The topic of time travel has long been debated by physicists and science fiction writers. Some say it is impossible, others say we simply haven’t figured it out yet. But could the ancient Egyptians have already made it work thousands of years ago? According to Richard Parkinson, curator of Ancient Egyptian Pharaohnic Culture at the British Museum’s Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan, the answer might be yes. “I recently found a girl crying on the floor of one of our exhibits,” says Parkinson. “I asked her what was wrong and she looked up at me and said, ‘look at the hieroglyphics, oh my god, that beetle is totally Karkat.’ And I looked at it and I just… I couldn’t believe it! I’ve spent over thirty years of my life studying these slabs, and I never noticed the Homestuck reference. That scarab beetle is totally supposed to be Karkat.”

17-year-old Alyssa Pearce was the first one to notice the similarities. “I was looking at the hieroglyphics and I saw that beetle and there is no way that’s not a Homestuck reference,” says Pearce. “Everything about it is just so Karkat! And there’s more, there’s a fish a couple feet down that represents Eridan, and a cat who is obviously Nepeta. Nepeta is in here a lot. I love Homestuck so much and it’s so incredible to see that they loved it even back then. It really is a timeless series, and it’s so amazing that they drew the characters.”

The presence of these Homestuck characters is indeed amazing, but the question remains: just how were the Egyptians able to read Homestuck? Physicist Paul Davies may have the answer. “This is a bit of a controversial theory, but I believe time travel actually can be achieved by creating two wormholes on opposite sides of a neutron star, or ‘pulsar’. A lot of physicists argue that there is no evidence for the existence of wormholes, but, well… I think the hieroglyphics speak for themselves. I mean, really, that beetle is so totally Karkat, and how else could they have possibly read Homestuck over two thousand years ago?”

So does this mean will we be traveling through time in the near future? Perhaps, but perhaps not. According to Davies, there is no guarantee that the wormholes used by the Egyptians are still open, and we have no way of knowing their location. However, in light of this new discovery, astronomers are keeping their eyes peeled. With any luck, we’ll be discussing JohnxKarkat with the Egyptians in the near future — or in the past!