{"id":279,"date":"2006-04-25T01:30:00","date_gmt":"2006-04-25T09:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.smontagu.org\/blog\/?p=279"},"modified":"2006-08-01T23:29:40","modified_gmt":"2006-08-02T07:29:40","slug":"asterix-and-archaeology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.smontagu.org\/blog\/?p=279","title":{"rendered":"Asterix the Linguist"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>The year is 50 BC. All Gaul is occupied by the Romans. All? No! One small village of indomitable Gauls still holds out against the invaders\u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>A lot of the charm of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.asterix.tm.fr\/\">Asterix<\/a> series by Ren\u00e9 Goscinny and Albert Uderzo comes from the way satirical projections of modern life  (e.g. chariots on dual carriageways with service stations staffed by the Michelin man or the Rugby game in Asterix and Britain) are combined with very accurate and carefully drawn reconstructions of the first century B.C.E. For example compare this illustration of Olympia from Asterix and the Olympic Games with <a href=\"http:\/\/dogaru.com\/greece\/photos\/olympia\/olympia_reconstruction_aerial.jpg\">this reconstruction<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><img alt=\"View of Olympia\" src=\"http:\/\/smontagu.org\/images\/asterix-1a.png\" \/><\/p>\n<p>However, occasionally they make a slip. In Asterix and the Black Gold a few pages after a similar aerial view of Jerusalem closely based on the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.inisrael.com\/holyland\/model.html\">model<\/a> at the Holyland Hotel, we see Asterix and Obelix walking out of the medi\u00e6val Lion Gate. And what does the sign on this Phoenician ship in Asterix the Gladiator say?<\/p>\n<p><img alt=\"Phoenician ship\" src=\"http:\/\/smontagu.org\/images\/asterix-2a.png\" \/><\/p>\n<p>I only recently noticed that and realized that the sign is intended as Phoenician script. Here is a closeup from another panel:<\/p>\n<p><img alt=\"Sign on Phoenician ship\" src=\"http:\/\/smontagu.org\/images\/asterix-3a.png\" \/><\/p>\n<p>The letters are rosh, yod, tau, or in Hebrew transcription \u05e8\u05d9\u05ea. (Phoenician is not yet encoded in Unicode, but according to the current beta of Unicode 5.0, they will soon be ???).<\/p>\n<p>Since the ship comes from Tyre, I am guessing that the authors intended the sign to be the name of its home port, and tried to transcribe &#8220;Tyre&#8221; into Phoenician, from left to right. In fact, the Phoenician for Tyre is \u05e6\u05d5\u05e8 or \u05e6\u05e8 (\u200e?? in Unicode 5.0), and should appear something like <img alt=\"Tyre in Phoenician\" src=\"http:\/\/smontagu.org\/images\/asterix-4a.png\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The year is 50 BC. All Gaul is occupied by the Romans. All? No! One small village of indomitable Gauls still holds out against the invaders\u2026 A lot of the charm of the Asterix series by Ren\u00e9 Goscinny and Albert Uderzo comes from the way satirical projections of modern life (e.g. chariots on dual carriageways [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.smontagu.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.smontagu.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.smontagu.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.smontagu.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.smontagu.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=279"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.smontagu.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.smontagu.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.smontagu.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.smontagu.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}