Interlude - Index of

Interlude
Redundant Array of Pyramid
Hieroglyphics (RAPH)
How do you store data so that it can be accessed a long, long
time in the future? Like hundreds or thousands of years from
now? On a trip to Egypt I learned how the ancient Egyptians
accomplished this.
Some temples in ancient Egypt were for the dead, but others
focused on the living. Those temples were partly religious,
but they also functioned as centers of learning and healing, a
sort of combination church, university, and hospital. The temple
of Kom Ombo was for the living, and it used an interesting
data protection technique. When running a temple, priests must
perform different procedures every day of the year—different
prayers, different offerings, different sacrifices. To ensure procedural
compliance with data protection, the builders carved
the operator’s manual, a large table with 365 different sets of
instructions, into stone walls.
Then as now, personal information required extra protection
to prevent identity theft. Pharaohs made colossal statues
of themselves, but if it was a good statue, a later pharaoh would
recut the hieroglyph to replace the old name with his own. In
response, Ramses II developed write-protected hieroglyphs. He
cut them inches deep into hard granite. Expensive, true, but
thirty-five hundred years later, Ramses II is one of the bestknown
pharaohs.
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