Very, very nice set! Love this theme!

So was this the version that came with a big plastic sarcophagus thing or was that 5919?

Give me great small sets like this any day. They rammed so much into just 164 pieces. Love it.

@PurpleDave said:
" @Brickalili said:
"So was this the version that came with a big plastic sarcophagus thing or was that 5919?"

5919 had the giant mummy. This one had a gold case.

@watcher21:
Brickset set listings show 5909 (there is no 5909-2) containing one more part than either 2879 or 5948, but there's no mention why. Rebrickable shows the piece counts being 197, 195, and 196 respectively, and says 5909 does come with the mummy container (which would account for the base and lid). There's no mention of why 5948 has one extra piece, but I'd guess it actually came with the gold case, not the mummy."

I just used http://peeron.com/inv/parts/x875

It was the 5919 version of the set I had, but either way I absolutely loved it as a kid. It was the biggest Adventurers location set that I had (at least until Orient Expedition came along), and I must have had absolutely hours of fun bringing together my entire Adventurers team (I had Harry and Kilroy from 5956 and Pippin from 5936 (albeit in the wrong outfit for the location)) to discover this place, going head to head with Mr. Hates and Slyboots (who I had from 5938) in their attempts to recover the Red Ruby*, outwit the skeleton guards (my skeletons from various sets tended to all join forces...!), and avoid getting eaten by snakes. Good times... I'm not sure I see as much play value in it these days as I got out of it back then, but my childhood imagination made this small building seem waaaaaay bigger than it actually was!

*In hindsight that's a redundant name, aren't all rubies red? But that was what the Lego Adventures comic strip called it, so that was the name I ran with too. The Curse of the Mummy puzzle adventure book gave it the proper name Re-Gou and attributed magical powers to it, rather than it just being valuable.

I even remember getting the set, at least vaguely. As a kid, birthdays were when I got most of my "big" Lego sets (these days it seems laughable to consider this set as "big", but the Mummy storage container in the version I had *did* increase the perceived size...), and I generally went to the small local toy shop a few days ahead of time with my mum to pick out which set I wanted. I believe it was like 2002 by this time, because I know this wasn't my first Mr. Hates/Sam Sinister/Baron Von Barron minifigure (that would be the one from 5920, a birthday gift from a friend in 2000), and it also couldn't have been 2001 because that was the year I got 7171 Mos Espa Podrace instead. I was surprised and enthralled to see that not only did the shop have an Adventurers Egypt set in stock these several years later, but it was one that I hadn't even known existed before! And while this set didn't have any minifigures in who I didn't already have versions of (unique minifigs usually being a major criteria in which sets I'd choose as a child), the prospect of revisiting one of the first themes I'd fallen in love with was just too good to miss!

I remember opening the set on my parents' bed the way I always did with birthday presents... and looking back at that year tells me that my birthday would have fallen on a Sunday then, which I think checks out; learning that brings back to me very hazy memories of building this set on my bedroom floor, before we headed out to church...

Of course, nowadays I much prefer my 5988, which I rebuilt from a used lot a few years ago, to this set; but I still found this one absolutely fantastic at the time!

@watcher21 said:
" @PurpleDave said:
" @Brickalili said:
"So was this the version that came with a big plastic sarcophagus thing or was that 5919?"

5919 had the giant mummy. This one had a gold case.

@watcher21:
Brickset set listings show 5909 (there is no 5909-2) containing one more part than either 2879 or 5948, but there's no mention why. Rebrickable shows the piece counts being 197, 195, and 196 respectively, and says 5909 does come with the mummy container (which would account for the base and lid). There's no mention of why 5948 has one extra piece, but I'd guess it actually came with the gold case, not the mummy."

I just used http://peeron.com/inv/parts/x875"

Ah, so Peeron has a comic book inventories as 5909-1, which explains why the set was pushed to 5909-2. Brickset doesn’t follow the exact same numbering convention, so 5909-1 was left available for the set.

I'd violate a few tombs to get sets as cool as this again on store shelves.

Seems to be some sort of Egyptian garage using whatever parts are available.

@ThatBionicleGuy said:
"Red Ruby*"
"*In hindsight that's a redundant name, aren't all rubies red?"

So, funny thing is, rubies and sapphires are the same gemstone (corundum), but with different impurities that result in the red vs blue coloration. Rubies have historically been called “red sapphires”, but sapphires are not called “blue rubies”. Rubies also come in a range of red shades, so some could be referred to as “pink rubies” (this is especially true of manmade rubies where they can adjust the specific chromium content to achieve a desired shade). Only in the US, pink rubies that are below a certain level of color saturation are officially called “pink sapphires”, which just seems stupid since nobody else got on board with this (including the ICGA). Back before molecular science established what a true ruby is, the name included a type of gemstone known as a “spinel”, and the red ones are still sometimes called spinel-rubies or balas rubies, as a throwback to that historical confusion. Corundum with no impurities of any kind will be colorless like diamond, but apparently only those that fall in the red spectrum are referred to as rubies (so maybe not so stupid to set a minimum saturation, if one that has a barely perceptible pink tint could qualify as a ruby instead of a sapphire). Oh, and this apparently includes orange, violet…and purple. I even found a picture of an uncut cluster of purple ruby.

@AllenSmith:
And of course there are the Artoo/Threepio hieroglyphs (found in at least two sets) and other sneaky references that just refuse to participate in your theory, except that _some_ of them are legitimate LEGO references. Specifically, the second iteration of the Well of Souls from Raiders of the Lost Ark included logos to at least two in-house themes, I believe, in addition to the aforementioned droids.

@AllenSmith said:
"I've long been curious what the hieroglyphics on the printed pieces actually said. Seeing it as the RSOTD prompted me to take a guess.

The Egyptian writing system was very complicated. They had single-glyph symbols ("uniliterals") for all the consonants in their language, and largely omitted vowels. And while they could have stopped by defining an alphabet with just those uniliterals, they didn't, adding hundreds to additional characters that represented phonetic combinations. However, the existence of the uniliteral set means it's common to encounter tables to "translate" our letters into theirs, especially in educational material aimed at children. So while the Lego designers may have copied a real inscription or used completely random letters, the tables are also a likely possibility.

Since the symbols are all uniliterals but one (and that one erroneously appears as a single-letter equivalent in some tables you find online), I'm guessing they did indeed use a table to try to write modern words.

https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=2454px2
The first one is A-N-U-B-I-Z, which I take to be Anubis, the god of funerary rites. This particularly bears evidence of a lookup table. For one thing, the Egyptian name was Inpu (and thus written with different symbols). For another, the arm symbol is supposed to be pronounced with a long a (there's a better character for the short a), and there is a different symbol for s—distinctions missed in a simple discussion of letter equivalence.

https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=2454px4
This one is T-H-WA-H-T. I think the loopy character in the middle is the lasso biliteral https://www.unicode-symbol.com/u/1336F.html , though some online equivalence tables quote it as O. Since the first brick was a badly-translated deity name, I'm going to guess this one is Thoth gone wrong, with the last two letters transposed, and once again, a completely wrong set of symbols used, because that's the Greek name of the god, not what would have been written in Egyptian.

Both Anubis and Thoth are apparently named exactly that in Danish, so this all fits.

In other sets, there was:

https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=2454px3
H-WA-R-U-Z, or Horus, king god.

https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=2454px1
K-H-N-U-M, flood god.

All this is quite disappointing. It would be much more interesting if the symbols translated to something Lego-related.

But maybe all hope is not lost. The sarcophagus lid has Lion-Reed-Pot-MaybeLassoBadlyPrinted, which would turn into L-E-G-O according to some dubious substitution tables.
https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=30164px1&idColor=2

And https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=5938stk01&idColor=0 contains N-E-L-S. Might this be the Danish name Nils?"

Now, that's cool! Probably the graphic designer tried to use characters that meant something but did not have the time to learn all the intricacies of the language. Still, the fact that you were able to decipher 'their' usage of the code is really neat.

@PurpleDave Also very nice knowledge, thanks. Funny all the stuff you end up learning just by collecting Lego blocks!

@PurpleDave said:
"And of course there are the Artoo/Threepio hieroglyphs (found in at least two sets) and other sneaky references that just refuse to participate in your theory, except that _some_ of them are legitimate LEGO references. Specifically, the second iteration of the Well of Souls from Raiders of the Lost Ark included logos to at least two in-house themes, I believe, in addition to the aforementioned droids."

Lego graphics have gotten much more detailed and pleasantly self-referential since 1998. Winking Lego references are expected now, but were rare back then. For example, the original Pirate flag was a human skull; only much later did it become a minifig skull. The Adventures line was starting to Lego-ize the graphics, with minifig-styled figures on the Egyptian wall art and minifig-style hand clips on the falcon, but still hadn't gone all-in. After all, this was the era when Lego thought minifigures had noses! I don't know if it's still this way, but the minifig models at the entrance to Legoland California had noses in 1999. Even though it was much newer, Legoland Florida was the same when I visited in 2016, since they just copied most of the existing models from the previous park (it was like stepping back into late 90s Lego!). And I wanted to take a chisel to them.

@AllenSmith said:
" @PurpleDave said:
"And of course there are the Artoo/Threepio hieroglyphs (found in at least two sets) and other sneaky references that just refuse to participate in your theory, except that _some_ of them are legitimate LEGO references. Specifically, the second iteration of the Well of Souls from Raiders of the Lost Ark included logos to at least two in-house themes, I believe, in addition to the aforementioned droids."

Lego graphics have gotten much more detailed and pleasantly self-referential since 1998. Winking Lego references are expected now, but were rare back then. For example, the original Pirate flag was a human skull; only much later did it become a minifig skull. The Adventures line was starting to Lego-ize the graphics, with minifig-styled figures on the Egyptian wall art and minifig-style hand clips on the falcon, but still hadn't gone all-in. After all, this was the era when Lego thought minifigures had noses! I don't know if it's still this way, but the minifig models at the entrance to Legoland California had noses in 1999. Even though it was much newer, Legoland Florida was the same when I visited in 2016, since they just copied most of the existing models from the previous park (it was like stepping back into late 90s Lego!). And I wanted to take a chisel to them."

But...there are minifigs that do have noses:

https://brickset.com/sets/subtheme-Indians

Anyways, one other thing I just remembered that may explain the goofy spelling is fonts. There's a Greek alphabet font, and they tried to keep equivalent letters paired up. But the problem is, the Euclidian alphabet only has 24 letters, while the Roman alphabet has 26. And then Greek has psi and theta (both of which pair two Roman consonants), epsilon and eta (both "e" equivalents), and omicron and omega (both "o" equivalents). So when you type using a Greek alphabet font, you get goofy spelling errors where they mapped the redundant vowels or consonant pairs to Roman letters that have no Greek equivalent.

@PurpleDave said:
"But...there are minifigs that do have noses:

https://brickset.com/sets/subtheme-Indians "

Just because Lego made it doesn't mean I have to acknowledge its canonicity. The mercifully-brief nose era was a horrible aberration in history. Timmy must have killed his grandfather, and the Indians were the last of the Mohicans, because noses vanished long ago and never returned.

Back to the original subject, I looked at the Pharaoh's Quest prints, and as far as I can tell, they're Legoized nonsense—a combination of real hieroglyphs, things that look like they could have been hieroglyphs but weren't, and things that are just Lego, like a 1x4 brick. Alas.

https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=3754px1
This part looks like it has more designer names on it. There's N-E-L-S again, and also H-E-I-N-R-K (Heinrich?). The other two inscriptions are S/Z-I-S-S-A (Sissa?) and G-A-I-L/R (Gail?).

@AllenSmith said:
" @PurpleDave said:
"But...there are minifigs that do have noses:

https://brickset.com/sets/subtheme-Indians "

Just because Lego made it doesn't mean I have to acknowledge its canonicity. The mercifully-brief nose era was a horrible aberration in history. Timmy must have killed his grandfather, and the Indians were the last of the Mohicans, because noses vanished long ago and never returned.

Back to the original subject, I looked at the Pharaoh's Quest prints, and as far as I can tell, they're Legoized nonsense—a combination of real hieroglyphs, things that look like they could have been hieroglyphs but weren't, and things that are just Lego, like a 1x4 brick. Alas."

So you prefer smooth-faced Sneetches to the nose-faced variety?