Diane Greco Josefowicz's Reading List

"The book began when Jed, my co-author, stumbled into a tiny bookshop near the Luxembourg Palace in Paris and found an antique and expensively bound collection of pamphlets which all had to do with this thing called the Dendera Zodiac. He headed to the Louvre, where he quickly found the zodiac installed in a chamber off the main Egyptian Hall, where it can still be seen today. The Dendera Zodiac is an ancient bas-relief temple ceiling adorned with mysterious symbols of the stars and planets as well as hieroglyphics. It was first discovered by the French during Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt and was brought to Paris in 1821. The zodiac appeared to depict the night-time sky from a time predating Biblical Creation, and therefore cast doubt on religious truth. So in our book we set out to tell the story of this incredible archaeological find and its unlikely role in the fierce disputes over science and faith in Napoleonic and Restoration France. While we were unearthing this story we used newspapers, journals, diaries, pamphlets, and other documentary evidence to help us find our way. The five books I have chosen were also extremely helpful and gave a real insight into this fascinating but little known episode in history. Historians who like to write about 19th-century French history often focus on the same things: the Revolution of 1789 and the Napoleonic era are at one end of the timeline and the establishment of the Second Republic at the other. People focus on these two periods for obvious reasons, because there is so much politically going on. But what gets missed is the Bourbon Restoration, in between. When we were doing preliminary research for our book, we found there weren’t too many books available to us to put that era in context, but this is one of them. The Restoration, which begins in 1814, is marked by two interesting things. The first is the union of monarchy and the Catholic Church. Napoleon opened the door to this union by making various deals with the Vatican in the first years of the Consulate. When the Bourbons returned to power, this alliance between Church and state deepened considerably. The second interesting aspect of this period is its approach to history. The reactionary tenor of the period can be seen in the government’s imposition of an official policy of what was called ‘oubli’, or forgetting, of the past Napoleonic era. All relics of the time, like books and uniforms, had to be burned. Press censorship was extremely oppressive and history was essentially rewritten to minimise the effects of the prior period’s very real and sweeping social and political changes. What was really useful for us was how much detail there was about the era in the book. You get the sense that anyone involved in politics had to be very slippery in order to survive. Mansel is very good on the period’s political animals, like Joseph Fouché, whose résumé included stints as Napoleon’s minister of police as well as a powerful position under the Bourbons. These intrigants really were a breed apart, exceptionally self-seeking and opportunistic. Power moved from faction to faction, and if you were too closely linked to one faction it could work against you when that faction fell out of favour."

"One of the most intriguing aspects of our research was tracking down the vaudeville play that was written about the zodiac, Le Zodiaque de Paris (from which we took the title of our book). The play was performed in Paris in September 1822, not long after the zodiac arrived. The play is a mirror of the public perceptions of the zodiac. It dramatised the range of responses to the zodiac’s arrival. And people did respond in various ways, from disbelief that something so bizarre could be anything more than a curio, to a belief that the zodiac was proof that religious authority was bogus. The play was performed at what was called a boulevard theatre. At this time, as I mentioned, there was a lot of censorship and only a handful of theatres had official status and government support. At the state theatres, you could see the plays by the usual heroes of French drama ­– Racine, Molière, Corneille. And of course you could go to the opera. But if you wanted something different, edgier, more illicit, the boulevard theatres were the place to go. They were numerous, popular and affordable and gave audiences a lot more variety than the state theatres because they included forms like melodrama and vaudeville. They were also exciting. While the shows were heavily censored like everything else, the crowds were rowdier and the actors and playwrights did play to this aspect. Theatre riots were not uncommon. Pao’s book looks at the evolving representations of the Orient on the stages of the popular boulevard theatres of Paris from the early 19th century until their destruction during Haussmann’s urban renewal. She shows just how popular things to do with the Orient were at the time. Le Zodiaque de Paris, the vaudeville play about the Dendera Zodiac, can be counted among these plays that put ideas about Egypt on the popular stage. There had been a low-grade fever of Egyptomania in Europe for centuries. Many intellectuals, wondering about the origins of Western civilisation, looked to Egypt as an alternative to ancient Greece and Rome. So Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign, an imperial and colonial adventure that he undertook between 1798-1801, resonated with and enlarged upon a pre-existing fascination. His imperial ambitions in Egypt dovetailed with an existing soft spot for ‘all things Egyptian’ in France. Napoleon’s obsession with Egypt went back a long way as well. He saw himself as a new Alexander, and like Alexander he wanted to conquer Egypt, as he hoped that doing so would secure his place in history as an imperial ruler. While the campaign was a military failure, it was a cultural and intellectual success. After Napoleon returned, he put into motion the publication of The Description of Egypt, a multi-volume, lavishly illustrated study of Egypt which brought together much that was already known about Egypt, as well as introducing a great deal of new scientific, ethnographic, and art-historical material. The work is still considered one of the founding documents of Egyptology, and when it was published, it was a huge success – in part, because it had a ready-made audience. It excited many people who were already inclined to take notice of these things."

"This is a quirky book. I was surprised at how much material Spieth had managed to dig up about a very obscure subject, a secret society called The Sacred Order of Sophisians, which had connections to Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign as well as the world of the boulevard theatres. During Napoleon’s rule, Freemasonic circles in France invented rituals that allegedly first took place in the temple structures of ancient Egypt. So what Spieth is doing in his book is looking at the cultural environment and intellectual background of one such pseudo-Egyptian secret society. The Sophisians were founded by a playwright, Cuvelier de Trie, but for a number of years the society’s membership was dominated by veterans of Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign. And in a time where censorship was still going strong it became a safe place for them to talk about what had happened in Egypt, and what was happening, during and after Napoleon’s rise to power, which seemed to betray Republican ideals. This study is based on previously unpublished archival materials relating to the Sophisians, including the group’s so-called Golden Book at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. A richly illuminated manuscript envisioned by Marie-Nicolas Ponce-Camus, a student of Jacques-Louis David, the Golden Book features underground mazes, cave settings, pyramids and temple structures as theatrical settings."

"Yes, Zarafa. This book tells the story of a giraffe that was brought to Paris in 1826. It had been captured and shipped down the Nile and across the Mediterranean in a boat which had a hatch on the deck that was made especially for the accommodation of the giraffe. I like this book because it is the story of an object from Egypt which, like the Dendera Zodiac, was transformed immediately upon its arrival in France into a popular sensation, a spectacle. Allin’s book is not an academic analysis of French Egyptomania. Although I think Allin is sensitive to the issues of cultural ‘otherness’ that are inevitably involved in any study of Western encounters with Egypt, his book is written for a lay audience and the focus is on telling a story. It gave us a model for writing about the Dendera Zodiac, a similarly spectacular object, that was an alternative to academic analyses of Western ‘Orientalism’. Another thing that is interesting about the giraffe is that it was sent over as a gift from the viceroy of Egypt, Muhammad Ali, whom we write about quite a bit ourselves in our book. Ali was an ambiguous figure, both at home in Egypt as well as in the eyes of his European interlocutors. In this instance, the gift of the giraffe was intended to distract Charles X while Egyptian forces invaded Greece. As political ploy, it didn’t work. But as ambassador from an exotic land, this odd animal captivated the French people for almost two decades, as she lived out her life as part of the royal menagerie."

"Yes, it is pretty big. Rudwick is an historian of tremendous range and learning and it is all on display in this book. It is a history of the establishment of what he calls ‘geohistory,’ which is a mode of thought, a way of thinking about the earth as something with a history. This mode of thought grew up in the late 18th and early 19th century in Europe. Specifically, Rudwick traces the early history of what we now think of as separate sciences, geology, palaeontology, and the study of so-called ‘deep time’. He sees all these strands as unified in a coherent body of knowledge concerned with the story of the history of the earth, conceived as something that actually does undergo historical change. For us, nowadays, this is not a new idea. We are able to think in evolutionary terms. But at the time Rudwick is studying, the idea of ‘evolution’ wasn’t as precisely articulated, and the very notion that the natural world might undergo that sort of change was truly revolutionary. The controversies over the Dendera Zodiac were part of this shift in our way of thinking about historical time, the age of the earth, and the earth itself as a specifically historical object. For us the book suggested a way of contextualising the debates about the Dendera Zodiac. They occurred within a context where naturalists, palaeontologists and astronomers were all struggling with the same issue, how to think about the natural world as something that changed over time."

"I love all of the books in the Oxford Very Short Introduction series . In about 100 pages they really give you everything you need to ground yourself in a subject. And that’s certainly the case with Wilson’s tiny volume on hieroglyphs. She packs a lot into the book. She gives an overview of the nature, history and function of Egyptian hieroglyphs. She covers all the basics, everything you need to know about them if you’re starting from scratch. If you were to visit the British Museum and take a close look at the Rosetta Stone , or you were going to take a walk through the Egyptian gallery at the Louvre , it’s a book you might read before visiting, so that you could know a little bit more about what you were looking at before you got there, and be able to make more sense of what you see. “According to Susan Brind Morrow…hieroglyphs are actually easy to learn” I do have a favourite chapter in Hieroglyphs: A Very Short Introduction , which is about the status of names in the hieroglyphic script, their role in ancient Egyptian culture and its writing. Names had real power in ancient Egypt. And if you look closely at the Rosetta Stone, one of the things that’s noticeable right away is that there are a lot of names on it. And this is true of a lot of inscriptions, there are a lot of names and they’re mostly names of gods and rulers. Wilson says this is because names were thought to contain the essence of a person. To have your name carved in hieroglyphics on a temple completed your identity in a way that nothing else could. It conferred power in that way. The removal of a name from a temple was a serious erasure. There are even inscriptions where a pharaoh will issue warnings like, ‘if you scratch my name out of this, it won’t be lost, there’s divine power in the name that is sufficient to reinscribe it, even if you try and take it away.’ These amazing kinds of inscriptions that are intended to really preserve the power of an inscribed name. This is one of the things I find so interesting about hieroglyphs, that they do more than just record. For the ancient Egyptians, they confer other kinds of power, not just memory. I wouldn’t go that far, although maybe I should. I think they attest to a real and persistent need for some kind of mirroring, to have an outward consolidation of one’s sense of oneself. To have an outline in the world. That, I think, is something that hieroglyphics did for ancient Egyptians, or at least for those wealthy and powerful enough to have such inscriptions made. Exactly. So, if you were to take a slow walk through a museum and really start paying attention to the dates of the inscriptions that you were looking at, you might be able to see the kinds of developments that she mentions."

"This is a wonderful book, full of illustrations. It’s laid out almost like an art book. It is, I think, the best of a number of books that are available to introduce readers to hieroglyphics in a serious way. Betrò doesn’t say much about the grammar or syntax but you can get that elsewhere. What she does do is offer a nice selection of signs from Gardiner’s Sign List, and groups them according to sensible categories. So all the signs for plants are in one place, all the signs for the gods are in another place. Each sign occupies a full page, and the page is laid out in such a way that you can immediately understand the sign’s phonetic value, its function, whether it’s a determinative or not, whether it has a Demotic or hieratical equivalent, and so on. She also discusses the meaning of the sign in its relation to Egyptian religion. So you really get a sense of the role that each sign plays within this theological system. To read this book from start to finish opens a wide window into the culture. The same themes come up over and over: the afterlife and what happens there, who controls what, as well as a view of ordinary life in ancient Egypt—the kinds of plants and animals that are around, the kinds of instruments people are using to get on with their day-to day-lives, and what sacred significance those things had too. It’s a really nice encapsulation of ancient Egypt through its writing system. You can see a lot of things just by looking at the script. It’s a list created by Alan Gardiner (1879-1963), a British Egyptologist. He collected all of the hieroglyphic signs he could, about 700 signs, and grouped them. His list is what Egyptologists still use to learn hieroglyphics today. It’s available on the internet, but it’s hard to know what to do with it. Betrò’s book makes it accessible to non-specialists. According to Susan Brind Morrow—whose work we’re going to talk about—hieroglyphs are actually easy to learn. The syntax is fairly simple and the signs themselves are evocative. On her view, it’s not that hard to learn the language if you understand the culture to begin with. Certain facts about Egyptian life can help make sense of the hieroglyphs. For instance, there is a hieroglyph that looks like a snake with horns. This is a horned viper, which is not at all uncommon in Egypt even now, and it makes a sound like ‘fffffih’ when you annoy it. Susan Brind Morrow once explained to me that the wonderful thing about this sign is that ‘fffffih’ is its phonetic value, and that’s exactly the noise the horned viper makes when it’s about to strike. “Names had real power in ancient Egypt” At that same meeting, Brind Morrow pointed out a number of other correspondences that were similar. I don’t remember them all, but I would hope that she’s right. The story of the horned viper is such a wonderful just-so story. I want it to be true. But my concern in writing The Riddle of the Rosetta was not to gain a comprehensive knowledge of hieroglyphics but just to be able to read whatever Champollion and Young were able to read, which was a challenge enough in itself. No, not reliably. I could sound something out. I can certainly write my own name in hieroglyphs. I can transliterate things. But the inscriptions themselves are so historically specific, I don’t even think I want to imagine that I could reliably say what they said."

"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."

"Yes, this is a fun book. Again, I chose it because it’s very accessible. My shorthand title for this book is ‘the pantheon of decipherers’ because Robinson focuses so insistently on the impassioned geniuses at the centre of various decipherments. If you want stories about heroes, here they are. Robinson begins by outlining three successful decipherments: the decipherment of hieroglyphics, the decipherment of Linear B, the script used in the Bronze Age by the Mycenaean Greeks, and the decipherment of the Mayan glyphs. In the rest of the book Robinson goes on to talk about decipherments that haven’t been successful and scripts that haven’t yet been deciphered: Linear A, the ancient Mesoamerican script called Zapotec, and Rongorongo, the Easter Island script, just to name a few that he goes through. It’s really a book for people who love not necessarily the history of any particular decipherment, but the idea of decipherment as a code-cracking exercise. I’m one of those people. I love crossword puzzles, figuring out all the clues and getting the whole puzzle exactly right. And this is a book that very much celebrates that impulse. Often that’s the issue, that there just isn’t enough text to go on. In the successful decipherments, someone has usually figured out a phonetic key to part of the system and from there things start to fall into place. This was certainly the case with the Mayan glyphs, which were impenetrable until Yuri Knorozov, a Russian, really hit upon the phonetic backing to that script and used that to rebuild this whole set of ideas that gave rise to the decipherment of the Mayan glyphs. “I was up at 4am every morning for a good long time learning Coptic” For hieroglyphs the story is similar, as Champollion began his career by using Coptic to chip away at some of the mysteries presented by the ancient Egyptian scripts. As I said, Coptic is this late form of Egyptian, and so he canvassed Coptic sources from late antiquity, looking for Coptic words for ordinary things, like a lotus or a viper. Then he knew the sound that went with that concept and could then take that information and feed it back into what he knew about the hieroglyphic script and see if he could find correspondences that could then be enlarged upon and extended through a larger body of of inscriptions. He wound up with whole notebooks devoted to Coptic words, at times correlated to elements of the various ancient Egyptian scripts. Coptic permitted him to generate theories that he could then test on new inscriptional material. But this engagement with Coptic wasn’t the end of his investigations. Rather, it provided a point of departure for work he did some years later that led directly to the decipherment, as we discuss in our book ."

"This is probably my favourite book of the bunch. It may also be the most controversial. The Pyramid Texts are hieroglyphic inscriptions that appear on the walls of a small, Old Kingdom tomb erected around 2000 BCE in Saqqara. The script is Middle Egyptian, but the story that it tells may actually be much older. According to Brind Morrow, the Pyramid Texts are altogether the oldest surviving body of writing on religious philosophy in the world. The tomb itself was opened in 1880. The text was ignored for quite a while, and then people started to translate it. The results were not great. Through the 20th century, Egyptologists have attempted to translate the Pyramid Texts and Brind Morrow found all of these efforts unsatisfying, some markedly so. She also identified a bias in existing translations where translators presuppose that the writers of the Pyramid Texts were not very sophisticated, and conclude that this was a primitive document. That bias gave them a lot of room to set the bar very low for the author of the Pyramid Texts. It gave them a lot of room to leave a lot of gibberish in their translation. Another way to put it might be that they didn’t ask very much of themselves as translators. Having found a number of absurdities in the various translations, she decided to take it on herself. She’s trained as a classicist, but she lived in Egypt for quite a while and she has expertise in Egyptology. She’s also a poet, so she’s got a sense of how poetic verses work. One of the first things she noticed in looking at the Pyramid Texts is that there are a series of separations that appear, so that the hieroglyphs seem to be grouped. She sees this as evidence of versification, that each group represents one verse in a long poem. The whole assemblage seems to be a sequence of prayers. What’s happening is that Unis, the dead person whose tomb this is, needs to leave his body. To do so, he needs to utter a set of prayers, and these are on the walls of the tomb. The idea is to move his spirit out of its bodily encasing and elevate it into the sky where it will live on as a star. So there’s this stepwise progression of his spirit that he’s supposed to go through and the text narrates that process in highly symbolic form. I looked into the Pyramid Texts after I read The Dawning Moon of the Mind . And I found myself agreeing with her about the state of the Pyramid Texts before she took them on. The older translations also struck me as absurd. I was surprised by the gibberish, too. It’s important to bear in mind, though, that because this is a very old text, it’s going to be very, very hard to capture just what it says. It starts so absurdly in the traditional version, where there’s the suggestion that a baboon is using its penis to open either the roof of the temple or the vault of the heavens or both at once. It’s unclear what’s going on. Brind Morrow reinterprets this wild scene by making it sensible. As she explores the signs, she finds a story of what’s going on in the sky, what constellations might be visible. She links this to what we know about the progress of the spirit in the afterlife in ancient Egyptian religion. Unfortunately this is where her own translation gets controversial. Not everybody agrees about how ancient Egyptians looked at the sky and what they might or might not have seen in it. What looks like Orion to me might be part of another constellation entirely to an ancient observer of the skies, even one standing, by some time-travel mechanism, right beside me tonight in my backyard, never mind thousands of miles away, thousands of years ago. So, her translation has a little bit of ambiguity, because we ourselves are not too clear about what was in that particular sky at that precise moment and what would have been noticeable, or salient, to the people producing this body of texts. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . That said, her debridement of the traditional version of the Pyramid Texts has resulted in something quite beautiful and powerful. The translation has an authority that certainly speaks to me. And the text itself is so important that it should be translated as clearly as possible. I see it as being in the same class as other traditional religious texts. The Tibetan Book of the Dead comes to mind, but also, actually, Kübler-Ross on the stages of grief . In both of those texts, a death produces a moment where it’s necessary to exist in a state of heightened alertness, when one must behave in a ritual fashion and treat the dead person in a ritual fashion as well, taking care to observe all the elements of the ritual in the right order and so on. That’s certainly the case in the Pyramid Texts. There’s something very comforting about that, I think, it’s one of the things that I find so helpful about Susan’s book. I don’t read it as a set of instructions for a dead person so much as a set of meditations for someone who is bereaved . From that point of view, it becomes a wonderful poem of solace, because the stepwise movement from grief and loss to transcendence is so carefully laid out. Certainly it’s being filtered through ancient Egyptian beliefs about life and death, and this alone may make it kind of foreign, but for a grieving person who is willing to read the text a little slant, as Emily Dickinson suggested, it may be a source of comfort. There are other Old Kingdom texts—hymns and songs. Volumes of ancient Egyptian myths and legends are available in translation as well. It’s not all government decrees, like the text on the Rosetta Stone. There really is a lot of more culturally relevant material. But, certainly, the Pyramid Texts are very, very special. In your question I think is a suggestion, which I appreciate, that we are in great need of solace ourselves, living through a global pandemic and with authoritarianism on the march again in so many places. Champollion also lived through some tumultuous times, politically and culturally. But it’s important to point out that his tongue was firmly in his cheek every single moment. Certainly, he found solace in this ancient grammar, but I think also in that statement, he is recognizing how distant from present concerns this study of ancient Egyptian really was. It was something that was absolutely central to his life, but whole governments were being overthrown around him, and he played a role in those revolts, nearly losing his life on at least one occasion. He is a man of the world as well as a scholar. So when he says that, I think he’s speaking to both sides of himself."