i know the pain. it's like Santa all over again.

Interesting side note : Chester F. Violin is sometimes mistaken for the less successful instrument inventor Chester F. Viola ; some history books even mix him up with Bob Stradavarius, the guy who invented the Stradacaster guitar.

Nero would have played the cithara, if anything. More likely he sang, and drank.

It's still a lovely piece of work, as good as any illustrations I've seen, but I find the characters on her lectern most fascinating. They resemble Hebrew, but if they are, it's a hand I don't recognize. As Paul Simon sings, "God only knows / God makes his plan / The information's unavailable / To the mortal man." I can guess which alphabet He uses... Hey, Belshazzar had to call in Daniel to read "Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin," proving for all time that sometimes you have to take a prophet with a loss.

And apparently Tacitus exaggerated the severity of the fire - most contemporary writers of the time barely mention it, one noting that four blocks of apartment housing and about 60 -70 individual homes burned down - some maybe Nero kept it down to a poppish two and a half minutes ... prolly edited out the instrumentals from "Light My Fire."

The alphabet is the Uchen script of Tibetan, but the Mantra(s) are Sanskrit : (reading from the bottom up) Ah Hig Ka (a yogic breath thingy) then the popular Aum Ma-ni Pa-dme Hung. i suppose i could have used the Devanari Sanskrit script, but the Mani mantra in Uchen is rather popular, so ...

Back in the late 1980s, the Navy promoted one of the guys who worked for me part-time to Chief Petty Officer. Every new Chief has to make a book: pages, binding, wooden board cover, the works. The Master Chief in charge told him he had to number the pages in Sanskrit. Sanskrit? For all poor Frank knew, that was a village on Long Island. He knew better than to try and fake it, so he came to the Perfesser. Fortunately, the base I worked on had a great reference library. I found a book on languages of South Asia and it included Sanskrit. It also included alphabets and examples -- including numbers. Frank laboriously copied the unfamiliar letters into his Chief's book.

At the ceremony, the Master Chief took one look at the pages numbers and called him on it. Fortunately there was a Petty Officer on Frank's base who was familiar with Sanskrit and looked it over and pronounced it good. That earned me a six-pack of the good stuff.

Personally, I would prefer Thai. A friend from high school studied the language, and it has to be one o the world's most beautiful writing systems.

A lot of East Asian languages are related, such as the Tibet/Burmese group. Sanskrit, on the other paw, is a cornerstone of the Indo-European group of languages along with Persian, Greek, and Latin. i can still speak and read a bit of Sanskrit and Tibetan, a tiny bit of Japanese. A bit of Latin helps with learning Sanskrit - and our modern numerals are derived from Sanskrit - the Arabs, about 1, 500 years later, adapted the Sanskrit number symbols - so we are not writing "arabic numerals" and never have been.

I remember much of that from the research. What Frank wanted was the word names for the page numbers written out. I don't recall how many pages there were, but I remember we may have fudged some.

My Dad researched languages before and after he retired. A chemical engineer by training,he was fascinated by many things and history and languages were only a part of it. I wish I could have saved his notes before the rest of the family discarded them.