Audrey Wrote:
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> Don't much like the PT's either :

I haven't read the book yet but I got a kick out of the forward;

[www.fsgworkinprogress.com]

> So we're supposed to believe the pyramid builders
> thought like this?

Unless you understand exactly what they meant by these lines, no, this is not how they thought. What we are missing is author intent, what the author meant. Once you understand his meaning then the way they thought becomes clear.

The simple problem is ancient language can't really be translated into English. Indeed, people even seem to be having trouble with the concept that language can be metaphysical.

English speakers are accustomed to seeking meaning for words to make statements understandable but you can't do this with ancient language because every single word had only one definition. Once you read this as English all its meaning evaporates. We must deconstruct things to understand them but ancient writing has no meaning after its deconstructed. These were the words of the gods "medju netju"; they were the words of NATURAL PHENOMENA and they were used to make people think alike and consistently with nature itself. It's just gobbledty gook if you try to take it apart to understand it the way we take EVERYTHING apart to understand it.

It's a different way of speaking that derived from a different way of thinking and from language that arose naturally. It is the same natural language with which beavers invented dams and termites invented cities. The complex natural language of humans was used to invent great pyramids and complex modern language.

> I don't see why we can't take
> the above text at face value, they're talking
> about stars, not people, and apparently the ba has
> nothing to do with a soul.

"Stars" are a much more complex idea in ancient language. This is for numerous reasons but the one relevant here is that the ancients used stars as mnemonics to remember their history. Individuals were assigned a star at their death so that they would be remembered each time someone looked up at the star.

There are a lot of ideas tangled up in the PT and they are all invisible if you try to deconstruct the meaning. The only way to untangle these ideas is to solve each of the terms through context much like the author above is trying to do.

> I think it was you who brought up the problem of
> finding Mesopotamian texts online that were dated.
> I can find texts, but a date isn't given. I was
> going to try comparing the older Mesopotamian with
> the PT's, but that exercise was a waste of time.

Yes. Even if I had a dated Mesopotamian text it would be of little utility unless it was extensive like the PT so it could be solved by context. I did begin solving one of these but solved only a single natural process before having to give up. There just wasn't enough writing.

We are exceedingly lucky to have the rituals known as the PT or ancient language would probably never be solved.