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Are any of the hieroglyphs, runes, etc. appearing in Stargate intelligible/meaningful?


The Stargate franchise is built around the notion of extraterrestrial visitors in Earth's ancient past, connecting many ancient Earth cultures with fictional extraterrestrial races such as the Goa'uld, Asgard, etc.. As a result, we often see a lot of Egyptian hieroglyphics, Norse runes, and other writing forms on screen. Where there is supposed to be a correlation with ancient Earth languages (regardless of origin), do the symbols actually make sense? Are they just random/arbitrarily chosen symbols? Do they form intelligible phrases? Do they contain production in-jokes? If so, what do they say?


Examples of alien writing:




  • Stargate symbols. Representations of constellations; non-linguistic and therefore out of the scope of my question.





  • Hieroglyphics. Look like Ancient Egyptian. Stargate mythology associates such writing with the language of the Goa'uld. Do any of the symbols appearing on obviously Goa'uld artifacts (resurrection sarcophagus, walls of Goa'uld ships, etc.) form readable phrases according to modern understanding of Ancient Egyptian?




  • Runes. Looks like ancient Norse writing. Stargate mythology associates such writing with the language of the Asgard. Do any of the runes where they appear in a technological or extra-terrestrial setting (as in episodes "Thor's Hammer", "Thor's Chariot", etc.) actually form readable Runic phrases?




  • Ancient. Looks more like a bar code than any natural language. Although Daniel Jackson associates spoken Ancient (one of the "four races") with Latin, the written form is obviously made-up for the show.





  • Nox and Furling. Writing appears in one or perhaps two episodes in which they are implicitly or explicitly identified as members of the "four races". Their languages are never associated with any human language, so any writings we might see must be made-up and therefore out of the scope of my question.




  • The Goa'uld system lord Yu wears clothing or other artifacts, or appears in settings upon which Asian (specifically Chinese?) symbols sometimes appear. Are these symbols meaningful in the context of their appearance?




I believe there are a few other examples of alien writings which Jackson associates with languages of the ancient Middle East or South Asia - Babylonian, Cuneiform(?) etc.. Does any of this writing which appears on screen actually form readable phrases, either meaningful in context or joke-full for the production staff?




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