Egyptian Symbols Look Like Emojis! - Easy Egyptian

Those funny Pharaohs!
The Israeli Museum in Jerusalem has an exhibition making Egyptian symbols more accessible by likerning them to emojis.

This is the Egyptian symbol for life.

A fascinating article on Ancient Egyptian writing says that you could write in any direction, and faces were turned to show the direction of the writing. If the faces faced left you started reading from the left.

The word hieroglyph comes from the Greek words ἱερός (hierós 'sacred') and γλύφειν (glúphein 'to carve' or 'to write'), and it was first used to mean Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Greeks who came to Egypt saw the picture letters, which were often found carved on house walls, tombs and monuments.

Simple wiki makes it clearer and relevant to today's writing.

Ancient Egypt

Ancient Egyptians used pictures to make a phonetic alphabet, so that each sound could be written with a picture-word, a phonogram or pictograph. For example, a zig-zag for water

came to mean the letter "n", because the Egyptian word for water started with n. This same picture became our letter 'M' in the Latin alphabet, because the Semitic word for water started with m, and Semitic workers changed the symbols to fit sounds in their own language.

 In the same way, our Latin letter 'N' came from the hieroglyph for snake

Mark, Joshua J. "Ancient Egyptian Writing." Ancient History Encyclopedia. Ancient History Encyclopedia, 16 Nov 2016. Web. 05 Feb 2020.

Useful Websites
https://www.straitstimes.com/lifestyle/arts/israeli-museum-explains-the-emojis-of-ancient-egypt-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_Museum

About the Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker. Please share links to your favourite posts.

How to send a rhyming greeting or wish

Problem
No time to send a card for a birthday or even a greeting or wish you were here? Here are some options:

Answers
You have choice of: foreign card (photographed and emailed),
1 Facebook greeting - with added emoji (miniature funny face symbol)
2 Send a picture of the recipient on previous birthday or you are them with the greeting
3 Write a rhyme. and send a picture for someone special if you have time

How To  Improve A Rhyme
It's easy to improve a rhyme
All you need is a little time.

I just made that up. To find a thyme, pick a key word to end your opening and closing sentences.
From your own head, pick out some rhyming words, going though the alphabet.
You can do this with one word or two, eg
love: a/b above , d dove
love you
above you

Check rhyming dictionary and thesaurus for more.

Try changing rhyming couplets to alternating lines ie
instead of end rhymes aa bb
abab

Count syllables. The easiest is to make all lines end with the same number of syllables
eg 8 or 10.
Another popular scheme is second and alternating lines shorter eg 9797.

If your lines are different lengths, it is often easier to lengthen the shorter ones than to cut the longer ones.

Author
Angela Lansbury
zon See my books on writing poetry on Lulu.com and Amazon

Where To Find Hearts For Valentine's Day And Personalise Confectionery Rock

America is the home of sweetheart, heart-shaped candies. (Americans say candy. The British say sweets.)

Over in Europe, Lviv in Ukraine, produces candies with red hearts in the middle, or the word Lviv. They look like chopped up bits of candy cane, so popular in the USA, for Christmas time.

I picked them up at the Lviv stand at the World Travel Market in London, last November 2017. At the time I had the name of the place they came from but a quick look on the internet reveals many other makes of chocolates in Lviv including a seven storey shcoolate shop. (Americans write story, because Webster simplified spelling for the benefit of immigrants, but in Britain the traditional spelling story refers to a plot or tale, whilst storey with an e means levels of a building.)

Brighton Rock
They remind me of Brighton rock, a large cylinder with the word Brighton running through it. which we used to suck as children to reveal the words. This was before extended eating of candies was known to be bad for teeth and my mother banned them.

If you look up Brighton Rock in Google or Wikipedia you will get results for the film (movie in the USA) called Brighton Rock, based on the title of the book by Graham Green who lived in Brighton. I think the title of the film was an ironic pun, named after the local sweet but suggesting that the characters were hard people, or sweet people.

Stocks of Rock
Sticks of rock are made at many British seasides and tourist centres, often flavoured with peppermint. I accidentally typed stocks of rock when I meant to type sticks of rock, but I like the alliteration and assonance of stocks of Rock.

Personalised Sweeties For Sweethearts
If you want a surprise, but not necessarily hearts, or to go with a card with hearts on it, you can give or display novelty sweets such as star rock which has a swirling pattern and comes from Scotland.

If you want a name, your sweetheart's name, a company name, you can get personalised rock made from a company in London, England.

Chocolates
An alternative is chocolates in heart-shaped boxes from supermarkets, especially in the UK.

Or heart shaped muffins.  You can buy heart shaped containers for mugffins and pancakes.

You can also buy red and white heart-shape coffee cups from department stores, usually displayed in the crockery department. A week after Valentine's Day one year I bought a pair at a reduced price ready for the rollowing year.

Cheap Choices - Bread and Egg
You could have a heart-shape egg on square or heart-shape toast, or a heart-shape toasted sandwich with egg and tomato for red colour.

Heart Shape Apple
The cheapest choice is to cut a single heart shape out of a red apple. You could have the apple with the heart cut out and the heart shape piece on the side. To stop cut apple going brown, cut immediately before eating, and/ or put lemon juice on the cut part or replace the cut piece and remove it at the last moment.

(Practise for a week until you can cut it and dispaly it neatly on a suitably contasting plate.) Online photos show an apple cut with numerous hearts.

If your spouse or sweetheart is away, you have time to look for an animated email or emoji to send with a message or a Robbie Burns poem or Shakespeare sonnet - or write your own.

https://www.therockpeople.co.uk/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweethearts_(candy)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_rock
vistibritain.org
https://www.visitbrighton.com
https://wikitravel.org/en/Lviv

Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.