Redundant Array of Pyramid Hieroglyphics (RAPH)

How do you store data so that it can be accessed a long, long time in the future? Like hundreds or thousands of years in the future?

Right now I am in Egypt, studying how the ancient Egyptians accomplished this.

Some temples in ancient Egypt focused on the dead, but others focused on the living. Those temples were partly religious, but they also functioned as centers of learning and healing, a sort of combination church/university/hospital.

The temple of Kom Ombo focused on the living, and it used an interesting data protection technique. The temple came with an "Operator's Manual". When operating a temple, every day of the year requires a different procedure — different prayers, different offerings, different sacrifices to be performed by the priests. To ensure data protection and procedural compliance, the builders carved the operator's manual — a large table with 365 different procedures — into stone walls.

Then, as now, preventing identity theft required extra data protection for sensitive personal information. Pharaohs made colossal statues of themselves, but if it was a good statue, a later Pharaoh would recut the hieroglyph to replace the old name with his own. In response, Ramses II developed write-only hieroglyphs. He cut them inches deep into granite. Expensive, true, but thirty-five hundred years later, Ramses II is one of the best known Pharaohs.

For most of the past two thousand years, hieroglyphs have been unreadable. But then the Rosetta Stone was discovered, which had the same Egyptian text written in Greek letters as well as hieroglyphics. To make sure your data can be read in a thousand years, write it in multiple formats.

The data that I accessed at Kom Ombo — with the help of a tour guide — was perhaps twenty-three hundred years old, but the pyramid of the Pharaoh Teti at Saqqara contains hieroglyphic data over four thousand years old.

Teti protected his data under tons and tons of stone (hardened storage?), but he also used redundancy. In his burial chamber, the same message was repeated down long columns. Many copies of the columns were repeated across the wall.

What data would you protect so that it could be read four thousand years in the future?

The RAPH protected message in Teti's tomb was this. Over and over and over, it said "Teti".