Perhaps I’ll use my time-belt to go back and stamp on Captain Cook’s Compass.
(You gotta love the alliteration).
Maybe that would leave the indigenous population in peace for a couple of centuries?
“But where would we send the bread-stealers?”, they cried.
At least, that’s what 17th-century Mail readers would cry.
/s
You’d also have to deal with the French
and the Dutch
and, just to be on the safe side, the Portuguese, Spanish, Chinese, Arabs and Romans
and if you’ve somehow managed all this I can practically guarantee you that the fucking Vikings who aren’t even real as such will show up somehow.
Temporal engineering? Not even once!
Well, firstly, how would you know?
I do get the argument against; “if we knock off Hitler how do we know we won’t get someone worse?” etc.
But then again, how do we know we won’t get something better?
So have fun with it, that’s what it’s for.
I might go back to '63 and burn down a book repository, much as I love libraries.
Are you crazy? As we all should know by now, Kennedy shot himself in order to prevent a temporal anomaly!
I’d forgotten about that!
I’d hafta learn Ancient Egyptian first, but there are some folks back then whom I’d love to meet.
Anyone specific?
I would like to meet the Asp.
“What the hell?
I have to swim through milk again?
What is it with you people?
You can’t bathe in water like normal creatures?
Someone’s gonna get fucking bitten for this, I swear!”
Merneith, Sobekneferu, Hatshepsut…Imhotep, Senmut…Senwosret I, Ahmes I…so many people.
You should also go to them building one of the pyramids and talk to the average worker too!
Yeah! and the artists, too! I’d also wanna find historians and librarians everywhere I visited.
It would be amazing to see the pyramids (as mentioned above), temples and other buildings in pristine condition… /damn near faints
I hear it’s not that hard, once you know the vowels.
…and what they were referencing
I don’t, but I know AE lacked some [ETA for accuracy - thanks, @Catsidhe ! - written] vowels.
They did have an ‘A,’ tho, as seen in the classic “Reblog if AAAAAAAAA” tumblr post…
It didn’t lack the sounds, but Hieroglyphics didn’t encode any vowels. It was a hybrid abjad. Hebrew and Arabic are at base abjads as well: even the letters which kind of go with vowels are actually consonants or semivowels: aleph/alif isn’t /a/, it’s the glottal stop /ʔ/. It’s just that it is typically (but not exclusively) associated with /a/. Yod isn’t /i/, it’s /j/. Waw isn’t /u/, it’s /w/. It’s just that they’re associated with the vowels.
The vulture hieroglyph isn’t “a”, it’s “ꜣ”, which is /ʔ/. It’s not “Ra”, it’s Rꜣ, which we pronounce “Ra”, and sometimes spell “Re” from historical habit. We don’t actually know what the vowel was, or even if it was open or closed syllables: was it /rɑʔ/, or /ræʔ/, or /rʌʔ/, or /rɔʔ/, or /rɑʔə/?
The “once you know the vowels” is a reference to the Stargate movie, where that’s the breakthrough to understanding the language spoken by the Goa’uld and their slaves.
ahem Ah, I’ve only seen it once, when it came out 
Ich habe das Original gesehen, nicht die brillante Neuverfilmung.
I thought we got “Rē” from later Coptic – and possibly Demotic, which I don’t know much about – rather than just having invented it from convention.
