

[Neanderthal]

Nice! Thanks for that Salkunh.

[Salkunh]

at the end of the mrwt there may be an =i as there is a pharaoh determinative meaning its either "my love" or its showing that a god is speaking about a statue of love which would fit in with eros who was a god of love was he not?

[Bongadoo]

Is this a question? 'What is this [the] seating place?' If so, what relevance does it have? Maybe we can look forward to an event there at some point.

[Salkunh]

yes it is a question, thats what the prt means

[Leeravitz]

I can't argue with the Eros definition personally - yes, he is traditionally called a 'god of love' and, mythologically, has very important connections with other Graeco - Roman love deities - Eros means 'desire' in Greek, and many Classical traditions hold him to have been the son of Ares (god of War) and Aphrodite (goddess of beauty and love). In a sense, his original Greek visualisation appears to have been as a kind of primal force of blunt desire, but later the Romans revisited the traditions and erred more towards seeing him as the god of love and longing. To the Romans, Eros = Cupid, which is how we primarily reference the god today !! The blindfolding of the god (which appears on the Picadilly Circus statue, if I'm not much mistaken) is a representation of the old saw that 'love is blind'.

Equally, the Hyde Park designation seems pretty unequivocal, and I can only assume that the reference to the 'great palace of the sovereign court' is Buckingham Palace, which abuts onto one of the edges of Hyde Park.

Again, the Mind Candy team have been pretty clever with the hieroglyphs here, utilising a fairly limited (because archaic) language to hint at contemporary references - so, I like the fact that references to the underworld = the Tube system and that the 'great palace' is not a reference to the Pharoah, but to a real 'great palace'.

Interestingly, it must be said that I think it unlikely in the extreme that anyone could work out the hieroglyph puzzle while just on the way to work (unless they happen to work in the ancient lanaguages department at SOAS or something), so this might imply that it *is* intended to be a direct clue for those of us who have time to go away and decipher it, namely, the ARGing community. If so, then we are left with a couple of questions:

1. What is the actual answer to the riddle (and is 'seating place' actually a slightly obfuscating translation?)?

2. What's the significance of moving from Picadilly Circus to Hyde Park etc?

Could be that this all a 'red herring' yet again, but I guess we can't know for sure that there won't be something to be found in Hyde Park or the equivalent...

[tanner]

[Leeravitz]

Further to my last post:

The interesting question here is whether or not these puzzles are intended to be relevant to our gaming. Sure, we've all had a day and a hlf fun's solving the puzzles available, because, hey, that's what we're interested in doing, but that's not the same thing as saying that the puzzles are intended for *our* consumption.

As far as I understand it, what we've discovered is that:

1. Mind Candy were attempting to enter a competition (?), gain some more potential investment money (?) or something.

2. They have designed their subway website, and demonstration puzzles, in order that these can be presented ,OOG, to whoever is on the judging panel for this competition, and the judges can then decide if they think this an enterprise worthy of sponsorship.

3. Whether the Subway puzzle was meant to be discovered by us is an open question - we stumbled upon it through a search engine, not because there were any in - game hints to lead us to it.

4. The idea that most of the puzzles on subway site are prototypes (by which I mean, specifically, demonstrations of the kind of thing that *might* appear as Tube advertisements, in the event that Mind Candy score well in this competition) may be borne out, for us at least, through knowledge that the 'loops' puzzle is identical to the one that we saw ear - marked as the 'strange loops' card. Let us recall that this 'card' was, in fact, no such thing - it was a basic design scrawled on a piece of paper. So, basically, OOG, a tactic has altered (unless we mistakenly assumed the design to be intended for the cards in the first place). The subway competition has come up, and those guys at MC have decided to substitute this puzzle as a Tube based one, rather than make a card from it. Either that, or it's a literal duplication, which would, again, imply that the tube puzzles are not significant 'in themselves'.

5. What is the purpose of the Tube puzzles? It would seem to be that they are (putatively) intended to drum up further interest in the game world, and the way Perplex City works - again, one gets the feeling that they are *not* designed primarily to give further clues to those already deeply committed to Cube finding endeavours, but, rather, to attract new customers likely to be intrigued by the puzzles. In that sense, there is no obvious reason why the puzzles should have any intrinsic 'significance' beyond the simple fact that they represent puzzles of the type which are liable to dominate the game proper (eventually...*sigh*).

6. The only reason I wonder a little about the heiroglyphs is that this is not a puzzle that I think could reasonably be solved during a short tube journey - it's too hard to make the hieroglyphs out easily, and, as we frequently acknowledge, you need to be quite an expert on this particular langauge system before you start getting to grips properly with it. In other words, the heiroglyphs really do seem to have the quality of a true 'hidden message'. I can't imagine they are there to be an integral part of the presentation, inasmuch as the competition judges probably couldn't translate them at a glance, whereas they can easily see what the more basic puzzles are intended to be like, and perhaps even have a crack at them.

So that raises this question: have the hieroglyphs simply been introduced as a nod in the direction of Mind Candy's cleverness - a demonstration that they can encode puzzles even at levels you don't expect them to - or are they intended to be specifically the message contained in this set - up for the ARG community? If the latter is the case, then maybe this genuinely is a clue...and something needs to be found in London...

[Riiick]

If we assume the two locations are Picadilly and Hyde Park and the Tube is relevant somehow, then it could be referring to Piccadilly Circus and Hyde Park Corner tube station. These are both on the Piccadilly line, and the station in between is Green park. Does this mean there is something at Green Park Tube station?

This map doesn't give much of a clue, unless the "seating place" is referring to the WC next to the station on the map!

[BrianEnigma]

[Centipede]

[Leeravitz]

Interesting that Green Park should come up again, given that it was already mentioned as a potential arena in which something might 'happen'. This suggests three possibilities to my mind:

1. It's a coincidence - references to Green Park were (allegedly) found in the initial subway ads discovered, later excised. The evidence may be considered doubtful. The idea that the answer to the latest puzzle is 'Green Park' is questionable, too.

2. There genuinely *is* a trail that's meant to point towards Green Park tube station.

3. Sneakiest option of the lot - MC weren't intending to do anything relative to Green Park, but then they cottoned on to the fact that we were discussing the possibility of a clue being hidden there. So, playing Devil's advocate, they've now decided to ensure that a clue *is* hidden there in reaction to this!

It seems to me like the most worthwhile thing that could be done is to have something placed on a poster, which nobody would be able to tamper with, and which passer - bys would just look at in bemusement, whilst those 'in the know' would be able to pick up on. Admitedly, I can't imagine it's cheap and easy to take out advertising (even for a limited time) at Tube stations. I would agree that leaving a message in the chocolate dispenser (or whatever) might be a bit risky. But, hey, if they're determined to do it, I figure MC *will* do it. The real question is: does any of this mean anything?

Of course, if we're looking at the riddle directly, then the answer should be in regard to 'what is the seating place?', and that's not exactly obvious. It *could* be another station (with some kind of pun intended?); it could be a very elliptical way of asking what line are the stations on (with 'the seating place' standing in for the 'place you sit down in order to reach these places' i.e. the tube); it could even be a slightly approximate translation - could it actually be something more logical like 'what is the stopping place?'.

Do the hieroglyphs for 'seating place' have any specific meaning in Egyptian i.e. are they a traditional synonym for something, were they used to literally describe, say, an area within a house, ship etc. or is this an example of a neolgism crafted by the people at Mind Candy that wouldn't actually have been used by the Egyptians themselves? I'd like to have more information on that.

[Muffin]