Jerry Stratton

In the New Kingdom, from the reign of Thutmes III, the forms

In the New Kingdom, from the reign of Thutmes III, the forms of hieratic signs were systematically revised. This revision was marked by a return toward the hieroglyphs which underlay hieratic signs. The handwriting also appears swifter and more floridly calligraphic, although ‘calligraphy’ does not seem to have existed as an art form distinct from fine handwriting.

It is difficult to assess how much has been lost. The majority of administrative papyri will have been kept in the exposed environment of towns in the Nile valley and have decayed… There was presumably a vast mass of administrative paperwork, from which only a few examples have survived.

Spend the day writing with your fingers
and read in the night!
Be close to the roll and the palette—
they are sweeter than pomegranate wine.
Writing, for him who knows it,
is more excellent than any office.
It is sweeter than provisions and beer,
than clothing, than ointment.
It is more precious than a heritage in Egypt,
than a chapel in the West.

New techniques are being developed to peel the layers of papyrus away from the inside of a mask, without damaging the painted outer surface, but it is still a difficult task.

These problems were present in antiquity, as is shown by… the theological inscription on the ‘Shabaka Stone’. This claims… that

this writing was copied out anew by his Majesty in the Temple of his father Ptah-south-of-his-wall, for his Majesty had found it to be a work of the ancestors which was worm eaten and could not be understood from beginning to end.

King Shabaka copied it onto a basalt slab ‘so that it became better than it had been before’. Ironically, the slab was reused as a grindstone and is itself now illegible in many places.

“What’s so terrible about innovation?”
Terry shook his head. “You know’s well I do. They figure they got everything the way they want it, and trying to change it gets people disturbed or th’own out of their jobs. I did hear tell some of the engineers got plans for a machine that’ll sure enough fly, but the authorities won’t let ’em build it. Say hit’ll be time enough in maybe a hundred years, when the effects of them automobiles all git absorbed.”

He turned and took a double armful of dresses off the hooks, disposing them to make as neat a bed as possible. Removing his own coat gave both freedom and a pillow. He stuffed the carnelian cube into the latter and lay down, obsessed with a sense of pattern for which there was no justification—a sense that there was somewhere a central threat running through this series of dream-experiences, the clue of which he could not find.

In time, careful and controlled observation, experiment, and measurement became the accepted approach to

In time, careful and controlled observation, experiment, and measurement became the accepted approach to scientific knowledge.

Maudslay’s standards of accuracy in the cutting of metal were revolutionary. He produced a brass screw seven feet long with an error of only one-sixteenth of an inch over its full length, and designed a micrometer capable of measuring deviations of one ten-thousandth of an inch. Almost single-handedly, he turned metalwork from a craft into an industrial science.

In 1879, the year after Hughes had demonstrated his microphones to the Royal Society, he unwittingly discovered radio waves. He noticed that his microphones responded whenever the current flowing in a nearby coil was interrupted, even though there was no electrical connection between them. He demonstrated the phenomenon for visiting scientists by walking up and down Great Portland Street in London with a telephone receiver in his hand and showing that he could hear sounds as distant from the source as 500 yards.