Thank you, Minimalist! I appreciate it!
You all have inspired me, too.
Hospital, you say... Huh!... Why then,... I suppose the "dress for success" is applicable... in more ways than one...
If you all don't mind, I'd like to hang out in this thread for a little while - it's a fun subject and rather rich
... mmmhhh, fashion, jewelry...
Something curious happened to me, and I'd like to share the thought process and insight with you all. It is remarkable, how much knowledge one acquires and then forgets. You don't use it, you lose it! I have to admit that I was shooting from the hip in my posts, drawing upon the knowledge one picks up in the course of time... I did not consult reference material. And, I promptly fell prey to the workings of my own mind.
The discussion amongst you was about the language on the mosaic and then Minimalist wrote "And the writing does look Etruscan if you compare it to this" and he posted the picture with the script.
To compare to - means emphasizing similarities (as opposed to "compare with", which draws attention to the difference - which is what my brain registered, since I knew the two were not the same...). I knew the letters on the mosaic were Greek. Mumbling "this isn't Greek!" I stared so hard at the little picture with the script, that the letters started to dance in front of my eyes. At that point, I reached for the bottle with the clear liquid... *sniff*... yep, still water... and I didn't pay any attention to the pesky thoughts that kept nudging into my frontal lobe... C.W. Ceram... ancient scripts... ETRUSCAN...
Well, a little later, light hit marble head... for one, Minimalist never said that the script on the little picture was Greek... he compared the letters on the mosaic to the Etruscan script in the little picture - not the other way round...
Gods, Graves & Scholars by C.W. Ceram was the first book on archaeology I read as a child; and one of several lasting impression I got from it was a word in connection with ancient scripts, which I found fascinating: "bustrophedon" - wie der Ochse beim Pfluegen wendet - the way an ox-plow turns... In the beginning, Etruscan was written from right to left...
A quick search on "ancient scripts" on the internet brought it all back...
Note to self: it's helpful to get all the parameters right, and reading clearly has its advantages...
Also, remembering that one is more comfortable and at home with modern languages, one should so their homework when it comes to ancient scripts
It's hard enough to try and make sense of the languages we encounter today - live and in color. The opportunitities to get it wrong today are infinite... How much worse this all is when we try to understand languages that have been "dead" for a few centuries or millenia...
When I say "yep, still water" - what does it really mean? Water contained in a non-porous vessel is
without sound or
silent. If the vessel is not picked up or shaken, it is also
not moving or
stationary. The description of "
tranquil" or "
calm" is also applicable. If I took a video of the bottle containing a clear liquid I identify as water, and used a snap-shot, i.e. a single photograph, I'd also get a
still still. If I move from the adjectives describing the word "still" to the adverbs, I can confirm that
at or up to the time indicated, the vessel contained an odorless clear liquid I identified as water (earlier, when I took a swig it was water, and since I didn't leave the vessel unattended and thereby excluding the possibility of someone swapping the contents of the bottle with something more potent without my knowledge, the content should be water), so the synonyms "
even" (ha! the surface of water could be described as even, if the table is perfectly level!) "
yet" and "
nevertheless" all make some sense, too! And doesn't a still - an apparatus used for distilling liquids, esp. alcoholic liquids - add a hilarious touch in this context? Did the "still" describe non-carbonated water, refer to a point in time, or maybe both???? Um, good question...! If nothing else, now you know how the "anal" got into "analysis"...
So many words, and I haven't even touched the subject of fashion yet... history - and its myths and legends - is very much alive today. Why would an African dictator rebuild the Vatican - a few centuries after the original was made? Why would a Russian magnate have a private villa built that mirrors the styles of times gone by? What makes fashion designers drag out elements of clothing that have been around for centuries and in a variety of cultures all over the world and sell them as THE newest and hottest style - every few years over...?
Platform shoes??? Oh, no!!! Not again!!!!!
You walk into any jewelry store in Northern Greece, and the first thing you see is "traditional" jewelry with coins depicting Alexander the Great in various renditions - to include those that look like "Urbs Roma" (who by the way, if a city is female - what with the Latin "-a" ending - could use a razor - that stubble is just not very lady-like!)... The mind boggles...
I'll think about it some more...
... are you aware of the seed you have planted, deep in the hidden recesses of the readers' minds, by linking "Linguist", "illuminating", "DayBrown", and a website with a seal in Italian, that remarkably resembles the Vatican's together 
If written from left to right (by a right-handed person), the first stroke on the letter "A" is usually a straight line down, then the second stroke usually curves slightly, initiated from the start to the finish of the stroke, top to bottom. Depends on the surface of course... quill/ink on parchment or papyrus, a stilus on copper or other type of metal, or a chisel/hammer applied on a rock, can make a difference. When chiseling letters into a hard surface such as stone, a straight line is usually easier to execute than a curve, which takes more manual dexterity, effort, and "sophisticated" metal tools to achieve the desired result, but is relatively easy to execute on a softer surface and smaller "writing" tool and a liquid medium. It's very unusual, to see this order reversed on all the letters "A" in this picture... Only if one is writing letters of an alphabet from right to left, such as in Hebrew or Arabic, would the sequence as shown on the picture make more sense. 
