On: Is it safe to use __secret_internals_do_not_use_or...

[brimble]

Only way this works is if the one reading it knows your culture was technologically advanced, for-real and not just in your own estimation, and has some appreciation of what that might mean.

Otherwise, "curse of the mummy? LOL, yeah, I'm sure that's a real thing. Must be something great buried here. Watch out for actual traps, but we're about to get rich, boys!"

[thaumasiotes → brimble]

> Only way this works is if the one reading it knows your culture was technologically advanced, for-real and not just in your own estimation, and has some appreciation of what that might mean.

This is pretty well guaranteed if they can read your message at all.

[brimble → thaumasiotes]

I alluded to European expeditions to Egypt for a reason :-)

Though maybe there's only a brief window of development in which a culture is both not superstitious enough to be scared by this, and also lacks the technology & knowledge to figure out what you actually mean and verify it themselves.

[thaumasiotes → brimble]

Europeans could read Egyptian inscriptions for two reasons:

- A descendant language had been preserved in the Coptic Bible.

- The Rosetta Stone provided a parallel text between Egyptian and Greek, and Greek was well understood.

But the ability to read Greek gave us more than just an understanding of what the Rosetta Stone said. The Greeks wrote a lot about Egypt, too.