Yesterday, I toured the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum & Planetarium and also attended a introduction into reading and interpreting hieroglyphics symbols.

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The instructor explained how to interpret pictures and what pictures Egyptians used for letters - to sum it up its really a picture puzzle. Its letters that are combined into words...and then into sentences...which tell a story. And with 2,000 hieroglyphic characters one can imagine the memorization involved.

I quickly learned that this is no small task, just the introduction into this ancient Egyptian writing was complicated to say the least, complicated yes - impossible no. But I think I will leave that to the experts.

After the class I toured the museum, which by the way is the largest collection of Egyptian artifacts on exhibit in the western United States. The collection was incredible the artifacts were so old it was hard to comprehend how old this stuff really was. There was some fascinating jewelry pieces, statues and mummies. Below are a couple of examples:

" This necklace would have been worn by a very wealthy woman. Since cut stones, such as diamonds, were unknown in the ancient world, uncut stones had great value. Carnelian represents the blood of Isis, and was the most popular stone of ancient Egypt. New Kingdom - 18th Dynasty (1549-1298 BC)"

Another interesting artifact, thousands of years old.

"This is the first object ever collected by the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum, a small votive image of the goddess Sekhmet, patroness of physicians. It was made to be placed in the temple to honor the goddess, no doubt in hopes of a healing. Ptolemaic Period - Ptolemaic (332-30 BC) "

All this for 8 dollars.