Tuesday, March 15, 2005

Time Flies

Here’s my new watch - from the Museum of Modern Art. What a beauty!
Reading clockwise, the hieroglyphs on this watch translate to "Time Flies."
And some more info: The Egyptians used the hieroglyphic script for nearly 3500 years, from about 3100 b.c. until the end of the third century a.d. Some hieroglyphs were simplified images or pictures, called ideograms, which were symbols for the objects they looked like. For example, a wavy line meant "water." The Egyptians also used hieroglyphs phonetically, stringing together the sound of the symbols without their original meaning. An equivalent in English would be to spell "belief" with pictures of a bee and a leaf. It is possible to construct riddles using hieroglyphs in this manner. Because English and ancient Egyptian are not from the same language family, some sounds used by the Egyptians do not exist in our alphabet, and some of our sounds do not exist in Egyptian.
The watch is stainless steel with a copper dial, and is water resistant to 100 feet (30m).

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