years ago i was applying for phds in america and had to take the GRE, and the closest testing centre to me was in london. my brother lived there at the time, so i crashed at his place, took the test in the morning, then had a whole day to kill until we could meet for dinner. so i went to the british museum.
i had a really great day and saw a ton of really cool stuff, but the thing that has stuck in my mind over the years was this massive egyptian stele. it was like hundreds of others in the museum – a slab of stone as thick as my head, carved with beautiful hieroglyphs proclaiming the heroic deeds of some long-dead pharaoh. but this stele was displayed laid on the floor, most of the text obliterated by a gigantic hole bored through the middle of the stone.
it has high and lofty things written on it, but in the end, other people used it for something utterly mundane and in doing so made their own mark on it—their own writing
i first came across the stone because it is understood by some to state that Ptah created the hieroglyphs, but it's not so simple. this paper (p. 18) translates the relevant part as "Thus Ptah was satisfied after he had made all things and all divine word." i know virtually nothing about Egyptian but afaik the Egyptian word for "hieroglyph" literally means "divine word" and i know that people have always conflated spoken language with written language for ages, so i still don't know if this passage is referring to written hieroglyphs or spoken language specifically (or maybe even something else).
