10/9/2008
6
The Rubbing
Paul
laughed. For thousands of years, men had tried to read the Egyptian
writing as pictures. They met with failure, because the hieroglyphics
were not picture-writing. They were words like the writing
of the Orientals. It took the Rosetta Stone and many years
of study to break the code. Today, here, Paul had found hieroglyphics
that were true pictograms.
He
stood in front of the rubbing, now able to understand, reading
it intently. The pictures were obvious in their meaning. The
drawing was a chart of the entire underground complex. The
images around the periphery of the stone matched those on the
inner portion of the underground corridors. He made out the
plug in representation at the bottom of the rubbing—a miniature
carving inside a miniature diagram. The line of deities above
the plug matched the panoply below in the initial corridor. These,
he noticed for the first time, were depicted entirely in two
dimensions. The representations were flat, mimicking the fact
they were only the illustrations of the first corridor.