Academics’ humor

[Allen ★]

Rick-roll Egyptologist style. 
 

[12string]

OK, it was funny until the 6th line, that was just forced and gratuitous 

[MickinMD ★]

The respresents-s blanket roll, , in the second line is a misspelling - there's no "s" in King Tut!

I spent months, when I had cafeteria duty as a teacher, etc. studying a "Teach Yourself Hieroglyphics" book before I spent a week in Egypt in the summer of 1999. I printed a cheat sheet to take with me and don't remember much now, but I really was able to read some of the inscriptions on the walls, etc. In one case, a Priest of Amun Ra sent me a message over 3000 years through time.  I saw, repeated on a column in the Temple of Luxor, "Given life forever" in hieroglyphics. As I followed the sentence higher and higher my eyes were suddenly struck by the Sun - I had been to led right to the position where it happened due to the position of the words on the column. The Priest was cleverly telling me through three millenia that the sun god, Amun Ra, gives life forever.

Egyptian hieroglyphics are combination of word symbols and phonetics, and that blanket roll played a key "role" in Jean-François Champollion cracking the code and translating heiroglyphics in the early 1800's.  Look at the part below of a pharaoh's cartouche: reading right-to-left (Egyptians went either way - the backwards blanket rolls indicate right-to-left), There's a seated figure of the god Ra, holding the ankh, symbol of life (remember: he gives life forever).  the symbol next to Ra is known to be used in Egypt's Coptic Christian Church as a symbol of birth.  "Birth" in Coptic, Egypt's ancient language still used in their church, is "mis."  Next to the birth symbol are two blanket rolls, whose names in Coptic begin with "s" so he figured they signified two s's with an unknown vowel in the middle - he correctly guessed the Egyptians, like many ancient Middle Eastern cultures including the Israelites, left vowels out when writing.

Champollion put the sounds together and got Ra + mis + s + s and realized it spelled Ramises or Rameses - a name in the Bible. He's also the pharaoh played by Yul Brynner in The 10 Commandments.  From there, knowing the hieroglyphics are part phonetic, he translated the whole thing - and that was before the Rosetta Stone filled in some missing pieces.

[jsharr ★]

Why is @Kzoo in there so much?  School song?

[jsharr ★]

3 hours ago, 12string said:

OK, it was funny until the 6th line, that was just forced and gratuitous 

Nominated 

[maddmaxx ★]

It was all geek to me.