Thursday 28 November 2019

Diana Was At Work,

so upstairs to play with a few photographs,


 all of these infrared photographs we took when we were at Glenshee in March 2018, Diana keeps asking when are we going to have some snow,

 so there is some in these,

 colour swapped and added,

 plus a lot more,

 black and white,

 and a old fashioned look,

 as the photographs appear out of the camera,

 then colour swapped,

 a bit more added,

 I then decided to give the photograph a totally different look,

 back to black and white,

 and aged,

 this a pool that is made by the melting snow,

 colour swapped,
 and added,

 plus a lot more,

 black and white,

 and a antique look,

 in the evening a pre meal sherry, 

 I decided on a change of reading for this evening,a book I have enjoyed reading a few times before The Keys of Egypt, this is what I wrote the last time I read it, 
I had read it before, it is a fascinating read about the race between scholars to decipher the hieroglyphics that were left on tombs, temples and papyrus,


from one of the reviews,
'The book tells the true story of the early nineteenth-century race to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs and how it came to obsess the brilliant French scholar Jean-François Champollion, whose painstaking work finally solved the mystery of the hieroglyphs. He faced bitter academic and political opposition, at a time when France was often in turmoil with the rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte. His greatest rival was Thomas Young, the exceptionally gifted scientist and physician. Champollion's discoveries started a process which revealed the incredible history of ancient Egypt',

from another review,
'Jean-Francois Champollion's biography is neatly interwoven with Napoleonic history and the functions of Egyptian hieroglyphs in The Keys of Egypt. A gifted bookseller's son born in Revolutionary France, Champollion was to become "gripped by energetic enthusiasm" for Egypt. By the age of 12, he was studying several ancient languages, and, amid a "wave of Egyptomania," he would beat rivals to discover the key to deciphering hieroglyphs. If this was a race, it was a marathon. The breakthrough came after "20 years of obsessive hard work," not through the quick-fix solution often thought to have been provided by the Rosetta stone.

The Keys of Egypt details Champollion's life and work, which were hampered by politics, poverty, and an almost hypochondriacal series of health problems. Its sources include letters and journals, the authors having undertaken researches in major libraries and museums',

if you like non-fiction books as I do that deal with historical facts this is a book for you, extremely readable and enjoyable, to say Champollion was a genius is such an understatement, at the age of 12 he was totally proficient in Latin and Greek, so he was then allowed to learn Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac and Chaldean!


 'Cheers!',

 for my evening meal a tuna salad, 

 I read and listened to music for the rest of the evening until Diana called, so off to the station,

'there's a train down there', we walked home where it was feet up, one from New Tricks and we were off to bed.


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