The Egyptian Forerunner
Or, how Athanasius Kircher translated postdiluvian Hamite Egypto-Sinaitic logograms through prayer & meditation
When word reached Pope Alexander VII that the Dominicans of Our Lady Over Minerva had uncovered, while renovating their monastic garden, the angular outlines of an Egyptian obelisk deep in the Roman soil, His Holiness sent right away for the only man in Christendom–perhaps the world–who could make sense of the the artifact and read its hieroglyphs. Athanasius Kircher, S.J., responded with regrets, explaining that he was away on business, and would send an assistant in his place. As His Holiness knew, Father Kircher was always busy, poring over dusty tomes in obscure Oriental languages, experimenting with magnets or microscopes, tinkering with church organs, or otherwise wandering his personal museum that contained, among other things, the tailbone of a mermaid, a stone from the Tower of Babel, and a mechanical organ that played every kind of birdsong. Who could blame him for delegating a bit of busywork?
Before long, the assistant returned from the dig site, etchings in hand, apologetic. He’d been able to make copies of three sides, but the obelisk was too heavy to roll over, and the fourth side remained hidden. This was no problem to Kircher: judging by the available inscriptions, he could predict which hieroglyphs were on the fourth side. Taking a sheet of paper, Kircher copied out the missing hieroglyphs in his precise script. Soon the obelisk was rolled over.
“And when they had discovered,” Kircher wrote, “that soundly and without error all of my markings were composed as on the original, they were utterly stupefied.” The Dominicans suspected that the Jesuit had made a pact with some dog-headed Egyptian devil, or deployed some Kabbalistic black magic to see through the stone and decode the pagan writing. The Pope, though, was delighted, and asked Kircher for a private demonstration on the meaning of these hieroglyphs. They described, in Kircher’s Latin translation, how
Hemphata the supreme spirit and archetype infuses its virtues and gifts in the soul of the sidereal world…whence comes the vital motion in the material and elemental world, and an abundance of all things and variety of species arises from the fruitfulness of the Osirian bowl, in which, drawn by some marvellous sympathy, it flows ceaselessly, strong in power hidden in its two-faced self.
The Pope had the obelisk mounted on a marble sculpture of an elephant, where it still stands today.
The hieroglyphs have since been retranslated. The text, in full, contains nothing more than the names and titles of the pharaoh Apries (r. 589 - 570 BC)–no supreme spirit, no vital motion, no Osirian bowl. Nobody knows who or what Hemphata is supposed to be, or where Kircher got the name. Many of the figures Kircher “translated” weren’t hieroglyphs at all, but ornamental motifs. In the post-Rosetta world of modern Egyptology, Kircher’s long, lucidly-argued books on Egypt turned out to be so many thousands of pages of fantasy and bosh. The bronze tablet he considered his key to translation turned out to be a Roman forgery, its signs an illiterate hodgepodge of pseudo-glyphs. He came very nearly close to being wrong about everything; the handful of times he didn’t only got things right in ways he couldn’t have ever known or suspected. It was enough to make the forefather of Egyptology.
Two different books call Athanasius Kircher (1602 - 1680) The Last Man Who Knew Everything, which is how he must have looked to his thousands of fans. In a lifetime overlapping with Galileo, Descartes, Leibniz, and Newton, Kircher was the intellectual superstar of his time, a polymathic genius who’d written authoritative works on magnetism, musicology, linguistics, optics, mechanics, geometry, and more. But while his contemporaries were developing the sober, testable methods of modern science, Kircher looked backwards to the freewheeling, associative, Biblical style of medieval scholarship, flying high on citations from Aristotle and Genesis, unencumbered by experiments, equations, and observation. He never went to Egypt or China or the great subterranean continent of Atlantis, but he wrote books about all of them. While his contemporaries were discovering the moons of Jupiter and the volumes of gases, Kircher was calculating the precise number of species on Noah’s Ark or proving, beyond all doubt, that the Tower of Babel could not have reached the Moon. He invented, or claimed to invent, a magnetic clock, an engine powered by sunflower seeds, a water-powered church organ, the first megaphone, and an algorithmic card-catalogue capable of automatically generating short melodies with four-part harmonies. He was endlessly curious, once descending into the crater of Mount Vesuvius, and using the newly-invented microscope to look at blood, rotting food, and rare minerals. To his native German he added proficiency in Italian, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Chaldean, Arabic, Aramaic, Armenian, and Coptic, along with a little bit of Chinese and, of course, ancient Egyptian.
As a writer of fantasy, Kircher is first rate. His works, taken together, form a cockeyed encyclopedia from another dimension, where Aztecs chant Hebrew prayers from atop their skyscraper pyramids and the waters of the Great Deluge lap at the subterranean shores of Atlantis. As a scholar, though, Kircher was wrong about almost everything, from the very great (he wrote at length against the heliocentric heresy) to the very small (armadillos are not hybrids of turtles and porcupines). Outside a few scholars who study him for historical interest, Kircher is remembered, if at all, as a fraud and a fool.
I kept running into Kircher while reading about the history of hieroglyphs. The conventional story goes like this: after their invention in the late 4th millennium BC, hieroglyphs were in continuous use by Egyptian priests for some three and a half thousand years, slowly dying out in the early Christian era. The last known hieroglyphs date to AD 394, and within a hundred years even educated Egyptians like Horapollo could only recognize a handful of simple hieroglyphs, and grossly misunderstood the nature of hieroglyphic writing. Fourteen centuries passed, Horappollo’s speculations growing to monstrous proportions in the hands of Christian monks and hermetic mystics who attributed all kinds of magical powers to Egyptian writing, Athanasius Kircher chief among them. This went on until Napoleon’s soldiers bunkered down in an old Mamluk fortress outside the town of Rashid and discovered one of the foundation stones had writing in three different scripts: Greek, hieroglyphs, and a shorthand based on hieroglyphs. By 1822, they had all been deciphered, revealing a writing system like any other, with no room for wacky Kiercherian speculation.
The whole story is worth reading, and books like John Ray’s excellent Rosetta Stone and Edward Dolnick’s The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone are good introductions to the only swashbuckling adventure graphology has ever had. (I do wish, though, that both books would be more specific about particular hieroglyphs and the grammar of ancient Egyptian.) I had originally picked these books up with the intention of writing about the men who got hieroglyphs right, but found my thoughts drifting towards the man who got them wrong in the most interesting–and ultimately fruitful–ways.
Three problems confronted the early decoders of hieroglyphs: the meaning of individual glyphs, the language that they corresponded to, and the total number of glyphs. Kircher, as we have seen, got the first one catastrophically wrong. Following his Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic sources, Kircher believed that hieroglyphs were a kind of purely pictorial language that expressed the wisdom of the Egyptians. A reader had only to be initiated in the religion to understand the meaning of the symbols. Always fond of mysticism, which holds that all religions share the same sources, Kircher was convinced that bits of Egyptian wisdom were concealed in other occult traditions, like Kabbalah, alchemy, Neoplatonism. Being an expert on the occult and knowing a few things about Egyptian religion, then, Kircher could “read” hieroglyphs by meditating on the meaning of each glyph and its relationship to the others around it.
This was wrong, obviously. Hieroglyphs are simply phonetic symbols that combine to form words in natural language. The rabbit glyph doesn’t mean “open” because, as Horappollo insisted, rabbits never closed their eyes–the ancient Egyptian word for “rabbit” was just a homophone for “open,” so it could be used for either one. Because of this fundamental misunderstanding of hieroglyphic meaning, Kircher and his generation of Egyptologists never had a chance.
On his way to this falsity, though, Kircher accidentally solved the second problem of hieroglyphs: following his Arabic sources, Kircher had come to believe that Coptic, spoken by medieval Egyptian Christians, was the direct descendant of the ancient Egyptian language. Other European scholars had toyed with the idea before, but never had enough access or talent to learn an obscure, dying language spoken by a religious minority in a backwater province of an enemy empire. Kircher, as a high-ranking Jesuit with access to Rome’s vast libraries, had that access. Reading Arabic and Hebrew sources, he taught himself Coptic, published a Coptic-Latin dictionary with grammatical notes, and recorded Coptic hymns in western musical notation. More importantly, Kircher would declare, repeatedly, that Coptic was, as one of his books called it, The Egyptian Forerunner–not necessary for reading hieroglyphs, but interesting nonetheless. These books led to a small but lasting community of European Coptic scholars, whose work was necessary to read the Rosetta Stone.
This might seem obvious, but it’s worth stating: without knowing the language of a mystery script, decipherment is almost impossible. There are only a handful of texts in Linear B but we can read them because we know they’re in Greek; on the other hand, we can sound out the glyphs of Nubian Meroitic, but nobody knows the Meroitic language and the inscriptions are gibberish. Thanks to Kircher’s Coptic books, Champollion was able to match Coptic sounds to Egyptian hieroglyphs: if the sun hieroglyph 𓇳 matched the Coptic word for sun, ra, would it appear in the hieroglyphs for a name like Ramesses? It did.
Kircher also indirectly solved the most vexing problem of hieroglyphs: their baffling variety. While the number of glyphs varies over the centuries, even at its most conservative, there were hundreds in use–far too many for an ordinary alphabet. Languages only need a few dozen phonemes to express every word (English has about 45, depending on your accent) and a few dozen letters to represent them. If hieroglyphs weren’t purely symbolic, how could all of them possibly have different sound values?
Once again, Kircher suggested the solution in his own indirect, backwards way. Besides being the world’s foremost authority on Egypt, magnets, and volcanoes, he was also an expert on Chinese language and culture. His China Illustrata, another massive, ill-conceived epic about the Biblical origins of an ancient, pagan culture in the style of his Oedipus Aegyptiacus, was one of the first bestsellers on China in European history. In the Kircherian calculus, Egypt and China, both being massive and ancient empires with a reputation for monumental architecture and secretive wisdom. Athanasius being Athanasius, he drew the straightest possible line and deduced that the Egyptians and the Chinese shared a common ancestry as sons of Ham (they are not), and that Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese hanzi were related (they are not). Several pages of learned, rigorous scholarship are devoted to proving this point, with Kircher, the only man alive able to “read” hieroglyphs, miraculously managing to supply a reading of the Egyptian that matched the Chinese every time.
And yet, Kircher was actually onto something: Chinese and Egyptian aren’t related, but they really do work in similar ways: just as every Chinese phoneme has multiple hanzi that could be used to pronounce it, every sound in Egyptian had multiple corresponding hieroglyphs. Spelling, in both languages, is a matter of knowing which glyphs to use for which words. Although Kircher had things exactly backwards–hieroglyphs and hanzi are phonetic, not pictorial–by pointing out their similarities, he primed other scholars to study Chinese and familiarize themselves with non-alphabetic writing. Young and Champollion, the Rosetta Stone’s principal translators, had dabbled in Chinese for this exact reason.
It’s easy, looking at Athanasius Kircher’s work, to laugh. It’s also justified: Kircher made all kinds of mistakes through ignorance and bias, and as Daniel Stoltzberg proves in his Egyptian Oedipus, Kircher regularly lied about his research and its prospects. The elaborate fantasies of Egypto-Sinaitic Hamite logographs cooked up by his overheated imagination are as wild as the illustrations he made to accompany them. And yet, without quite meaning to, or even understanding what he was doing, Kircher managed to provide some of the first, crucial steps towards the deciphering of hieroglyphs.
Sources
For biographical details and the outlines of Kircher’s work, I am indebted to John Glassie’s A Man of Misconceptions: The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change, which is still the best general introduction to Kircher’s life and work, and the source of my quotes & translations used here.
I relied on two books for my understanding of hieroglyphs and the history of Egyptology: Edward Dolnick’s The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone and John Ray’s The Rosetta Stone and the Rebirth of Ancient Egypt.
All illustrations in this essay are taken from Stanford University’s wonderful online collection of Kircher’s works.