Perplex City card #219: "The Master Of Secrets"

Yes, it's true, I have recently joined the hunt for the Receda Cube. Learn more at http://www.perplexcity.com .

One of the first cards I got was a black card (the cards are sorted by difficulty; black cards are the second-hardest cards, second only to silver). #219: The Master Of Secrets.

At first I thought it was a simple substitution cipher, where one hieroglyphic stands for A, another for B, and so on. But as I looked for patterns (pattern recognition is a must in deciphering codes, and it happens to be a specialty of mine), I realized that many of the glyphs don't repeat. With a sinking feeling of horror, I looked up some hieroglyphics and realized that it is no code; this card is a message actually written in hieroglyphics.

I suppose I should have guessed it earlier, since black cards are the second-most-difficult tier of cards, a substitution cipher would have been way too easy. On the other hand, all was not lost. The fact that the card is written in hieroglyphics actually gave me a few clues right off the bat. Namely, it told me that the card's solution has something to do with Egypt. It also told me that it probably had something to do with ancient Egypt in particular, since hieroglyphics haven't been used in over 1000 years (the current national language of Egypt is Arabic).

So, I set out to translate a message written in hieroglyphics. I do not happen to have easy access to the Rosetta Stone (yes, that's a joke), so the next best thing was to look online for a translator. This took a while, as most online translators are just used for translating English into hieroglyphics, not the other way around. What I found after a little more searching was an online excerpt from Gardiner's Grammar. Sir Alan Gardiner was a famous Egyptologist from Oxford who wrote a lot of books about hieroglyphics and what they mean, and thanks to the internet I was able to read a little of what he wrote, and after a few hours I finally managed to figure out a crude system of translation.
I hope I don't need to tell you that it wasn't easy. translating any language into another language raises issues of grammar and context, especially one that communicates entire words in single characters (I took three years of Japanese class, and I still need hiragana to translate from Japanese to English). But I will point out that it's not nearly as tough as Chinese.
Eventually I got a method figured out. It involved a complicated method of running a symbol through two programs, looking it up on a chart I'd written by hand, and then putting it through another program. It took over a minute to translate each character, and that wasn't counting the hour and a half I'd spent setting up the system.

The first line took the longest since I was still learning how to do it, but after several dozen minutes I managed to translate it as something resembling, "I am revered by the King"
The next line was a little quicker, and it came out as, "I carry the love of my father." I was scared for a moment that it might be referring to Jesus, but the Perplex City Puzzle Scribes didn't seem like the religious types from what I had heard.
The third line said either, "I nourished the ford bull," or "I was nourished BY the ford bull."
I couldn't quite figure out the fourth line no matter what I tried, but it said something like, "The multitude of scribes to me."
The fifth line was only a bit clearer: "Scribes of the old times of Egypt hand over to the mouth of Egypt"
Line six was a bit clearer: "I am the trustworthy scribe of his fingers,"
Line 7: "I am the green gardener of his finger"
And Line 8 was the easiest: "What is my name?" And it was the hardest as well.

What I first found when I looked up these lines was that they were remarkably similar to a section of text in an Egyption book, Urk IV, and they make reference to the Nile river. It made sense, given that the river makes the plants grow. So with a sigh of relief, I closed the programs, put the papers I'd written away, and entered that answer into the form, and got back... a negative. I tried different permutations, but got the same reply: "Sorry, that's not the answer."

It wasn't going to be that easy. I realized that there were more differences than the context from the text from Urk IV. The card wasn't talking about the Nile.

I rolled up my sleeves again, reopened the programs, got the papers back out, and got back to work. I had to start again from scratch now.
I was in no hurry, given that I had another 24 hours before I could try again (the Perplex City solve form has a safeguard to prevent random guessing: If you make three wrong guesses, it doesn't let you try again for 24 hours), but I still got down to work.
I wondered if the key was in the 4th line, the one I really couldn't translate. So I spent the next long while looking for that. It involved a lot of random searching and wild guessing, and puzzling over a reduntant word that appears in two different forms in the same line ("writing" and "written"), but eventually I managed to figure it out, it said: "I have written many books about the writings of ancient Egypt."
Ahah, it was a person, not a body of water or a natural phenomenon. And it was an Egyptologist, to boot.
In retrospect, that should have given me the answer right away, given which books I'd been reading to help me learn how to translate the hieroglyphics in the first place, but hindsight is always 20/20, isn't it?
So I went about revamping the other lines, seeing if I'd missed anything the first time through. I reworked the system a little to accomodate what I knew it was referring to (I had to revise what I was looking for in the translations), and that was a royal pain in the ass, but eventually I sort of crushed it, and this time this is what I got.

"I am the one revered by the King,
I am the one beloved of my father,
I learned at the ford of the bull/ox,
I have written many books about the writings of ancient Egypt,
I made flourish the words of Egypt,
I made the plants and the trees grow,
I am a scribe whose fingers are excellent,
I am a gardener who is green of his finger,
What is my name?"

Okay, I was looking for a scribe, and a "gardener," and one who was "revered by the King."
I tried dictionaries and encyclopedias, but I wasn't quite sure where to start. Then, on a whim, I googled the whole mess, "Scribe," "ancient Egypt," "books," "gardener," and "King."
And found the guy whose works I had started with to get started on the translation: Sir Alan Gardiner.
That was just plain mean of the puzzle scribe (who the card said was some "guest architect" named Margaret Maitland), but it made perfect sense. Sir Alan Gardiner was a "gardener" (well, technically it was spelled a little differently), he was "revered" by the King (being knighted, after all), he wrote many books on the writings of ancient Egypt (several of which I myself had been reading over the last few hours), and the third line...
The third line was just plain horrible. "I learned at the ford of the bull/ox." The ford of the ox. Ox's ford? OXFORD! He was educated at Oxford. See what I mean?

Well, the end is a bit anticlimactic. I just waited out the clock, punched in "Sir Alan Gardiner" into the solution line, and got the 55 points.
That's 12 cards down, 750,000 to go. See ya there.