From the intro to "Make It Funky" ...

Bobby Byrd: What you gonna play now, JB?

James Brown: Bobby, I don't know. But whats'ever I play, it's got to be funky.

So ...

Me: What you gonna write about tonight, Mikey?

Myself: Mike, I don't know. But whats'ever I write, its got to be a) different, and b) something I feel strongly enough about to motivate me to want to write instead of running the next round of AirBoss carrier landings tests, or taking a nap, or watching Wings Of The Red Star.

Something like ... ... ...

... ... ... Ancient Egypt

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I've gotten fairly deep into Ancient Egypt, deep enough that on and off for the past two years I've been trying to learn to read hieroglyphics. I haven't succeeded yet but the effort certainly has been educational. For example, I now know enough about the culture to be able to compose a perfectly plausible tomb protective magic spell ...

"He who enters my tomb will be torn apart by babboons and then eaten by hippopotamuses. Crocodiles will feed on his entrails."

This may seem comical to you but in reality this would give pause to even the most greedy tomb robber. You see, all Ancient Egyptians, whether of royal blood or simple peasant commoners, could expect continued existence in the afterlife, but only if their bodies were intact. Pharoahs were buried in fantastically costly elaborate tombs, because they could afford it. Commoners might simply be buried in sand, not even wrapped in a shroud. But whatever the manner of burial, the body would usually be preseved somehow and the soul thereby protected. Thus to tell a person that they are going to have their body torn apart and eaten (by animals no less) is to condemn their ka (roughly their soul) to annihilation, a very harsh punishment indeed.

I can also compose a perfectly plausible magic spell to be recited to Osiris regarding whether the petitioner should be granted an afterlife ...

"I am a good person. I fed the poor and I gave clothing to the naked. I was kind to the crippled old man and I gave much beer and bread to his family. I gave money to the temple priests."

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I've been interested in things Egyptian for fifty years, but it's only in the past ten years that the interest has become intense. Now ...

Three years ago I re-established contact with a girlfriend of my pre- and early teens. Shortly after that discovered a mutual interest in Egyptology. In fact, it turned out that she had a grandfather who was Egyptian, with a Parisian grandmother who was an Egyptologist. Well-to-do, the grandparents split their time between Paris and Cairo.

(Aside: Not until three years ago did I learn that my girlfriend had been born in Switzerland, and that French was her first language. We were both products of dysfunctional families and we lived in the present, not the past, so we knew very little about each other's backgrounds. It was simply too painful for each of us to bring that stuff up, and anyway none of it mattered. We accepted each other for who we were, caring nothing about who we had been.)

So my girlfriend, the infamous wealthy RGB about whom I sometimes write because we came very close to becoming a permanent item, sent me the most wonderful postcard. The card has to do with Ancient Egypt, it was a prized heirloom of hers, yet she gave it to me as a token of what had existed between us so many years before.

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I had the card laminated to arrest the ravages of UV light. As I write this piece the card is mounted on the spine of a very wide notebook, where it has been for two years, so I can look at it several times a day. The front of the card is an excellent picture of the famous Tutankhamen death mask on display in the Cairo Museum. (I consider the mask to be the most beautiful art object in the world. I had the privilege of seeing it at the Fields Museum in Chicato thirty years ago when the traveling Cairo Museum exhibit wended its way there.) While I display the card with the artwork side out, it's really the back of the card that holds my interest -- because the card, purchased from the Cairo museum, was sent by RGB's grandmother to RGB's mother in NYC in the spring of 1955. The handwritten inscription says, simply and in French (which I speak too) ...

... Cairo, the 19th of March, 1955.

RGB had asked her mother for the card because she loved the picture on the front, and she kept it through all these years, only to give it to me. When she did she wrote several things on it that are of interest only to me, the most important thing being

"Michael, this card spans our time ..."

And it does. I had known RGB for only about a year when the card was written. (We were ten when we met.) Now I am its custodian, the card sent to me by the RGB I had not laid eyes on since 1957, when we were thirteen and had to go our separate ways as we left the boarding school where we had spent 3.5 years together. Now we were in contact again after a radio silence of almost 50 years.

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I met my wife after boarding school, when we were 13, and we've been going steady :) since we were 16. As my feelings for her grew, the enormous hole in my heart that the separation from RGB had caused began to heal. But the hole never fully closed. As I said to RGB three years ago, I had thought of her at least weekly over all these years. As I said to my wife, under only slightly different circumstances I would now be married to RGB instead of to her.

You see, my wife knew about RGB. She has always known that RGB existed, but she didn't know the depth of my feelings for RGB because I rarely mentioned her. But when RGB and I began to correspond after all these years she (RGB) invited my wife and I to visit her at her east coast home. (RGB has homes on both coasts. She winters on the seashore near a city in Southern California and she summers on the mid-Atlantic seashore.) I decided to risk explaining to my wife what the real situation had been with RGB so she would be able to understand our conversations, and so she would not feel left out somehow.

We spent a wonderful week with RGB, the two women getting along really well, which came as a pleasant surprise because for many women this visit would have been a potential marriage-breaker. When we got there I immediately spotted a piece of Egyptian tourist kitsch, a rectangular beige rug with embroidered hieroglyphic writing. As usual with such things, the arrangement of the words is just as important as the content of the words. In fact, just as there are many different words in English that one can use to express an idea, so were there many different words in Ancient Egyptian that could be strung together in different ways to achieve the same meaning.

So a scribe, or a tomb painter, had a lot of latitude in the specifics of the texts he created, and the best of them created visual poetry at the same time that they were creating sequences words to be spoken aloud. Anyway, this rug seemed to be a good example. The modern artist had arranged the symbols attractively and in a way that was entirely plausible. RGB and I agreed that the rug had to be saying SOMEthing, expecially because it too came from her grandparents.

I then assigned myself the mission of deciphering the writing on the rug. After six months of casual Internet-based study I hadn't made any headway. I then sent a jpeg of the rug to a couple of scholars, including the famous Zahi Hawass, Director of Egyptian Antiquities, but I never heard back from either of them.

Okay, it was time to take by the horns the bull, an animal almost as sacred to the Ancient Egyptians as the cat. I spent a couple of hundred dollars on a number of books about learning to read hieroglypics, and I spent a good part of the summer of 2007 sitting out by our condo pool trying to make sense of what I was seeing on the rug.

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It finally dawned on me that the reason I couldn't read the rug was because it was gibberish. For example and oversimplifying, prominent at the top of the rug is an oval cartouche containing the name of, presumably, a pharoah. (The oval cartouche symbol means simply "name" so in principle it can be that of a noble or high commoner, but that would be unlikely.) I searched for the name very carefully in every Egyptology book that I own. It is not the name of any pharoah known to Egyptologists today. Not only could I not find the name listed anyplace, I couldn't identify a single word in any of the inscriptions. Not one.

As single characters the symbols have meaning. For example, a figure of a bent-over person hobbling along with a cane with a curved handle means "old person", or sometimes "wisdom". There are several dozen different characters that make up the rug artwork, and they are all legitimate root words with known meanings ...

But I couldn't identify any two-symbol words, or any three-symbol words, and I stopped trying there. You see, one of the books I own is a dictionary of written Ancient Egyptian, organized exactly like Modern Chess Openings, as in ... "Here's an initial symbol. Here are all the second symbols that could follow the first one if we are talking about a two-symbol word, and here are the meanings of all those two-symbol words. And if you consider three-symbol words, here are all the possibilities." ... And so on. I was not able to link any part of the text to any part of the dictionary, or to anything in any of the other books.