Has anyone ever bothered to freeze-frame this? My Latin studies never got beyond first year, but there's clearly some text on the prop tablet that was in the shooting script and cut from the film's final edit. In particular there's the text "...across the desert and through the mountain to the Canyon of the Crescent Moon, broad enough only for one man, to the Temple of the Sun, holy enough for all men. Where the cup that holds the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ resides forever."
I just got the Lost Journal tonight, and it has an excellent transcription of the full tablet, though it's obviously been back-translated from the prop's Latin (which was in itself a translation from the shooting script). Amusingly, the Journal replicates an error in the prop: one line of text from the lower third of the writing reappears, for no discernible reason, at the very bottom of the tablet, after the message proper has ended.
Also, the prop appears to be Classical Latin, not Medieval Latin (which is understandable from a moviemaking standpoint, as classical Latin is much more widely studied and translations more easily determined).
PS--does anyone else think the "Temple of the Sun" is a reference to Tintin? We know Spielberg is a big fan of the Belgian boy reporter, and the use of Petra as a location in one of the Tintin stories was echoed in LC as well.
I just got the Lost Journal tonight, and it has an excellent transcription of the full tablet, though it's obviously been back-translated from the prop's Latin (which was in itself a translation from the shooting script). Amusingly, the Journal replicates an error in the prop: one line of text from the lower third of the writing reappears, for no discernible reason, at the very bottom of the tablet, after the message proper has ended.
Also, the prop appears to be Classical Latin, not Medieval Latin (which is understandable from a moviemaking standpoint, as classical Latin is much more widely studied and translations more easily determined).
PS--does anyone else think the "Temple of the Sun" is a reference to Tintin? We know Spielberg is a big fan of the Belgian boy reporter, and the use of Petra as a location in one of the Tintin stories was echoed in LC as well.
