(no subject)

It's being a good weekend. The Chester Beatty Library rocks, very very much. As befits a library museum, they have lots and lots of books, and information about how they were made, and so on, and then an exhibition about religions - Buddhism in its various sorts, Jainism, Hinduism, Christianity and Islam. Books, statues and other paraphernalia. We'll be going back there.

My AO Character, Shevon, is now out of the training grounds and into Borealis city. Level 2, to be found in Borealis Backyard 1 until such time as I have more gear and so on. He's a little lithe black guy, don't let his size fool you. mr_wombat, you gonna be on this evening?

Last night's Age of Legends game went very well. Nothing earth-shaking, but it was good, and satisfying, and had lots of neat small details, a lot of them stemming from research and reading I've done recently.

Lecture on Text and Philology of Ancient Eygpt

There was a guest lecturer in TCD on Friday in inannajones' department. He was an Eygptologist, Stephen Quirke. The lecture was about text and philology of Ancient Eygpt; I'm not much into Eygptian stuff, but this grabbed me. I'm typing up here the notes I took - some of which are things he said, others are stuff that I thought of while scribbling and listening.

"Text does not exist in the ancient world; there are too many assumptions in the context."

There is a clear distinction in Ancient Eygpt between inscription and manuscript.

Hierolglyphs to Art is not a clear distinction; figures are often depicted "holding" hieroglyphs like sceptres.

First purpose of writing - to make things (names) last, posssibly forever; this has worked for the many Eygptians we know only by name.

There is no pilgrimage in Ancient Eygpt. (I don't know if this is controversial, or what, but everyone in the room sat up and wrote it down, and Quirke said it very definitely)

Questions Quirke has set aside for further work:
"What is the impact of the writing system on circulation?"
"What is written?"
"What is the effect of circulation?"

Stable printed text only exists after 1800s CE, copyright and authorial control likewise.

Reproduction before introduced variation; didn't preserve. (Journalistic variation, variation on songs)

19th century created images of mass illiteracy, actually more gradual, like computer use today.

Stopping notes here; I'll edit the rest in later. Off to Argos!

(no subject)

AO takes a long, long time to patch, even on DSL. I would truly hate to see what it's like on dialup.