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Tag Archives: hieroglyphic

The Sexual Palimpsest of Brown University’s “Rock”

Brown University’s Rockefeller Library is reminiscent of UChicago’s Regenstein. They’re both rather ugly from the outside, they both have two basements, they both have nicknames (the “Rock” and “Reg”, respectively), and they’re both filled with graffiti mostly written in literate1 English. In just three hours combing through the study areas in the Rock stacks, I [...]

Return of the hieroglyphs: M2 + Egypt = Awesome

The students responsible for the now world-famous* hieroglyphic sex graffiti have returned to express their love for Egypt. I ran this one by my expert Egyptologist, and in addition to translating it they had some fascinating remarks about the characters they chose to render ‘Egypt’: Egypt here is written with the “foreign land” determinative (hill-shapes) [...]

Hieroglyphic sex graffiti

Rarely does a single piece of graffiti merit its own blog post. This morning I found one such piece of graffiti on the 4th floor, next to the ad for (subsequently reverted) Wikipedia vandalism, near the Facebook thumbs up. The second row of hieroglyphs in the image to the right (click to see larger) were [...]