#luxor

So in 2003, when I was thirteen, I had a popular sprite request thread on the PokéMasters forums, early in the history of Pokémon sprite edits, when this was still a new thing only a few people were doing. On December 29th 2003, I made this sprite as a request, presumably for the TPM thread:

The sprite was saved as "dragon.png". It's a splice, made of existing sprites put together with some scratch edits: specifically, I used the body of my Gold version Charizard revamp, the head and tail of my Crystal version Lugia revamp, the wings of the R/S Charizard, and the forward-facing claws of the Yellow version Pidgeot, edited to erase what I interpreted as the left toe on the right foot and the right toe on the left foot (today, I think what I saw at the time as the right toe of Pidgeot's foot is actually the other foot). (I'm not totally sure whether the back-facing claw was taken off some other sprite or if I added it from scratch based on the other claws; I haven't found another sprite that matches it.)

(I don't totally remember the nature of the request, and my TPM sprite thread unfortunately seems lost to time; however, if I were to guess, I would guess that this dragon being a wyvern and having Lugia's head wasn't my idea: I had pretty particular ideas about what I felt dragons should look like as a kid, which definitely included having six limbs, and I didn't really consider Lugia one and wasn't a huge fan of Lugia as a Pokémon. On the other hand, some of the other specifics probably were: the exact sprites I used were almost certainly my idea, since I tended to use my own revamps in requested splices if I just liked them better than the R/S sprite of the Pokémon. And amusingly, if you've read The Quest for the Legends, I think this sprite shares some design DNA with Chalenor, who I designed around a similar time - the Lugiaesque tail and the black body with colored slashlike markings is quite similar, even if one is a dragon and the other a cat!)

At any rate, after making it, I put dragon.png in my sprite gallery, where I stuck every sprite I made, with a caption that just said, "A requested, cool dragon pokémon." A while later, I revamped and reorganized my sprite gallery and took out a bunch of sprites I considered old and embarrassing for one reason or another; dragon.png was one of those that got the axe. Something that always bugged me about it was how the feet seemed to be angled wrong - I thought I was being super clever using the same foot twice and removing a different toe from each copy to make them appear to be two feet at different angles, but the angle on both was wrong, and that's still where my eyes are immediately drawn when I look at it. All in all, the sprite hasn't been anywhere public under my name since I silently removed it from the gallery.

I hadn't thought of it in years, either, until this Tuesday, when I got a very excited e-mail from an Italian Pokémon fan. You see, since no later than 2005, my dragon.png sprite has been an infamous urban legend in Italy specifically, a rumour on the level of Mew under the truck or Pikablu. Some Italian who visited my sprite gallery back when dragon.png was still in it took a shine to it, put it into fake screenshots of FireRed and LeafGreen, named it Luxor, and spread a classic sort of playground rumour where this Pokémon could be unlocked in the Japanese version only by following an elaborate sequence of steps. Supposedly, catching Luxor would delete every Pokémon in your party or in the box you put it in.

In the years since, people had made wiki entries, fanart, fake cards of Luxor. There's an entire 22-minute Italian-language YouTube video about Luxor. I never heard about it because the rumour was only ever properly a thing in Italy; Italian visitors to The Cave of Dragonflies never connected it to me because the sprite wasn't on the site anymore. Plush had only dug it up by trawling through archive.org and stumbling upon it in an archived version of my gallery from when dragon.png was still in it. For more than twenty years my sprite has been an urban legend Pokégod and I had no idea! Wow!

Archaeologists Uncover 3,000-Year-Old Tomb Near Egypt's Luxor

Archaeologists uncovered a 3,000-year-old tomb near the southern Egyptian city of Luxor, authorities said on Sunday, the latest in a series of discoveries that officials hope will boost tourism.

The tomb, identified as belonging to a man named Paser, was found by a Dutch archaeological mission from Leiden University in the Sheikh Abd el-Qurna necropolis on Luxor's West Bank, according to Egypt's tourism and antiquities ministry. The team of archeologists will work to identify people buried there and learn more about them.

Specialists believe the tomb dates to the Ramesside period, which spans Egypt's 19th and 20th dynasties, based on the artistic style of its inscriptions.

Located east of a previously known burial site, the tomb follows the traditional layout of private Theban tombs from the New Kingdom (1570-1069 BC), they added.

It consists of an open courtyard leading to a rock-cut chapel shaped like an inverted "T", with burial chambers carved beneath ground level.

Archaeologists found several well-preserved architectural elements in the courtyard, including a mudbrick bench designed to hold a funerary stela and a staircase flanked by sloping ramps leading to the entrance.

Inside, inscriptions bearing Paser's name depict him worshipping various deities inside shrines, as well as seated with his wife before an offering table.

The excavation team said further documentation and study will continue in order to determine who was buried in the tomb and to better understand its historical and archaeological context.

The discovery comes as Egypt seeks to promote new archaeological finds to support tourism, a key source of foreign currency for the country.

Luxor is home to some of the world's most significant ancient monuments and archaeological sites. The recent discovery is part of a research project that's been ongoing since 2018, according to the tourism and antiquities ministry.

Last year, also near Luxor, a large tomb belonging to a pharaoh was reopened to visitors after more than 20 years of renovation. That tomb features paintings of Amenhotep III, who ruled ancient Egypt between 1390 B.C. and 1350 B.C., along with a group of ancient Egyptian gods.