Hippie's OOC culture pontification and gushing

[Lalena Steele]

Greetings. I figured I would make this little thread to gush about all the iconography drawn from Real world ancient cultures on the new server for any others who are fascinated by them like I am. And so I don't break anyone's immersion by breaking into long winded ooc gushing about it.  As many of you probably know I am a real world museum professional who studied archaeology so this current iteration of EFU is like catnip to me.

I plan to go into more detail about some specific buildings in the main hub. To avoid spoilers I will only be talking about areas that are easily accessible to all PCs, and not go into anything that is in quest areas or in areas where you might need to be higher level to go. 

My initial observations:

The setting textures are heavily ancient Egyptian but there is iconography drawing inspiration from other middle eastern, Mediterranean and eastern cultures.  The main wallpaper of the setting features a series of Egyptian hieroglyphs. I have not yet spent enough time look at them to see if they repeat or if they are unique, and if they are taken from actual Egyptian text. The hieroglyphs on the obelisks feature cartouche that would indicate a name of a specific person. The lion mosaics around the buildings in the main plaza are a bit baffling to me at the moment. They look very familiar. They are similar to roman style mosaics but not quite, maybe Aegean? I need to do some research to say for certain.

[Lalena Steele]

Within the Gate of Coins is a doorway heavily drawing on Ancient Egyptian iconography.  Flanked on either side by a jackal headed man holding an Ank. At the top of the doorway is a winged Aten sun-disk. 



I could not find any examples of such a doorway in actual Egyptian architecture, however the depictions of Anubus look to be almost exactly the same depictions as  depiction of Anubus seen on the left of in the weighing of the heart in the Hall of Justice from Book of the Dead of Hunefer

[Astra]

I believe the lions are based on the Ishtar Gate!

[Lalena Steele]

Ah beat me to it :D  I realized it the other night.  I had studied it in college so that is why it looked familiar.

[DangerousDan]

On a thematic level, we are drawing lots of inspiration from Sumerian + Akkadian mythology, and early cultures of  the Ancient Near East.

[Lalena Steele]

The intricate designs seen here on the door to the College of Sands are an example of Celtic knot work. The most famous example is the Book of Kells. Currently residing at Trinity College Dublin, the book is an medieval manuscript of the four Gospels of the New Testament in Latin, written around 800 CE/AD.  The center of the door features a spiral of interlocking birds that appears in the book of Kells. The original image is 5/8ths of an inch according to George Bain's Celtic Art. While the book of Kells is gorgeous to look at cannot spend all night pouring over the 680 pages to find a single tiny spiral unfortunately. Perhaps if I do track it down I will add the original image later.

The top and bottom zoomorphic spirals of a dog seemingly biting itself is a common image in Celtic art, seen in several manuscripts, including the Book of Kells, Book of Durrow, and on other examples of Celtic art like the Tara Brooch