Abydos
- 25 minutes ago
- 4 min read
The glyphs at Abydos were photographed for the first time in 1848, and mistranslated immediately, which was the only mercy the century had to offer them. They sit on a lintel in the Temple of Seti I, high enough that a visitor must crane to see them, in a corridor the guides move through quickly, and what the visitor sees, what every visitor has seen since the photographs began circulating, is unmistakable and impossible in the same instant: a helicopter. Beside it something like a submarine. Beside that a shape that the twentieth century, when it finally arrived, would recognize as its own aircraft, rendered in profile with the casual accuracy of someone drawing a thing they had watched land.