The Myth of Egypt and Its Hieroglyphs in European Tradition

"This is an old book, a classic. Iversen was a Danish Egyptologist and in this book he’s looking at the history of the reception of Egyptian hieroglyphics in the West. He starts in Greece, and goes all the way through, up to the decipherment. The way he tells it, it’s almost a history of folly. So he’s got a particular slant, but he does give a nice catalogue of the people who were exposed to hieroglyphs and did something to them or with them in their own cultural context. What I love about this book is that it’s a nice index to the European encounter with ancient Egypt, of who all of the major players are on the stage, even if I don’t always agree with his view of what they were doing with these hieroglyphs. Iversen is very interested in disentangling historical preconceptions about hieroglyphs from what’s really going on. In our book, we are less interested with that question. We focus on what Champollion and Young thought rather than how their ideas matched up with the present organization of knowledge in Egyptology. But a lot of people are very interested in how things match up. I’ve selected Iversen’s book with that audience in mind. Another strength of Iversen’s book is that he takes seriously some earlier scholars who have gotten short shrift. So, for instance, he writes about Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680), who was probably the first serious scholar of hieroglyphics in the West. Kircher is a figure of fun to many people—as he was, sometimes, to Champollion—but he did do some important work and Champollion drew on it, although he was careful to distance himself from Kircher at other times. There’s a more recent book on Kircher by Daniel Stolzenberg called Egyptian Oedipus . I was going to list that, but I chose Iversen instead because it’s less academic and more accessible to general readers. For a reader who is interested in Kircher and these original, serious, almost philological engagements with hieroglyphics, the best thing would be to go on to the more recent book, because Stolzenberg does a nice job of laying out what Kircher was doing with hieroglyphs and connecting that work with his other scholarship and his context. I feel a little bit tragic about it. I always feel a little uneasy walking around cities like Rome and Paris, where so many ancient Egyptian obelisks crop up everywhere. In Rome, there’s one cemented on top of a stone elephant, and the whole assemblage sits in the middle of a small square in the shadow of the Pantheon. The sculptor Bernini was responsible for this construction, including the elephant with its astonishingly swingy trunk and, if I am not mistaken, the brass or iron furbelow that sits atop the obelisk like a hat. I don’t mean to insult Bernini, who I admire, but his treatment of the obelisk makes it so clear that these objects exist in the West only to be recontextualized for local purposes. The effort to re-situate these artefacts in new contexts always strikes me as dissonant and not quite convincing. I suppose we import things all the time. But these objects still have such a power. An obelisk covered with hieroglyphs is, I think, a powerful object. It seems minimized if it becomes the centre of a roundabout. Its original significance is lost, at that point."