So it turns out that the hieroglyphs written on the walls of temples and pyramids in Assassin's Creed: Origins aren't just decorations or randomly selected images. One enterprising individual has even started translating them, and they believe they've cracked the code. It turns out the walls are engraved with sections of the actual Assassin's Creed.
Over on Twitter, user Clazzaranius has started deciphering the hieroglyphs that appear in the various trailers and promotional materials for Assassin's Creed: Origins. Their profile states that they are an "archaeology person" and "gamer," so we imagine the Origins reveal was the happiest moment of their life; sort of a "this is what I was born to do" kind of moment.
As Clazzaranius explains, the upcoming Assassin's Creed game is set during the reign of Cleopatra VII, which just so happened to be a major focus of this particular person's studies. As an added bonus, the game is apparently using Middle Kingdom hieroglyphs, which Clazzaranius also studied.
Clazzaranius gave the images from Origins a quick look and determined that they looked legit. In other words, Ubisoft didn't just decorate the settings with a bunch of random hieroglyphs simply because they would look the part. Instead, they decided to give them actual meaning. Clazzaranius said that the process was slow because they were working with incomplete images, but they started to get a handle on what the messages were.
While Clazzaranius admits that parts of the images may be gibberish, the first sentence they were able to pull together states "You work in/with darkness." You have to keep in mind that reading this stuff isn't as simple as matching a letter or word to an image. As Clazzaranius' notes show, there's a lot of figuring and translating involved.
Clazzaranius explains that a lot of the images certainly appear to be filler, but there was also clearly a lot of work done in order to imbed actual messages as well. As Clazzaranius continued their work, the first phrase seemed to evolve into, "you work in darkness to serve light." Another section later became "nothing is true," to which Clazzaranius stated "I think I know where this is going." They were referring, of course, to the official creed of the Assassin's, which the entire game series is based on. While they've still got a lot of work to do, Clazzaranius said that knowing what the images are trying to say should help make further translation a bit easier.
It's always cool to see someone handed the opportunity to mix their various passions into a single project. It's also cool to know that Ubisoft clearly put in some extra leg-work to make the images in their game actually mean something, even if the vast, vast majority of players would never know what the hieroglyphs mean. Just remember to take some time to appreciate your surrounding when tooling around in Assassin's Creed: Origins. You never know what you might discover.
