Egyptian - Decypher or tell me it's gibberish

[Timothy]

Hey guys,

I bought this for one of my walls. I went to 3 different art stores and looked through about 1500 different prints of all genres and this was the one which caught my eye so I took it home.

My question is: Can anyone please decipher it for me? And is it a case of 'a bad tattoo', where the translation is completely off, or gibberish? I'm hoping that it means something, but skeptical as always!

Thanks people! Photos below:

Edit: Photo orientations are off from iphone: Photo 1: 0º. Photo 2,3,4,5: Rotate right 90º.

Edited April 13, 2014 by Timonthy

[Sir Wearer of Hats]

It looks like wing-dings, but light the Kmt Sesh signal and see what he says

[Timothy]

It looks like wing-dings, but light the Kmt Sesh signal and see what he says

Have requested his assistance already!

[kmt_sesh]

Hello, Timonthy. Yes, I received your PM, and I apologize for the very late reply. My time is very tight these days.

Unfortunately I don't think I can be of much assistance, either. I gave it the old college try but am not making much sense of the inscriptions. Well, really any sense. They may be in a very cursive form of hieroglyphs whose orthography largely eludes me, or, equally possible, they're written in hieratic. This was a cursive form of every-day writing widely used until around 650 BCE, and was afterward still used largely for religious purposes (alongside hieroglyphs).

I have no formal training in hieratic and have never been good at deciphering it. While I can recognize the occasional character—hieratic probably developed as a very cursive form of hieroglyphs—that doesn't mean I can translate it.

So what I'm seeing is a board with blue (or black) bands on the sides and a blue dot-shape in the center. I take it the writing is in the unpainted portions of the wood. Do you have any idea what this board was originally attached to? It resembles the foot board of a coffin but the design suggests not. It's entirely possible the board started as something else (or part of something else) and was reused at a later time as a writing surface. Such reuse of raw materials was common.

About all I can tell with some degree of confidence is that most of the writing is vertically arranged, although not all. If the inscriptions are authentic, you would probably need the assistance of a real linguist. Books on hieratic are not commonplace and I don't know the degree to which you could train yourself.

I'm sorry I can't be more helpful. Very interesting piece, though.

[Timothy]

Hello, Timonthy. Yes, I received your PM, and I apologize for the very late reply. My time is very tight these days.

Thanks for the reply, I was happy waiting patiently in the corner and do appreciate the response!

Really I'm glad that you didn't immediately conclude 'windings', and now I have more questions than answers.

I don't have any idea of the origin, I guess it's a commercially available print, I can't find anything similar Googling descriptions of it. So I might go back to where I bought it and try to find out where it came from.

The hieratic system is very interesting but I don't see training myself as an option as I don't have the capacity right now. I might have to search for a linguist!

I will update if I discover anything of substance, hopefully it's not meaningless!