I agree that it appears that the set decorators did a good job of "looking like an Egyptian" without actually being all that accurate.

You're right, toe5, that does look like an airplane broken in two.

Also, fourth and fifth pictures, in the center, that's stick-figure John Locke jumping off the table to hang himself. (OK, just kidding. But it does look like that.)

I thought I read somewhere with ancient Egyptian statues they can and were represented in both four and five toes form. Four toes when the "god" is in animal form and five toes when the "god" is in human form. Why I don't know, I wasn't there. I don't speak the language. I just remember reading that somewhere in this craziness.

Novashannon, DaveJohnson,

Kthnx. I agree with DaveJohnson that this is a good job on the part of the set design team of representing an 'Egyptian' aesthetic without being slavishly accurate.

[And I did Indo-European historical linguistics - only heiroglyphic language there was Luvian, no relation at all to Egyptian, so DaveJohnson has more of a leg to stand on here - perhaps four-toed?]

ashaver: airplanes can be dangerous...

Well, I can't make any claims to being a linguist, but I did study Middle Egyptian in University for 2 semesters (for a translation project). I wasn't what you would call fluent, but at least I can recognize genuine hieroglyphics :-)

I chock this up to Lost prop design - they wanted it to look Egyptian & they achieved the goal. Looking at the main piece of 'Anubis' and 'Smokey', I don't think you would ever see a real Egyptian plaque looking so crude - but again, this is make believe!

Cool, zulu! anything more ont he "glyphs"?

toe5: That's a viper or snake of some sort. Often, dangerous animals were depicted as being cut in half, or their feet cut off, so that it could cause no harm to the dead.

Fifth picture, bottom center image looks like it could be the same eye/ufo from the top left of the Anubis/Smokey image.

Yahhh,

These symbols, only some of which appear to be drawn from or based on Egyptian hieroglyphs, are not actually like what you might see in Egypt.

Note the surprising lack of repetition of the forms - there is only one I see more than once in the above grabs - the "plus sign" looking thing once on the right column, and once in the center.

Interestingly, there seems to be a large number of these signs which are 'pairs' of marks, like a lot of the dyadic structure we see all over Lost...

(yes, I am a linguist...)

Sorry - meant to add, the Egyptian hieroglyphic writing system is more complex than glyph = thing. It's a very complex writing system that used pictographs much like the Chinese writing system.

But again, that would be a funny nod to the screen capture fans ;-)

toe5

That would be funny, certainly. These are rather 'loose' hieroglyphics to begin with...

Long-time reader, first-time poster.

Second picture, top-left symbol on pillar: airplane broken in two?

Honor him. You can't contain Smokey.

I was hoping one of the alcove busts would still be intact, and be the head of John Locke!

So, I'm assuming this structure has been built around Smokey? The larger central graphic over the Smokey grate seems to imply that Smokey was there when these builders arrived... but did they build this to honor Smokey or to contain it?

It looks like Ben reacted to reading one of the sets of hieroglyphics.

It looks like there are small statues in the alcoves along the wall. I don't think Ben has been in there before because he seemed rather mystified.