Archaeology and ScriptsEgypt Remembered

A Script Forgotten

After the 4th century AD no one could read hieroglyphs; writers like Horapollo and later Athanasius Kircher read them as pure symbols.

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Writers like Herodotus and Strabo visited an Egypt where priests still carved hieroglyphs. That world ended slowly. Temples closed under Christian emperors, the last priests died, and by the 5th century AD no one alive could read the script. It stayed unreadable for about 1,400 years.

Key idea

Once the last trained readers were gone, scholars assumed hieroglyphs were not writing for sounds at all but pure symbols, each picture standing for a sacred idea. That belief, from Horapollo in late antiquity to Athanasius Kircher in the 1600s, kept the script locked.

Why it works

Hieroglyphs look like pictures, and some of them do stand for what they show. Late Greek writers knew that much and built a whole theory on it. But most signs in a real text stand for sounds. A reader who looks for a hidden meaning in every picture will invent a long mystical sentence where the Egyptian text says something plain, like a name and a title. The wrong theory made every attempt fail.

Horapollo

The Hieroglyphica, a Greek book under the name of Horapollo, probably dates from the 4th or 5th century AD. It explains nearly two hundred signs, each as an allegory. A few meanings are right, but the reasons given are not. The book says a goose means "son" because geese love their young. In fact the bird sign used in the word for "son" (a pintail duck) writes the consonants zꜣ, the same consonants as the word itself: a sound pun, not a lesson about birds. The manuscript was found on the Greek island of Andros in 1419 and printed in 1505, and Renaissance scholars took it as the key to Egypt.

The word zꜣ "son": the pintail duck writes the sounds zꜣ, and a stroke marks it as a word sign. A sound pun, not an allegory.

Athanasius Kircher

Kircher (1602–1680), a Jesuit scholar in Rome, published huge volumes on Egypt, including Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1652–1655). His "translations" turned short inscriptions on obelisks into pages of mystical philosophy. Yet he made one lasting contribution: he studied Coptic, the language of Egypt's Christians, and argued that it descended from the ancient language. He also saw that the water sign could stand for the sound m, matching the Coptic word ⲙⲟⲟⲩ "water". That Coptic link would later prove vital.

Worked example: How long was the script forgotten?

The last known hieroglyphic inscription was carved in AD 394. Champollion announced his decipherment in AD 1822. How many years lie between?
  1. Both dates are AD, so subtract: 1822 − 394.
  2. 1822 − 394 = 1428.

Answer: 1,428 years, or "about 1,400 years".

Worked example: Symbol or sound?

A scholar of the 1600s sees an owl in a cartouche and writes that it stands for "wisdom and the night". What is the modern reading, and why did he go wrong?
  1. The owl is the sound sign for m, one letter in a spelled-out name.
  2. He assumed every picture was a symbol. That is the error behind Horapollo and Kircher: they never tested whether the signs could spell words.
  3. A sound reading can be tested: the same signs must spell the same names wherever they appear. A symbolic reading cannot be tested at all.

Answer: The owl writes m; reading it as a symbol made the text unreadable.

Common mistake

Thinking hieroglyphs were always understood as sounds. For about 1,400 years European scholars thought they were mystical symbols. Remember the dates: last carved AD 394, read again in 1822.
The long silence: from the last hieroglyphic inscription (AD 394) to the decipherment (1822). Horapollo's book was printed in 1505 and Kircher wrote in the 1650s, both inside that silence.

Practice

Pass with 3 right answers, the last 2 in a row. Each right answer earns 2 XP.

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@teddyrookbook GitHub