SOLVED: It was an obscure Goa'uld dialect.
Is this gibberish? 20 bucks at a thrift store.
this post was submitted on 17 May 2026
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You've got me beaten on deciphering it!
I saw some symbols were in similar spots like the beetle in a circles up top, but the waves to the bottom left weren't there at all.
Maybe some consolidation was done to make as much fit within the limits of the accuracy of the mold used or something along those lines.
Oh shit you're talking about the cartouche!
Ok yeah that should... those are drawn around names of very important people or gods... so the one we have here would be uh...
Ok yeah, that is the cartouche name for Tutankhamen... they've kinda stylized the third (second? lol) symbol into 3 perfect squares though.
Usually its closer to 3 strokes than rectangles or squares... I think this is just Z2 by Gardiner's classification.
So there then! That's not gibberish!
A modern repro of his name done by presumably actually qualified people, shown as part of an exhibit:
https://thaddeusnowak.com/2014/05/21/pharaoh-tutankhamun-union-station/
I think, in this context, the circle above the scarab is meant to be the sun literally, which is then figuratively Ra, which then even more figuartively basically means 'Divine'.
Many cartouche encapsulated pharoah names start with this kind of circular/sun figure as the first element.
I'm getting quite the education here! I will have to read more on this when I get home!
I am again not 100% sure, but i think that... if we are going with bottom to top, then left to right...
Well best case scenario we end up with a bunch of determined symbols that have hopefully unicode equivalents (yes many hieroglyphs are in unicode), or could follow another standard of conversion to latin style characters...
Butthenwewouldendupwithasentencelikethisinancientegyptian.
So if you don't know the language at all, you'd have no idea where to break apart chunks into words.
So... maybe, you could feed that into some kind of a text to text translator.
Tesseract OCR is opensource, but doesn't appear to support hieroglyphs.
I couldn't find any online image to text converters that supported hieroglyphs either.
So yeah I tried to do it manually, got frustrated lol.
I guess its worth noting that, as far as i know, egyptian does allow for compound characters that represent combinations of phonemes... and/or convey an entire concept, not as phonemes.
So sometimes, when a glyph element is present or not present, it still means something, just a different something.
But there are a lot of glyphs.