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Ancient Egypt Magazine

Volume Four  Issue One -- July/August 2003

Netfishing by Hapy  

With the summer holidays in full swing, those who aren’t attending Egyptology summer schools (and have children to entertain) may be looking for something wholesome and entertaining to fill up the odd hour with minimal parental input. I see I have your attention.

Check out the BBC History web site at www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/egyptians Specifically for children on this site (although adults may be tempted too) there are two games which are challenging but not fiendish and don’t take too long to complete. The first asks you to take the role of apprentice embalmer in the workshop of Kha, a mysterious Anubis-headed master undertaker.

Step by step you are taken through the stages of preparing the body for burial, making sure that every requirement is fulfilled. These include eviscerating the corpse, drying it out, putting the internal organs into vessels, treating it with oils, putting some of the appropriate amulets in place and so on. There’s a neat little introduction to hieroglyphs involved too. The game tests the memory as well.

Particularly appealing is the embalmer’s cat, Miuty, who is there to offer assistance – but not the answers – up to a point. Make too many mistakes and your budding career as an undertaker is at an end, after a thorough bawling- out by the boss. But you can always start all over again and learn the right techniques along the way.

The second game seems to be aimed at a slightly older age group (although it’s not clear what the age definitions are) and is more complex. The task here is to build a pyramid for the king, taking into account time, pyramid alignment, the number of workers to use and how to feed them. It includes an optional section where you sail a boatload of stone from Aswan which is probably the most challenging bit, so don’t omit it. The graphics capture well the fickle motions of the boat in current and wind.

It’s even more challenging if you’ve chosen a wrong option regarding material or inclination of the sides of the pyramid, as you don’t find out until it’s too late – and get the sack. (Perhaps it was worse in ancient Egypt.) But you can always start over again – and again. How those hours will pass while the children occupy themselves (and you can put your feet up).Then explore the real thing, with a graphic of the component parts of the Great Pyramid with accompanying photographs. There’s a lot more to the BBC web site than that of course. There are articles by specialists on aspects of Egypt and the most famous rulers and a tour through some of the items from Tutankhamun’s tomb. There’s also a chat room for various topics, not just Egyptological, and the Egyptian section is just one of a number on the site which covers all periods of history.

When finally tired of sailing boats, building pyramids and eviscerating mummies (don’t try this at home, as they say) the surfer can move on to www.gatewaytoancientegypt.co.uk, a mammoth personal site packed with information laid out in an attractive and organised way. It would be nit-picky to complain about the unnecessary apostrophes in what is a good resource.

The site covers periods of Egyptian history, religion and a number of other topics. There are photographs of some of the best-known sites too, creating the feel of a travel diary. One strength of the site is that each of the images for each entry – each picture of a deity, for instance - is credited and usually hyperlinked, and so it’s possible to move on to another site while traversing this one. Much better than providing just a list of links.

Finally – and Egyptology purists please stop reading here – visit Neferchichi.com when you’re finally at your wits’ end and getting towards the hysterical stage, the Egyptian ‘Mad Libs’ section in particular. What you are invited to do, is to fill in a form with various nouns, adjectives, place and personal names to re-write a well-known story.

Here are some examples that we came up with: ‘Hieroglyphic writing first began around 5,000 months ago. Egyptians wrote in hieroglyphs up to about 400 AD, after that they wrote in a growling style called demotic. Eventually everyone forgot how to stumble with hieroglyphs. But now we are able to decipher hieroglyphs thanks to a shining chunk of rock and a dull business consultant.’ And: ‘The Egyptian queen Josephine was totally Greek but is believed to have been able to read, write and speak Egyptian. She was married to her loud brother Rory and they ruled Egypt together, although they hated each other. He tried to have her killed but Josephine was tipped off and she fled to the Isle of Mull.’ To date, 1,402,420 people have visited the Neferchichi site. I’m not surprised.

HAPY

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