Egyptian Glyphs in Australia???

[Beagle]

Leaning towards hoax.

I agree completely!

Welcome to the forum Nigel.

[JohnB]

Hi peoples. It's been a while.

I wouldn't be too quick to call hoax on this.

The site has been known for 100 years plus. So to be a hoax you need a person reasonably fluent in archaic hieroglyphs living in Australia in the 1890s (at the latest). You need that person to go bush and find a cleft in the middle of nowhere where he perpetrate the hoax. Bearing in mind that the odds of anybody finding it are slim to none. Frankly, the chances of him finding the site again were pretty slim. The carvings also entail a lot of work as they are in granite, not a softer stone.

It should also be remembered that the hoaxer would have been strongly influenced by Budges "Easy Lessons in Egyptian Hieroglyphics with Sign List" yet the wall carvings apparently do not show such influence.

I've known of the site for over 30 years and visiting it is on my "To do" list. I have yet to find a complete record of the sites carvings, just some (quite often blurry) photos. A good and accurate photographic record is needed I think.

Cheers.

[Minimalist]

Hi, John. I'm still troubled by the Djedefre reference. 100 years ago how many people in the world had ever heard of him?

[JohnB]

That's my point.

There appear to be too many consistencies with what is known now that wasn't known then.

Frankly I doubt that there were more than 4 people in Australia 100 years ago with the requisite knowledge to even attempt a hoax. If that's not enough, some (at least) of what they knew was wrong and would show up in the carvings.

It's a bit of a "Carch 22". Officially the carvings are a hoax, without any explanation of how they could be. It works like this;

"The carvings are a hoax because there is no evidence the Egyptians ever came to Australia".
"But aren't the carvings evidence?"
"No"
"Why not?"
"Because they are a hoax"
"Why are they a hoax?"
"They must be, because there is no evidence the Egyptians ever came to Australia"

Consequently our Egyptologists won't look at them and the only people who do are from the "fringe" and only investigate enough to get a couple of pretty pictures or rough drawings of "Hieroglyphs in Australia".

I've been meaning to take a holiday down that way and try to get a complete photographic record of the carvings. Once that's done, a complete transliteration and translation would follow. All there is ATM are a few pictures and the "story" they tell. Without a complete record there is no way to tell how accurate the translation is. Maybe the end of this year? I hope so.

[Minimalist]

Excellent example of circular reasoning there.

By all means, post those pictures here when you get them.

[Rokcet Scientist]

OK, so then if those glyphs are real, then the whole rock formation they were found on/in must have been vacuumed up from somewhere in Egypt (by the Anunaki of course) and dropped in the remote Oz outback...

It would be consistent. We 'know' they dropped other huge rock sculptures in the western desert: http://archaeologica.boardbot.com/viewt ... =13&t=2211....

[kbs2244]

It is just boats RS.

There is more and more evidence they were not afraid to leave the Nile and get out of sight of land.

[Minimalist]

Right, kb, although I think your observation from last September that coasting down the Malay Peninsula to Indonesia would get them there as well and with only being out of sight of land for a brief time. What is it? About 70 miles across open water to Australia? Even at only 4 knots you could cover that in a day.

[Rokcet Scientist]

In any case the Abos already did it 35 to 60.000 years earlier, didn't they?

Although I maintain they walked...

But if the Abos could, then certainly Pharaonic Egyptians could.

[Take3]

I'm calling hoax too.

There seems to be number of places in that pic where the glyph has been inscribed THROUGH the lichens on the rock. there's no way those small patches of lichen have been in situ for thousands of years. They should be much bigger or have at least grown into the glyph.

The lack of weathering on the glyphs themselves has been mentioned by others and should not be discounted

Minimalist: where its far from conclusive I think the trend crazed Victorian's (as in Victorian England, not residents of the Australian State) obsession with all things Egyptian may explain the reference to a relatively obscure ruler. New excavations with their attendant treasure hoards and mummies curses would have been front page news. Also a whole industry in pseudo egyptian nick nacks existed. So the possibilities I'm trying to illustrate are; that knowledge which is obscure today may well have been more prominent in the public domain in the 19thC. At least at the level of knowledge our carver has dispalyed (essentially the just name Djedefre).
Also that the incription could have been copied from a plethora of heiroglyphic gibberish which was being promulgated at the time.

[Minimalist]

that knowledge which is obscure today may well have been more prominent in the public domain in the 19thC.

Always a possibility, Take3 (welcome, btw.) The trouble is that even apologetics needs some actual evidence to support itself. I agree that one man who knew of Djedefre could have done it. The question is why and who was he.

[Rokcet Scientist]

a whole industry in pseudo egyptian nick nacks existed.

In the 19th century, and the beginning of the 20th, every other travelling street fair had its own "genuine Egyptian mummy" on display.

[Take3]

Well again its all speculation but I'd guess its an extension of another Victorian craze ie; carving your initials into your colonial subordinates national treasures. I mean its a lot of work (a few hours at least if we assume a modern carver with steel tools) for a prank, but just like the guy who performs as the "tattoed enigma" and has had horns/bony lumps actually grafted to his skull, "to f*** with any scientists who dig up my skeleton in a couple thousand years" it may well have been a really really far sighted gag.

I do think the reference to Djedefre is worth bringing into question but with the weight of evidence denying the antiquty of the glyphs in the first place, I'd lean towards a more mundane explanation to account for that one feature.

[Take3]

In the 19th century, and the beginning of the 20th, every other travelling street fair had its own "genuine Egyptian mummy" on display.

Double tragic that one; first for the number of people who paid good money to look at dead monkeys. And conversley for the number who got what they paid for but in a setting which ensured the future destruction of those few genuine artifacts being toted around.

Damn Carneys



[Edit: I fixed the quote marks for you. Min.]

[jw1815]

I'm with Take3 on calling it a hoax. I took the trouble to search it a bit since I knew that a few claims in the Crystalinks article by Paul White were wrong, even though I'm far from being an expert on ancient Egypt.

For example, he claims that the Australian carvings date to the time of Khufu and are a mix of “archaic” Egyptian, Sumerian, and Phoenician writing. But Phoenicians didn’t even have a writing system at the time of Khufu, not until 1000 years later. When they did develop one, it was alphabetic, not hieroglyphics. Also, the Sumerians used pictographs, and their system was developed around the same time as Egyptian writing (3400 BCE) or slightly later, but the two systems were different. It wouldn’t have worked to combine them within the same words, sentences, or paragraphs.

So I checked out Paul White as a source and looked for opinions of Egyptologists. I know that they’re a very “closed club,” but White’s article claimed that the Australian carvings were translated by an Egyptologist - [W.] Raymond Johnson - who, it turns out, is one of the world’s leading experts on Egyptian hieroglyphics. That makes him not only a member of this closed club himself, but also one who is very highly regarded by other club members. Surely they’d have some comments on it.

Nada. Not even on the website of the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, where Professor Johnson is the Field Director of the institute’s Luxor House Epigraphic Project. The Oriental Institute’s purpose is to preserve and record the artifacts, writings, and history of the Near East. The Luxor Epigraphic Project focuses on Egyptian writings. Here’s the Oriental Institute’s website. Perhaps someone else can find something there about the Australian carvings that I missed. I realize that Johnson is a common name, but I doubt that there’s another Raymond Johnson who just happens to also be an expert Egyptologist on hieroglyphics.

http://oi.uchicago.edu/