Page 1493…
Hi all!
So…for the next 8 days…I am going to be doing a lot of hieroglyphics.
Yikes.
I hope you like the back story here. I did my best to work in actual historic events (as one as dumb as I can figure out using Wikipedia and such).
The computers are still being built.
The third computer (which we’re halfway to funding) I may have to get somewhere else. Costco took it down permanently.
Too bad. Was a fabulous deal.
Either way. Here’s the donate button if you’d like to help out.
 We need about $600 more to make the last computer a possibility.
If it doesn’t happen…I’m still 2 new workstations faster thanks to you all!
So thank you!
Oh…
And here’s another painting I did for one of you lovely readers who donated over $100.
Niviene.
Hope you like it.
Discussion (55) ¬
Beautiful painting of Niviene!
Kind of excited about Ramses being King of Dreamland, even though he was kind of a jerk in my favorite movie, “The Ten Commandments.” 😉
Love the hieroglyphics! I have to be “that guy” right now, though: I feel like you’re a bit redundant in panel 3 and 4 with Ramses’ name. I think it might read better if you said “his rule” rather than using his full title a second time.
^Just my opinion.
Really looking forward to this backstory. If I recall correctly, the Exodus, wars against the Hittites in the Levant, and the invasions of the ‘sea peoples’ across the Eastern Mediterranean are associated with Ramses II reign.
The third panel is especially interesting. It references our world and Dreamlands, presumably with the ‘normal’ people on the left for the former, and the traditionally-Egyptian figures on the right for the latter. Given how we see these hieroglyphs of people with animal heads often in our world, I wonder if that implies that the Egyptians brought Dreamlanders into our world somehow… Or I’m overthinking this. Either way, I’m looking forward to this.
Scott, I imagine you are asleep at this point like any sane person would be, but did you plan to leave the 3rd Workstation graph up?
I notice that the entire Costco site is down right now. Did you get direct word that they would no longer sell the unit or the unit + monitor deal?
Again, worst case is getting a comparable unit from Ebay for around $1K.
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
—- Percy Bysshe Shelley
I’m wondering about erosion underwater.
If the blank spots on the obelisk(s) are from missing plasterwork, given their age, all of the plasterwork would have dissolved by now.
If it’s not plasterwork, though, and only a piece of marble has fallen off, the surface underneath would not have been rough, but smoothed out by water. Even if it were fairly recent, the surface underneath would have been at least partially smooth along the edges that were the first to disjoin (i.e., the top).
Before anyone suggests that the surface should have been eroded by now, ancient Egyptians have developed enameling of ceramic surfaces.
Oh my god, a giant rock!
3rd panel, typo: “Pharoah” (should be Pharaoh).
Thanks for all the great work going into TDC, Scott!
Have you noticed? We’re #6 on TWC with 11,424 votes. Thank you everyone who made this possible. Vote on, Dreamies! The former #6 is only a few votes behind, 11,286. Our new target, the current #5, has 17,203.
Most likely, we won’t gather this many votes before the month ends. But keep voting anyway. And get ready for the next month’s beginning.
So I’ve been reading your comic for quite some time now but have never commented until now. Fantastic comic, I really love how the characters and story have evolved. And I reallly love the painting of Niviene!
And also, “During the rule of Ramses the Second” should have a comma after it instead of a period.
What whaaaat… Whoaaa!! I must’ve been sleeping lately, ’cause I wasn’t expecting this…. NEAT! =D
Beautiful painting of Niviene!
Scott, did you use Angelina Jolie as your base model?
Toughluck, I imagine that Niviene has been using her magic to keep the stones protected from erosion and such. And it is in Dreamland, where normal physics and such need not apply. (Humans can fly in dreams, after all. 😉
Curious to see if Nicodemus somehow mucked up things during Ramses time, too
Love seeing Nicodemus in that Egyptian tablet.Anyone else from our world as the king of Dreamland? Eric the Red? JFK? Can you picture Hitler in Dreamland? Maybe not!
Awesome! ^.^
Love the Egypt stuff. I was wondering about that culture and if it would make an appearance in the story. Still wondering about some others, but I don’t mind waiting and of course reading to find out about them.
There are two problems with that theory:
1. Why would these patches of rocks be missing at all? Surely the chiseled surface would be gone well before significant pieces started falling off?
2. Niviene is there only a 1000 years, while Ramesses II had lived ca. 1200 BC, which adds over 2000 years to 1000 during which she would be around to protect the obelisks.
I believe that Julius Caesar has been mentioned, but I don’t think anyone since King Arther’s time has been able to become the king until the sword was recovered.
-sp Arthur
Oooo!!! Good catch! I didn’t even pick up on how that looks like her until you said something. If this painting was based on Angelina, color me five times more excited about it! *is an annoying fangirl*
Could have been the result of rock impact? 🙂 Projectiles (from before they were underwater) could have made a chunk fall off (or get pulverized) while the remaining glyphs were undamaged.
Solomon and David (of biblical fame) were also mentioned as former kings of Dreamland on this page.
LOVE the painting!!! 🙂
Oh…and about the page 😉 I’m really looking forward to learning what we can over the next 8 days. I imagine it will be very enlightening.
Out of curiousity…do renders of the heiroglyphs process faster than the renders that involve characters or materials that reflect (i.e. Alex’s armor)?
Actually…it’s Christina Hendricks from Mad Men.
http://i.imgur.com/FFan6.jpg
I’ve not seen the show…but saw this photo somewhere and saved it for whenever I wanted to paint a redhead.
🙂
This is all photoshop. So no rendering.
Yay!
Of course…making these pages takes quite a bit of hours themselves. Lots of photoshopping.
Scot
RE: Computers.
I just got a rebuilt HP Pavillion quad core with 4 gigs of ram and a terrabite hard drive for less than $600. from Geeks.com. That is not a bad place to shop. I’ve gotten several things from them, and have always been satisfied. For the starving artist, it’s worth looking into.
ps. love the history lessons.
Lee
panel 3: now we know where Egyptian deities come from!
Nice twist – and unexpecteed, at least for me
If I wanted to be picky, I could add that reading hieroglyphics is a knowledge that was mostly forgotten (with few partial exceptions) until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799, so in theory Merlin would have a hard time reading them… but of course he had magic and unspoken secret knowledge to help him 😉
Couldn’t Dreamland have other types of surfaces than we humans do? Or maybe a magic aside from Niviene’s is preserving it – something ancient from the time the obelisks were made, and a spell that erodes slowly.
I just love how Merlin is an all-powerful wizard. He shows up everywhere. Dreamland, Harry Potter, Xanth Novels, various movies… He could be as old as anyone wants him to be. Niviene too.
Love the hieroglyphics.
Oh yeah! Forgot to add… if the kingship is passed down genetically, wasn’t Abraham at one time King, and how would Ramses II get the title and then have it transfer back down to King David? If the line were broken somehow, shouldn’t there be a “fail-switch”? The ability to choose an appropriate heir?
Scott,
have you considered an HP computer? They come with a 2yr warranty and you can add up to another 4, including home svc. It turned out the ZT system machine was a bad joke. I went online to HP and custom built a new one for myself. With the 1g my FIL is gifting me with I’m getting a high end i-7 6 core chip and 12gig of ram 2.5 terrabytes and 2 gig video card, decent photo and dvd software also. 1800.00 roughly. and free shipping.
It was Moses who was a Prince in Egypt not Abraham.
In other times, there might have been Cyrus the Mede, or Darius the Persian, Alexander of Macedon. Clovis the Frank? Theodoric the Goth? Charlemagne? But that still leaves lots of years for other kings.
A Read Magic or Read Languages spell?
I think we’ve already established that the kingship in Dreamland is not hereditary, but goes with the sword Alex pulled from the stone–which allows its bearer to enter Dreamland even as an adult. It seems likely that the heir might be the King’s child, who would have access to the sword in this world, but it might not be.
The problem with a new king after Arthur was that Arthur was suspended, neither really alive nor dead, so the heir could not take up his sword, and so never “dreamed” his way into Dreamland–until Alex slipped in through a loophole by being the younger twin of the true heir, Dan.
Heh, Thanks Tommy, I was just going to point that out.
But you remember time passes much differently in dreamland. The stones could be 1000’s of years older in dreamland than they are in earth time.
Amusing . . . I just started teaching myself to read hieroglyphics (Budge has at least two books out on the subject), so I’d just started falling back into the study of Egypt once more! I was startled to see the pictures for today!
For what it’s worth, I agree completely. It’s way redundant. 🙂
hieroglyphics and the rocks are amazing
Yes, but this doesn’t feel right. It takes something that we understand well and puts it at odds with the environment.
If you explain everything with a deus ex machina, the machine quickly breaks.
Our enjoyment of fantasy depends on our willing suspension of disbelief. If the world is completely unfamiliar, it takes away from the enjoyment, since you can only grasp the differences so much and not find it tedious to be faced with yet another phenomenon which will have to be handwaved a page after it’s introduced.
That counts double if the introduced differences are only for difference sakes or when used to patch plot holes. You can’t have rocks falling upwards and rain. If you reverse the laws of physics, you have to be consistent. And being consistent is easiest if you follow the laws of physics which are fundamentally the same everywhere (flying aside).
If the rocks are different from what’s familiar to us, then they must be a plot device or it would be pointless to make them different from ordinary granite. That’s especially true with these obelisks, which are common to Earth and Dreamland it appears.
And it would be vastly easier to simulate erosion under water than above ground — the surface would be smooth, but porous instead of rough.
No it doesn’t. That’d be the easy way out. Furthermore, not only have we not seen any evidence of time moving differently in Dreamland than on Earth, we have seen a lot of evidence for the contrary in the way Nastajia, Paddington and Kiwi aged, in how Nicodemus had a thousand years to shape and subdue Dreamland, finally in how tediously Niviene pointed out the flow of time.
I’m still going with the projectile impact damage theory. 😛
Oh well 🙂 She’s pretty attractive, too.
I don’t think it is missing pieces but something crusted on. It looks to be on top of the hieroglyphics.
Ok I don’t want to be picky or anything either (I know others have said the same thing) but I know for a fact that in Egyptian art, no matter what the actual relative size of everything, the King was almost always pictured bigger than everyone and everything else… ok maybe not every THING. My point is that Nicodemus in that carving is WAY bigger than Ramses, who I am pretty sure would not have been happy with that, particularly since he had a pretty bad habit of leaving gigantic statues of himself and his beloved Nefertari all over the Egyptian Empire (sortof). He is the guy who had 4 gigantic statues of himself put in front of his temple (to HIMSELF). And that was pretty early in his reign as Pharoah! He was pretty pleased with himself and his godly profile 😛
(But I do think your rendering of the rock and carving is pretty awesome. I am impressed with all the work you put into putting all those flowers and eyes and things. I don’t remember what they all mean… I didn’t pay attention to that part. Just the skewed perspective :P)
this is, of course, only something that you should fix if you have the time.
sooo…..
people knew about dreamland even in Egyptian times?
and nick was there as well? dam, nick is really old. O.o
Just had a thought… Egyptians – Cats – Felicity’s kind. Wonder if they will somehow be tied together.
The hieroglyphic text around the center seems to be largely names — specifically ‘royal’ names. the upper track, at least, consists of more cartouches than not. A king-list of Dreamland to that point in time? I know more often than not Hieroglyphics are used without much regard, but I wouldn’t rule out an easter egg here… the Latin was pretty well done, after all. I’d try to transliterate them but the image is tiny (at least on my screen) and I’d have to pull down books since I’ve not committed hieroglyphics to memory.
Comprehend Languages. At least, that’s what the spell was called back in my day (i.e. AD&D 1st Edition).
😉
The Sea Peoples were later, in the reign of Rameses III.