Chapter 2

Hieroglyphs, Deep History, and Biblical Chronology

Beginning at least as early as the work of Herodotus in the fifth century B.C.E., descriptions of hieroglyphs and other Egyptian scripts became a literary commonplace in Greek and Roman geographic and historical accounts of Egypt, where they were often deployed as signs of Egypt’s alterity. As discussed in the previous chapter, hieroglyphic writing served as an important marker of Egyptian cultural identity among the Egyptians themselves. For outside observers, unfamiliar with the hieroglyphic script and possessing only a limited understanding of how the writing system functioned, hieroglyphs served as a convenient shorthand marking Egypt as unmistakably foreign. Many of the early classical authors were writing in a time when hieroglyphs were still in active, if increasingly restricted, use and their Egyptian interlocutors might have been able to provide accurate information about the script. However, their works betray a kind of complacent intertextuality, as a number of well-worn tropes about the nature and meaning of hieroglyphs are repeated from one text to another. Writers such as Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, and Tacitus essentially defined the terms in which hieroglyphs would be discussed in Greco-Roman circles for centuries to come, and a few major themes run throughout their works, including the great antiquity of the hieroglyphic script, the attribution of its invention to the god Thoth, and the use of the script to record Egypt’s deep history.

Many of the same themes also appear in the writings of the church fathers; in fact, it is virtually impossible to read the patristic sources that deal with the hieroglyphic tradition in isolation from the classical discourse on hieroglyphs, as Christian and non-Christian authors alike frequently drew on the same source material. When the church fathers took up the subject of hieroglyphs, however, it was often in an attempt to debunk or at least problematize the classical authors’ claims about Egypt’s great antiquity and esoteric wisdom. Hence the preponderance of negative formulations that we see in the Christian texts: Egyptian writing is not a gift from the gods, but a human invention; Hebrew, not Egyptian, is the most ancient written language; the Egyptians possess not real wisdom, but some doctrine which is like wisdom; and their ancient hieroglyphic temple inscriptions and sacred books preserve not the true history of the world, but the misguided and dangerous teachings of an idolatrous society. This chapter examines three of the major themes that run throughout the classical discourse on hieroglyphs—the divine origins of the writing system, its antiquity, and its connection to Egyptian historical record keeping—and the way that those themes were reshaped by Christian authors such as Eusebius and Augustine in their discussions of world chronology and the authority of the biblical tradition. Although the church fathers did not produce any extended treatises on hieroglyphs comparable to the Hieroglyphica of Horapollo, the ways in which they deployed their limited knowledge of the hieroglyphic script offer a window not only into late antique views of Egyptian writing, but also into larger Christian debates about the value of classical and Near Eastern paideia and the relationship of those traditions to scriptural authority.

The Invention of Hieroglyphs in Classical Sources

Although Herodotus is widely credited with laying the foundation for several centuries’ worth of Hellenic Egyptomania, his remarks about the Egyptian writing system are actually quite limited. He notes the existence of two distinct scripts, which he characterizes as “sacred” and “common” (that is, hieroglyphic and Demotic), but he does not offer any detailed description of hieroglyphs or speculate on their origins, either historical or mythic.¹ Of critical importance for later commentators, however, is his assertion that Egypt was the birthplace of many different arts and technologies. He reports being told by his local informants that the Egyptians were, among other things, the first to establish temples and cultic ceremonies for the gods, and this notion of Egypt’s cultural primacy is reiterated in numerous subsequent accounts.²

It fell to later Greek and Roman authors to elaborate in greater detail on the specific origins of the Egyptian writing system, and those writers who comment on the subject are in substantial (though not unanimous) agreement that writing in Egypt was the invention of the god Thoth, identified with Greek Hermes and Roman Mercury. So, for example, Plato writes in the Phaedrus that “at Naucratis, in Egypt, was one of the ancient gods of that country, the one whose sacred bird is called the Ibis, and the name of the god himself was Theuth. He it was who invented numbers and arithmetic and geometry and astronomy, also draughts and dice, and, most important of all, letters (γράμματα).” This origin myth is seconded by Cicero, Diodorus, and Plutarch, among others.³ Like Plato, Diodorus posits that Thoth-Hermes was the inventor, not only of the Egyptian writing system, but of human language more generally. He writes, “it was by Hermes, for instance, according to them, that the common language (κοινὴ διάλεκτος) of mankind was first further articulated, and that many objects which were still nameless received an appellation, that the alphabet was invented, and that ordinances regarding the honours and offerings due to the gods were duly established.”⁴

Naucratis is an unlikely birthplace for the Egyptian scribal arts, having been established as a Greek trading depot only in the late seventh century B.C.E., but for Plato to attribute the invention of writing to the figure of Thoth-Hermes is perfectly consistent with Egyptian mythology, which had long identified Thoth as the scribe of the gods and the “lord of hieroglyphs (nb mdw nṯr).” Although the archaic origins of Egyptian devotion to Thoth remain somewhat obscure, a cult of Thoth seems to have been in existence at least as early as the Fourth Dynasty, and he appears in the Pyramid Texts. From the Middle Kingdom onward the association of Thoth with knowledge, wisdom, and the invention of technologies such as writing was well established.⁵ In the Egyptian sources, Thoth is reckoned as “excellent of speech (ı̉ḳr ḏd),” “lord of script (nb sẖ),” “lord of books (ḥḳꜢ mḏꜢt),” “excellent scribe (sẖ ı̉ḳr),” and “he who gave words and script (rdı mdw drf),” among other titles.⁶ Unlike the Mesopotamian scribal tradition, which preserves a narrative account of the invention of cuneiform and the creation of the first cuneiform tablet in the tale of Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, the Egyptian sources do not record at any length the story of Thoth’s invention of hieroglyphs, which must rather be gleaned from the cumulative evidence of his many epithets. So, for example, a late Ptolemaic text from the temple of Edfu refers to Thoth as “the heart of Re, who first wrote in the beginning, lord of script, who reckons lifetimes (ı̉b n r^ϲ šꜣ^ϲ-spẖr m-šꜣ^ϲ nb sẖ ḥsb-^ϲḥ^ϲw).”⁷ Thanks to his identity as the inventor of hieroglyphs and the scribe of the gods, Thoth is also associated with administration, law, and magic, frequently combining these capacities when he appears in the mortuary literature. For example, in a first-century C.E. funerary papyrus from Thebes, the deceased is told, “the letter of breathing of Thoth is your protection, which was written with his own fingers. He will cause your speech to be eloquent in the presence of Osiris [after] you [have come] to the hall of the righteous.”⁸ Accompanying vignettes in the funerary papyri frequently depict Thoth in his scribal guise, proffering a rolled-up papyrus scroll or holding a reed pen and scribal palette as he does in the Book of the Dead fragment shown in Figure 4.

Just as the classical authors’ claim that Thoth-Hermes was the inventor of hieroglyphs can be traced back to long-standing ancient Egyptian traditions, the notion that Thoth was the originator of all human language also finds some validation in the Egyptian sources. In addition to being recognized as the “lord of hieroglyphs,” as we have already seen, in the New Kingdom Thoth was credited as the one who “distinguished the tongue of one land from another (wp ns ḫꜣst r kt),” a function that has led some modern scholars to suspect the existence of an Egyptian parallel to the story of the confusion of languages recorded in Genesis 11:1–9.⁹ Even if such a theory may be pushing the limits of the available evidence, references to Thoth differentiating foreign languages from one another do appear to reflect Egypt’s increasingly cosmopolitan outlook during the New Kingdom and suggest a growing belief in Thoth’s power to transcend the borders of Egypt and act on an international scale.

Although the belief that Thoth-Hermes was the inventor of writing was widespread among both Egyptian and non-Egyptian commentators, the sources do record a few dissenting voices. Pliny the Elder, for example, observes that although some of his sources posit an Egyptian origin for the art of writing, his personal belief is that the Assyrians got there first, and Pomponius Mela credits the Phoenicians with the invention of “the alphabet, literary pursuits, and other arts.”¹⁰ The latter does concede, however, that the Egyptians “are, as they declare, the oldest human beings, and they refer in unambiguous annals to three hundred and thirty pharaohs before Amasis and to a history of more than thirteen thousand years.”¹¹ It was toward the agency of Thoth-Hermes as the inventor of writing, however, that the majority opinion inclined, supported by a plethora of references in the Egyptian sources themselves to Thoth as the patron of scribes and of the scribal arts.¹²

The impressive longevity of Thoth’s status as a kind of culture hero for his role in the invention of Egyptian writing is further attested by a composition that has come to scholarly attention relatively recently and may represent a bridge of sorts between the Egyptian and Greco-Roman traditions. This text, published as the Book of Thoth, has been reconstructed by its editors from approximately thirty Demotic manuscripts dating mainly from the first century B.C.E. to the second century C.E.; it is almost certainly the product of the type of priestly scriptorium known as the House of Life, discussed above in Chapter 1.¹³ Formatted as a dialogue between master (Ḥs-rḫ, “The-onewho-praises-knowledge,” probably to be identified with Thoth himself) and disciple (Mr-rḫ, “The-one-who-loves-knowledge”), the Book of Thoth allows us a glimpse of how the Egyptian scribes themselves conceptualized their own writing system. As the editors note, “the author of this book manifestly aimed to give to the engaged reader a deep understanding about the symbolic and religious aspects of writing within the Egyptian world view.”¹⁴ The text celebrates the role of Thoth, the “great, great, great one” not only as the master of hieroglyphs but also as their inventor. This creative process is alluded to in the following terms: “The signs revealed their forms. He called to them. They answered him. / He knew the form of speech of the baboons and the ibises. / He went about truly in the path of the dog. He did not restrain their barkings. He understood the barking of these and these cries of the Vizier (= Thoth).”¹⁵ As Richard Jasnow has observed, animal imagery is frequently used in the Book of Thoth to describe the repertoire of hieroglyphic signs, and the metaphors of hunting and trapping are used to represent the scribe’s mastery of that repertoire. Hence we read that “The Ba-souls of Re (that is, hieroglyphs), they are possessors of wings. They fly to the Wise-One (that is, Thoth). / He is their herdsman who makes for them sustenance. They are quiet so as to place themselves by him. / The document is a nest. The books are its nestlings. That is, t[hey are] in his shade (?).”¹⁶ Thoth’s mastery over hieroglyphs is asserted throughout the text and, via the medium of the dialogue, this wisdom is conveyed to the disciple as well.

Figure 4. Book of the Dead fragment depicting Thoth as scribe. Egyptian, Ptolemaic period, ca. 320 B.C.E. Toronto, Royal Ontario Museum 910.85.236.10. With permission of the Royal Ontario Museum © ROM.

The editio princeps of the Book of Thoth was published with the subtitle An Egyptian Pendant to the Classical Hermetica, and speculation on the possible relationship between the Demotic composition and the Greek- and Latin-language compositions of the Corpus Hermeticum represents an important area of emerging scholarship. Although the editors themselves caution that “there are no obvious verbal ‘parallels’ between the Book of Thoth and the Classical Hermetica,” they do note that the Book of Thoth shares a number of common features with the Hermetica, including the use of the dialogue format; the prominent role accorded to Thoth-Hermes, described in both as “thrice-great”; and the heavy emphasis placed on the notion of Egyptian wisdom, particularly as it is encoded in hieroglyphic texts.¹⁷

Jean-Pierre Mahé, in his preliminary commentary on the Book of Thoth, goes a step further, proposing that the text should be seen as “pre-hermetic” in nature and noting that “since we now have, within the same Demotic writing, a dialogic framework and wisdom instructions, we may fairly assume that this provides a very close antecedent to the Greek Hermetica.”¹⁸ Mahé also notes that the existence of Greek and Old Coptic glosses in some manuscripts of the Book of Thoth could point to a bilingual readership for the text, which would go a step further in cementing a link between the milieu of composition of the Book of Thoth and that of the Hermetic tractates.¹⁹ Most importantly for the present chapter, although the Book of Thoth and the Hermetic corpus represent fairly esoteric intellectual traditions, they both attest to a very strong belief in the role of Thoth-Hermes as the creator of the Egyptian writing system and in the centrality of that writing system within Egyptian culture. Moreover, these beliefs are in substantial harmony with the views expressed in the broader classical discourse on Egyptian hieroglyphs, stretching back to Diodorus and forward to Ammianus Marcellinus. It remains to be seen, however, to what extent they are congruent with the views expressed in the works of the Christian church fathers and ecclesiastical historians, and it is to these sources that we shall now turn.

The Invention of Hieroglyphs in Christian Sources

Given the indebtedness of the early Christian literary tradition to earlier classical works, which provided Christian authors with both stylistic exemplars and content to be discussed (or disputed), it is not surprising that Thoth-Hermes-Mercury does indeed appear as the inventor of writing in the works of several of the church fathers.²⁰ Eusebius, for example, quotes Diodorus’ statement that Thoth was the inventor of letters, and Lactantius paraphrases Cicero’s De natura deorum to say the same in his Divinae institutiones, writing:

In Cicero the pontifex C. Cotta … says that “there are five Mercuries” and, after listing four of them in a row, that “the fifth is the killer of Argus; that is why he fled to Egypt and established laws and literature (leges ac litteras) among the people there. The Egyptians call him Thoyth; from him the first month of their year” (which is September) “got its name.” He also built a town, which in Greek is still called Mercury’s city, and the people of Faenia worship him very devotedly. Though he was a man, nevertheless he was so very old and so very learned in all manner of scholarship that his knowledge of many facts and skills gave him the extra name of Trismegistus. He wrote many books in great quantity which are relevant to knowledge of things divine; in them he asserts the supremacy of the one and only God most high, and calls him by the titles that we do, “lord and father.”²¹

Although he denies the divinity of Thoth-Hermes-Mercury (“he was a man”), Lactantius seems to have greatly respected the figure he called “Trismegistus” as a philosopher, and in his apologetic works he makes extensive use of Hermetic texts that he thought bore witness to the Christian message, especially the so-called Perfect Discourse or Asclepius.²² So, for example, he argues that the existence of an all-powerful Son of God “is demonstrated not just by what the prophets say, which is unanimous, but also by the predictions of Trismegistus and the prophecies of the Sibyls.” He goes on to support this claim with quotations drawn from the Asclepius, the Sibylline oracles, and Proverbs 8:22–31.²³ A similar approach is taken by Cyril of Alexandria in his apologetic work Contra Julianum, in which he claims that “the Egyptian Hermes,” despite being a priest (τελεστής) and an inhabitant of the temple-precincts of the idols (τῶν εἰδώλων τεμένη), was nonetheless acquainted with the teachings of Moses and had profited from them.²⁴ Like Lactantius, Cyril proceeds to include quotations from the Hermetica in his collection of pagan testimonia to the Christian message.²⁵

Lactantius was not alone among the church fathers in his reliance on Cicero’s De natura deorum for the link between Thoth-Hermes-Mercury and the development of writing. In Adversus nationes, Lactantius’ teacher Arnobius also offers an extended paraphrase of the same passage from Cicero, although unlike Lactantius, he does not identify its source, referring only in general terms to “authors on unknown antiquity.”²⁶ The influence of Cicero not only on Arnobius and Lactantius, but on the overall development of Christian literature in Latin, is suggested by Jerome’s famous self-condemnation (Ep. 22.30) as an unregenerate Ciceronian. De natura deorum, with its debate over the existence of the gods and the proper interpretation of Greco-Roman mythology, was of particular interest to Christian authors who wished to find arguments against the gods from within the classical tradition itself.²⁷ Moreover, Cicero’s characterization of the inventor of writing as a murderer and exile provided fertile ground to Christian authors seeking to discredit traditional Greek, Roman, and Near Eastern mythology by highlighting the immoral actions of the gods recounted in those myths. Hence, for example, the apologist Aristides writes, “they bring forward Hermes as a god, representing him to be lustful, and a thief, and covetous, and a magician (and maimed) and an interpreter of language. But it cannot be admitted that such an one is a god.”²⁸ Despite the euhemeristic reevaluation of his divinity in the patristic sources, however, the position of Thoth-Hermes-Mercury as the inventor of writing generally remained secure.

Elsewhere in the patristic corpus, brief remarks by Tertullian and Eusebius, among others, testify to just how widely diffused this tradition was.²⁹ Many of these comments are made only in passing and often appear in the context of critiques of classical mythology and historiography. Tertullian, for example, argues in De testimonio animae that people spoke of God “before letters had sprung up in the world, before Mercury, I suppose, was born,” and Eusebius uses the example of Hermes to explicate the process by which Greeks and Romans were wont to deify abstract concepts, writing that they “shrank not from labelling gods even the calculations of their own minds or even the language by which they gave expression to these, naming the mind ‘Athena’ and speech ‘Hermes.’”³⁰ The extent to which this association had become common cultural currency among both Christian and non-Christian authors is indicated by Augustine’s dry remark in De doctrina Christiana, where he notes that “we (Christians) were not wrong to learn the alphabet just because they say that the god Mercury was its patron.”³¹

Augustine’s position on the invention of writing in Egypt is worth considering in more detail, as his work demonstrates the way in which theories about the origin of letters could feed into larger Christian debates about world chronology, universal historiography, and the nature of the Greek, Roman, and Near Eastern gods. As his comment in De doctrina Christiana indicates, Augustine was well aware of the tradition that situated Thoth-Hermes-Mercury as the originator of both writing and human speech more generally. This tradition is also alluded to at various points in De civitate Dei, where Augustine argues that although Mercury is often identified as having power over speech, and as having been “noted for his skill in many arts,” which he taught to mankind around the time of Moses, he was not in fact divine. Rather, Augustine writes, “weighty historians who have committed these ancient tales to writing agree” that Mercury was originally human, and that he was awarded divine honors in recognition of the fact that his many gifts to mankind made human life more pleasant. This euhemeristic interpretation allows Augustine simultaneously to retain the ancient tradition linking Thoth-Hermes-Mercury with the invention of writing and to demote the latter figure to the ranks of human culture heroes.³²

Elsewhere in De civitate Dei, however, Augustine records an alternative tradition which he seems to prefer, according to which writing was the invention not of Thoth-Hermes-Mercury, but of Isis. This view is articulated on four separate occasions in book 18, where it serves to underpin Augustine’s presentation of world chronology from the time of Abraham to that of Christ. In an attempt to harmonize biblical chronology with that of the Greeks (an endeavor of which more will be said below), Augustine writes that Inachus, the first king of Argos, rose to power “at the time of Abraham’s grandsons.” He goes on to state that “it is also said that Io was the daughter of Inachus: Io, who, afterwards called Isis, was worshipped in Egypt as a great goddess. Other writers, however, say that she came to Egypt from Ethiopia as queen, and that, because her government was both broad and just, and because she instituted many beneficial things, especially the art of writing, divine honours were accorded to her there after her death.”³³

Returning to this notion later in book 18, Augustine uses both the humanity of Io/Isis and the chronological position of Inachus as a contemporary of Abraham’s grandsons as a convenient means of refuting the Egyptians’ claims to primordial wisdom. He writes, “not even the wisdom of the Egyptians could have preceded in time the wisdom of our prophets; for Abraham himself was also a prophet. Moreover, what wisdom could there be in Egypt before the art of letters had been taught by Isis, whom the Egyptians, after her death, thought worthy to be worshipped as a goddess?”³⁴ In a stringent critique of the Egyptians’ claims to expertise in the astronomical sciences, which was much vaunted in classical sources, Augustine goes on to say, “it is futile, therefore, for certain persons to babble with most vain presumption and say that Egypt has understood the pattern of the stars for more than 100,000 years. For in what books could they have collected so much information, who learned the art of writing from their teacher Isis not much more than two thousand years ago? That is what Varro informs us, who is no mean authority in the field of history; and, moreover, his statement is not at variance with the truth of the Divine Scriptures.”³⁵ In other words, if the goddess Isis could be equated with the human figure of Io, thought to have lived not in the dim, primordial past but a mere two millennia before Augustine’s own time, and if it was Io/Isis who introduced writing to Egypt, then the Egyptians’ claims to possess a scientific tradition stretching back several tens of thousands of years could not be valid.³⁶

The conflation of the Greek Io and the Egyptian Isis was an ancient notion by Augustine’s time. The iconographic similarity between the two figures—Io said in Greek mythology to have been changed by Hera into a cow and Isis commonly depicted with the Hathor-headdress of cow’s horns surmounted by a moon disk—was noted already by Herodotus. Diodorus likewise affirms a congruence between Io and Isis, as do Lucian and Juvenal, among others. That this connection was also known to early Christian authors is confirmed by Clement of Alexandria, who writes that “Isis, who is the same as Io, is so called, it is said, from her going roaming over the whole earth.”³⁷ But where does Augustine’s contention that Io/Isis invented Egyptian writing originate? Although Egyptian mythology presents Isis as a wise woman and a skilled magician, she is not traditionally credited with the invention of writing itself in Egyptian thought.³⁸ Nor do the earlier classical sources typically accord her such a role, preferring, as we have seen, to confer that honor on Thoth-Hermes-Mercury. Moreover, although Plutarch acknowledges Isis’ “knowledge and understanding” in De Iside et Osiride, he explicitly dissociates her from the discovery of writing, observing that “many have related that she was the daughter of Hermes, and many others that she was the daughter of Prometheus, believing the latter to be the discoverer of wisdom and forethought, and Hermes to be the discoverer of writing and of music and poetry.”³⁹

Augustine claimed to owe his information about Io/Isis’ invention of writing to the Roman writer Varro, who was active in the first century B.C.E. and whom later authors, both Christian and non-Christian, cited widely as an authority on everything from agriculture to Latin linguistics and Greco-Roman mythology. Unfortunately, only fragments of various works from Varro’s sprawling and diverse oeuvre survive, making it difficult to obtain a clear sense of where this most erudite of Roman scholars obtained his information.⁴⁰ We may nevertheless speculate that Varro was drawing on the traditions preserved in the Greek-language Isis aretalogies. These praise hymns developed during the Hellenistic period and continued to be produced as late as the third century C.E.; they celebrate Isis as a universal goddess and culture hero, responsible for the development of numerous technologies and attributes of advanced civilization, including writing.⁴¹ In the best-preserved example, a first- or second-century C.E. inscription from Kyme in Asia Minor, the goddess states, “I am Isis, the ruler of every land; I was taught by Hermes (ἐπαιδεύθεν ὑπὸ Ἑρμοῦ), and with Hermes I devised letters, both the sacred and the common, that all might not be written with the same (καὶ γράμματα εὗρον μετὰ Ἑρμοῦ, τά τε ἱερὰ καὶ τὰ δημόσια, ἵνα μὴ τοῖς αὐτοῖς πάντα γράφηται).”⁴² The fact that the invention of the hieroglyphic and Demotic Egyptian scripts stands at the very start of the long list of Isis’ achievements recounted in the aretalogy suggests its signal importance for the text’s author, who also attributes to Isis a number of deeds more traditionally credited to Thoth-Hermes, including the distinguishing of Greek and other “barbarian” languages.

The cultural and linguistic background of the Isis aretalogies has, not surprisingly, been the object of intense scholarly interest since the genre was first identified in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Although the Kyme aretalogy purports to be “copied from the stela in Memphis that stands before the temple of Hephaestus (τάδε ἐγράφη ἐκ τῆς στήλης τῆς ἐν Μέμφει ἥτις ἔστηκεν πρὸς τῶι Ἠφαιστιήωι),” arguments have been made for greater or lesser Egyptian influence on the development of the text.⁴³ Some scholars have proposed to see the aretalogy as fundamentally Egyptian in nature, representing the more-or-less literal Greek translation of phrases and concepts native to Egyptian mythology. Others have claimed that the text is squarely rooted in Greek thought, leavened with a handful of identifiably Egyptian notions for the sake of exoticism. Although the debate remains open, in recent years scholarly opinion has tended toward the middle ground, recognizing that although some of the individual statements in the Kyme aretalogy and the other related inscriptions can indeed be traced back to specific Egyptian-language models, some of them are equally clearly Greek in origin. Thus, the aretalogies may best be seen, in Žabkar’s words, as “composite” in nature, deriving, as Dieleman and Moyer argue, from the “mixed cultural milieu of Ptolemaic Egypt in the second century B.C.E. or earlier.”⁴⁴

The striking claim that Isis was educated by Hermes and was his collaborator in the invention of the hieroglyphic and Demotic Egyptian scripts has been taken by some scholars as evidence of the aretalogies’ composite character. Although Isis is not traditionally identified with the invention of writing in Egyptian sources, Dieter Müller has noted the existence of a few Egyptian texts in which Isis is credited with the same close connection to the writing system that is normally reserved for Thoth. Thus, in inscriptions from the Ptolemaic-period temple of Horus at Edfu, Isis is identified with the epithets “excellent of writing” (mnḫ sš) and “lady of writing” (nb.t sš); the latter title, in its masculine form, is very commonly borne by Thoth, as we have seen above.⁴⁵ Müller proposes that the attribution of these titles to Isis may result from the assimilation of Isis to the goddess Seshat, who is attested as early as the Pyramid Texts as the companion of Thoth and the goddess of writing and arithmetic. Also from Edfu comes a text stating that “Isis is at his (Thoth’s) side like Seshat” (Is.t r-gs⸗f m Sšꜣ.t), and a close parallel to this phrase is known from the temple of Isis at Philae as well.⁴⁶ Isis’ connection to Seshat (and her assumption of the latter’s epithets, including “lady of writing” (nb.t sš), is even more pronounced in texts from the Ptolemaic temple of Hathor at Dendera, as Dagmar Budde has shown.⁴⁷

Whatever its precise point of origin may have been in the multicultural context of Ptolemaic Egypt, the genre of the Isis aretalogy was, by the first century B.C.E., widely diffused in the Mediterranean world. As noted above, Diodorus preserves a portion of the Kyme aretalogy, or a version thereof, in his writings. In terms strongly reminiscent of the claim that the Kyme aretalogy had been copied from a Memphite stela, Diodorus writes of a stela “bearing an inscription in hieroglyphs (ἐπιγεγραμμένην τοῖς ἱεροῖς γράμμασιν)” that was said to have marked the purported tomb of Isis. That stela, he says, read as follows: “I am Isis, the queen of every land, she who was instructed of Hermes, and whatsoever laws I have established, these can no man make void. I am the eldest daughter of the youngest god Cronus; I am the wife and sister of the king Osiris; I am she who first discovered fruits for mankind; I am the mother of Horus the king; I am she who riseth in the star that is in the Constellation of the Dog; by me was the city of Bubastus built.”⁴⁸ This passage corresponds very closely to lines 3a–11 of the Kyme aretalogy; interestingly, however, two lines from the latter text are omitted in Diodorus’ account: line 3c, which relates Isis’ collaboration in the invention of the hieroglyphic and Demotic scripts, and line 10, which states “I am the one called goddess by women.” Diodorus himself states that the original text was considerably longer, remarking “so much of the inscriptions on the stelae can be read, they say, but the rest of the writing, which was of greater extent, has been destroyed by time.”⁴⁹

This comment offers an important clue as to the transmission of the aretalogy tradition; Diodorus does not claim to have seen the stela himself, but to have accessed the text at second or third hand. He opens his discussion of the text with the statement “I am not unaware that some historians give the following account of Isis and Osiris,” and his use of the phrase “they say” in 1.27.6 gives a further indication that Diodorus accessed this tradition by means of one or more copies of the Kyme aretalogy that were circulating during his lifetime.⁵⁰ If Žabkar is correct in asserting that the praises of Isis contained in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses represent a Latin translation of concepts originating in the Greek-language aretalogy tradition, it can be argued further that such texts were still being shared in the first centuries of the Roman empire and that they were, moreover, being transmitted between different linguistic communities.⁵¹ For the purposes of the present discussion, this is significant because it offers a glimpse of the mechanism by which the motif of Isis as the student of Thoth and the inventor of hieroglyphs might have reached the Latin-speaking Varro in the first century B.C.E. Even if Diodorus himself does not transmit line 3c of the Kyme aretalogy, his testimony indicates that the text of the inscription was being circulated, perhaps in multiple versions, among scholars during his lifetime; Varro, Diodorus’ slightly older contemporary, would presumably have had access to this material as well.

From the aretology tradition, then, the attribution of Egyptian writing to Isis seems to have passed to Varro and from Varro to Augustine. Although this motif is not widely repeated in the church fathers—as we have seen, those few Christian authors who speak of the invention of hieroglyphs typically attribute it to the agency of Thoth-Hermes-Mercury—it does appear in a late and highly influential context, the seventh-century Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville. Isidore, writing in the late antique encyclopedic tradition and drawing heavily on the works of both Varro and Augustine, among other authorities, claims that “in the language of the Egyptians, the earth is called Isis, and they mean by this the person Isis. Now Isis, daughter of king Inachis, was a queen of the Egyptians; when she came from Greece she taught the Egyptians literacy and established cultivation of the land, on account of which they call the land by her name.”⁵² In Isidore, then, we find not only the conflation of Isis and Io, but also the euhemeristic assertion that Isis was a human who received divine honors based on her benefactions for mankind and the claim that she was responsible for two of the quintessential hallmarks of Egyptian civilization—the agricultural economy and the highly distinctive writing system. Nor does Isidore represent the endpoint of this particular tradition. Io and Isis are connected to each other and to the invention of writing in such late medieval and early Renaissance works as Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris and Christine de Pizan’s Epistre Othéa, whence the remarkable scene of Io presiding over a scriptorium from the early fifteenth-century Harley MS 4431, depicted in Figure 5.⁵³ With Christine de Pizan’s treatment of Io/Isis, the Christianization of this complex character is complete; as one recent commentator on the text has noted, the “letters” with which Io is associated in Epistre Othéa are not hieroglyphs or Greek, but rather the Holy Scriptures.⁵⁴

Figure 5. Manuscript illumination showing Io presiding over a scriptorium. Detail of Harley MS 4431 f.109r (ca. 1410–14) © The British Library Board.

Egyptian Historical Records in Classical Sources

In the earliest classical sources, the claim that the art of writing was an Egyptian innovation frequently went hand in hand with the assertion that the hieroglyphic script was of tremendous antiquity and that its quintessential purpose was to preserve Egyptian historical records, particularly records of royal history. Herodotus himself claimed that the Egyptians are “great in cultivating the memory of mankind and are far the greatest record-keepers of any people with whom I have been in contact.”⁵⁵ The link between the Egyptians’ ancient writing system and their ancient tradition of historical record keeping is stated even more explicitly in Plato’s Timaeus. In that text, the author reports a meeting between the Athenian lawgiver Solon, who was widely reputed to have visited Egypt, and the priests of Athena (that is, the Egyptian goddess Neith) at Sais. The priests tell Solon,

And if any event has occurred that is noble or great or in any way conspicuous, whether it be in your country or in ours or in some other place of which we know by report, all such events are recorded from of old and preserved here in our temples; whereas your people and the others are but newly equipped, every time, with letters and all such arts as civilized States require; and when, after the usual interval of years, like a plague, the flood from heaven comes sweeping down afresh upon your people, it leaves none of you but the unlettered and uncultured, so that you become young as ever, with no knowledge of all that happened in old times in this land or in your own.⁵⁶

The notion that the priests of Egypt were the custodians, not just of Egyptian history, but of world history more generally, is articulated in a number of other classical sources, including Diodorus, who claimed that the priests maintained royal annals “which were regularly handed down in their sacred books (ἐν ταῖς ἱεραῖς βίβλοις) to each successive priest from early times, giving the stature of each of the former kings, a description of his character, and what he had done during his reign,” and Strabo, who found it curious that the Egyptian priests did not know the source of the Nile flood, because they “rather meticulously record in their sacred letters (εἰς τὰ ἱερὰ γράμματα), and thus store away, all facts that reveal any curious information.”⁵⁷ Dio Chrysostom similarly claimed that “a certain very aged priest” had given him the true history of the Trojan War, telling him that “all the history of earlier times was recorded in Egypt, in part in the temples, in part upon certain columns, and that some things were remembered by a few only as the columns had been destroyed, while much that had been inscribed on the columns was disbelieved on account of the ignorance and indifference of later generations.”⁵⁸ In the same vein, whole sections of Josephus’ Contra Apionem read like a historian’s paean to the scrupulous record keepers of earlier generations. Closely echoing Plato’s observations in the Timaeus, Josephus draws a sharp contrast between the Greeks, whose memory of the past has been obliterated by war and natural disaster, and the Egyptians, Chaldeans, Phoenicians, and Jews, whose “extremely ancient and extremely stable tradition of memorialization,” is the happy result of temperate climatic conditions and a conscientious approach to record keeping, these peoples having “applied great forethought to leaving nothing of what happens among them unrecorded, but to have them consecrated continuously in public records composed by the wisest individuals.”⁵⁹ As William Adler has argued in his study of Christian chronography, by praising these ancient Near Eastern chroniclers, Josephus was attempting both to highlight the great antiquity of the Jews and simultaneously to problematize the Greek historiographic tradition and, by extension, the Greeks’ claim to cultural primacy. As we shall see below, Christian authors like Eusebius developed these same themes (and engaged with many of the same sources) in their own disputations with the Greeks.⁶⁰

Given the common late antique assertion that hieroglyphs had a purely religious function (discussed below in Chapter 3), the extent to which the earlier classical commentaries dwell on hieroglyphs as a means of conveying historical information is quite striking. It is also in substantial, if fortuitous, agreement with modern Egyptological theories about the fundamentally royal context of the earliest experimentation with hieroglyphic writing.⁶¹ Some ancient authors go so far as to suggest that hieroglyphs were developed specifically for the purpose of recording historical events; such a view is articulated in Tacitus’ Annals: “The Egyptians, in their animal-pictures, were the first people to represent thought by symbols: these, the earliest documents of human history, are visible today, impressed upon stone. They describe themselves also as the inventors of the alphabet: from Egypt, they consider, the Phoenicians, who were predominant at sea, imported the knowledge into Greece, and gained the credit of discovering what they had borrowed.”⁶² Such a focus on the annalistic use of the hieroglyphic script is wholly in keeping with the Egyptians’ very ancient tradition of maintaining king lists and royal annals and their practice of preserving those documents in monumental form, as in the famous example of the king list from the temple of Seti I at Abydos.⁶³ Although it is unclear whether Greco-Roman visitors to Egypt would have had any knowledge of the Abydos king list (which is not mentioned in Strabo’s description of the important monuments at Abydos, although he knew of the building in which it was found), general awareness of the Egyptians’ historiographic traditions would have come down to them from Greek-language sources such as Herodotus, who relates how the priests of Thebes confronted Hecateus of Miletus with the visual representation of 345 priestly generations, and later Manetho, who claimed to have written his history of Egypt on the basis of “sacred writings (ἐκ τῶν ἱερῶν γραμμάτων)” to which he had access by virtue of his position as an Egyptian priest.⁶⁴

The early classical authors’ focus on the use of hieroglyphs for the writing of historical records is underscored by the fact that many of the specific inscriptions they describe purport to be historical accounts of royal activities. Some of these inscriptions are either wholly apocryphal or, at the very least, egregious misinterpretations of real monuments. For example, one of the inscriptions of “Sesostris” that Herodotus claims to have seen in Ionia, carved “in sacred Egyptian script (γράμματα ἱρὰ Αἰγύπτια)” across the breast of a monumental relief depicting the king, has long been identified with a Hittite relief from the Karabel Pass, carved with an inscription, not in Egyptian hieroglyphs, but in hieroglyphic Luwian.⁶⁵ Traces of “Sesostris”—the heavily mythologized composite of the Twelfth Dynasty pharaohs Senusret I and III—were said to have been found throughout the eastern Mediterranean and are referred to not only by Herodotus but also by Diodorus and Strabo.⁶⁶ These claims may in part be a reflection of the long-standing Egyptian tradition of erecting commemorative stelae along campaign routes; the Beth Shan stelae of Seti I stand as notable examples from the New Kingdom, and the Adulis inscription of Ptolemy II suggests that this practice continued at least into the early Hellenistic era.⁶⁷ However, as Deborah Steiner argues in The Tyrant’s Writ, for Herodotus the writing of monumental royal inscriptions is also a sign of “Oriental” despotism, both Egyptian and Persian; moreover, she proposes that in Herodotus’ discussion of the various inscriptions he claims to have seen, “accuracy does not seem to be the historian’s chief aim; instead the inscribed monuments may form part of a larger motif that associates the tyrant with the written word.” Thus, by insisting on the act of writing (royal) records as a distinctive feature of Egyptian culture, Herodotus and his fellow Greek writers were also emphasizing the stark political contrast between Egypt’s absolute monarchy and classical Greek experimentation with more representative forms of government.⁶⁸

This perceived connection between Egyptian record keeping, the carving of monumental inscriptions, and the various manifestations of despotic power may also underlie the references, in Herodotus and elsewhere, to Egyptian inscriptions not directly connected to the figure of Sesostris. Herodotus claims, for example, to have seen an inscription carved on the pyramid of Khufu at Giza that recorded “the amounts spent on radishes, onions, and garlic for the workmen”—the equivalent, according to his interpreter, of sixteen hundred talents of silver. This claim is repeated almost verbatim by Diodorus, who adds the homely detail that the workmen were furnished not only with vegetables but also with “purgatives.” Khufu appears as a tyrant in the accounts of both authors, much as he does in the Middle Kingdom tales of Papyrus Westcar, and the purpose of this epigraphic excursus is seemingly to emphasize the massive and, to critical eyes, wasteful expenditure associated with constructing the pyramids.⁶⁹

Although the notion of ration lists carved into the facing stones of the Giza pyramids is presumably apocryphal—such accounts were kept, but on papyrus, as shown by the administrative documents from the reign of Khufu recently discovered at the site of Wadi al-Jarf—other inscriptions referenced by classical authors do have clear parallels within the Egyptian epigraphic tradition.⁷⁰ This is the case, for example, of the Theban inscriptions described by Tacitus, which clearly echo the bombastic military records of New Kingdom pharaohs like Thutmose III and his Ramesside successors. In describing Germanicus’ visit to Thebes, Tacitus observes that “on piles of masonry Egyptian letters (litterae Aegyptiae) still remained, embracing the tale of old magnificence.… The tribute-lists of the subject nations were still legible: the weight of silver and gold, the number of weapons and horses, the temple-gifts of ivory and spices, together with the quantities of grain and other necessities of life to be paid by the separate countries; revenues no less imposing than those which are now exacted by the might of Parthia or by Roman power.”⁷¹ Such a display, down to the enumeration of booty garnered by Egypt’s imperial expansion, is completely consistent with the form and content of existing New Kingdom royal inscriptions, most notably the Karnak annals of Thutmose III (which, it is worth noting, record the collection of plunder and tribute paid in precisely the kinds of materials listed here by Tacitus). For example, the spoils collected by Thutmose III’s forces in the aftermath of the siege of Megiddo included nearly two thousand prisoners of war and “additionally, precious stones, gold, bowls, and a variety of vessels. […], a large jar of Syrian workmanship, vases, bowls, plates, a variety of drinking cups, [x+]27 knives, adding up to 1784 deben. Golden disks which were hand crafted and many silver disks, adding up to 966 deben and one kite.” The list goes on to record additional plunder in the form of statues, walking sticks, carrying chairs, furniture, and clothing, among other goods.⁷²

Significantly, neither Strabo, writing in the age of Augustus, nor Tacitus, compiling his Annals under the Nerva-Antonine dynasty, betrays any particular anxiety about the role of writing in documenting (and supporting) an imperial regime. In fact, Tacitus draws an explicit parallel between the Theban tribute lists and the revenues exacted by the Roman Empire. Under the bureaucratic Roman state, the use of writing was no longer the clear signifier of alterity that it had been for earlier Greek commentators like Herodotus and Diodorus, and in the later Roman commentaries the focus of attention shifts from the use of writing to support the Egyptian monarchy to the character of the writing system itself and its purported religious function, as we shall see in Chapter 3.⁷³

Egyptian Historical Records in Christian Sources

Like the classical authorities on whose work they drew so heavily, the church fathers were clearly aware of the long-standing tradition associating Egyptian writing, and especially the production of hieroglyphic inscriptions by the Egyptian priesthood, with the keeping of historical records. The second-century apologist and theologian Tatian, for example, claims that the Greeks learned to write history from the Egyptians’ annals, and Christian chronographers from Julius Africanus in the third century to George Syncellus in the ninth made use of the Egyptian historiographic tradition in their efforts to reconstruct a universal chronology stretching back to the dawn of time (in the case of Syncellus) or, more modestly, to the birth of Abraham (in the case of Eusebius).⁷⁴ Claims about the antiquity and authority of the Egyptian sources, however, were not unproblematic for these Christian writers, who struggled to harmonize the lengthy chronologies calculated on the basis of Egyptian king lists with the considerably shorter chronologies that could be reconstructed from biblical genealogies.

This divergence of Egyptian and Judeo-Christian chronography was all the more troubling given that many of the Christian writers recognized the methodological need to consult sources outside the scriptural canon in order to flesh out a picture of truly universal history. Thus, Eusebius writes at the very beginning of his Chronicle that he thinks it would be appropriate to summarize the “diverse histories of the past which the Chaldeans and Assyrians have recorded, which the Egyptians have written in detail, and which the Greeks have narrated as accurately as possible” and to place this information alongside “the history of the Hebrew patriarchs.” When the information provided by these Near Eastern chronicles fails to support the chronological and cultural primacy of the Hebrews (and, by extension, their Christian heirs), however, Eusebius is forced to denigrate the very sources whose utility he has just defended, remarking that “the Egyptians relate many fabulous accounts [about ancient times], as do the Chaldeans, since they reckon their literacy embraces more than 400,000 years. The Egyptians have written extensively … in fable-like, delirious ravings.”⁷⁵ As William Adler has observed, “the presumed antiquity of the Chaldean and Egyptian chronicles was a double-edged sword”; it helped the Christian chronographers to stake their claim to greater antiquity than the Greeks, but it also opened up biblical chronology to unwelcome scrutiny.⁷⁶ The following pages will examine this tension over the Egyptian historiographic sources as it is expressed in two major works of late antique Christian chronography and history: the fourth-century Chronicle of Eusebius and Augustine’s early fifth-century De civitate Dei.

Eusebius’ Chronicle and the Value of Egyptian Historiography

Eusebius of Caesarea—bishop, bibliophile, and pioneering church historian—produced his Chronicle in Caesarea during the first decade or so of the fourth century. The work, which has survived to the present day via a patchwork collection of translations, expansions, and excerpts in the works of other writers, was originally composed in two parts. Part 1, the Chronographia, offered a narrative of world chronology going back to the time of Abraham and highlighting the various synchronisms that could be drawn between the historiographic traditions of different nations, including the Greeks, Hebrews, Egyptians, and Chaldaeans. Part 2, the Chronici canones, laid out this cross-cultural timeline in a tabular format, offering a kind of quick visual overview of the material contained in part 1.⁷⁷ As already noted, Eusebius himself highlighted the value of utilizing historiographic sources outside the scriptural canon in his attempt to reconstruct a universal chronology. Hence in addition to its intrinsic interest as a work of Christian historiography and polemic, one of the most important aspects of Eusebius’ Chronicle from the perspective of modern scholarship is the fact that it preserves a massive amount of material quoted from earlier sources, some of which have since been lost.⁷⁸ These sources include earlier chronographers such as Alexander Polyhistor and Julius Africanus, both of whom, in turn, drew on the work of earlier Hellenistic annalists such as the Egyptian Manetho and his Babylonian counterpart Berossus.⁷⁹

In introducing the section of his Chronicle that is based primarily on Egyptian sources, Eusebius quotes Diodorus on the quality and significance of the Egyptian historiographic tradition, noting that “the priests kept records about all of them (that is, the Egyptian kings) in their temple archives, which were transmitted continuously from ancient times from generation to generation.”⁸⁰ Written in the Egyptian language and scripts, these “temple archives” of the priests would have been as incomprehensible to Eusebius as they had been to Diodorus. Consequently, Eusebius and his fellow Jewish and Christian chronographers were forced to access Egyptian historiographic sources through the mediation of authors competent to work in both Egyptian- and Greek-language milieus. Such an individual was Manetho, the Hellenistic Egyptian author of the Aegyptiaca, a Greek-language history of Egypt purportedly written for Ptolemy II. The text of the Aegyptiaca now survives only in fragments quoted by later writers, notably Josephus, Julius Africanus, Eusebius, and George Syncellus.⁸¹ Manetho claimed (and was widely believed by later epitomizers) to have had direct access to ancient Egyptian-language sources; consequently, his reconstruction of Egyptian chronology, particularly royal history, was highly influential. Despite the fact that Manetho did not achieve any great popularity in his own time, his work was widely used, if not universally accepted, by Christian chronographers in late antiquity.⁸²

Manetho’s identity as an Egyptian and, more particularly, as an Egyptian priest, is referenced at various points in the surviving fragments of his work and in the Jewish and Christian commentary on that work. Flavius Josephus, who relied heavily on Manetho in his apologetic efforts to establish the great antiquity of the Jews, identifies him as “an Egyptian by descent, a man steeped in Greek culture, as is clear: for he wrote his national history in the Greek language, having translated, as he himself says, from the sacred tablets (ἐκ δέλτων ἱερῶν).”⁸³ Although the earliest testimonia to Manetho (Josephus, Aelian, Tertullian, and Eusebius) do not specifically identify him as a priest, the fourth-century Expositio totius mundi et gentium refers to him as “the Egyptian prophet,” and the ninth-century Byzantine chronographer George Syncellus adds the information that Manetho was from the Delta city of Sebennytus, a contemporary of Ptolemy II, and “high priest of the polluted temples in Egypt (ἀρχιερεὺς τῶν ἐν Αἰγύπτῳ μιαρῶν ἱερῶν).”⁸⁴ Given that the association of the indigenous priesthood with the maintenance of historical records was deeply entrenched in the classical discourse on Egypt from a very early date, the identification of Manetho as an Egyptian priest serves to support the claim that he had privileged access to authoritative and restricted source material.⁸⁵

In addition to preserving significant fragments of Manetho’s widely known Aegyptiaca, Syncellus’ Ecloga Chronographica also points to the existence of a work entitled the Book of Sothis, which seems also to have circulated under the name of Manetho. Syncellus introduces this text with a brief description of Manetho’s purported sources and methodology. He writes:

At the time of Ptolemy Philadelphos, he (Manetho) was serving as a high priest of the temples of idols (ἀρχιερεὺς τῶν ἐν Αἰγύπτῳ εἰδωλείων) in Egypt, [and wrote a work] on the basis of monuments lying in the Seriadic land (ἐκ τῶν ἐν τῇ Σηριαδικῇ γῇ κειμένων στηλῶν),⁸⁶ inscribed, he says, in a sacred language and priestly characters (ἱερᾷ φησι διαλέκτῳ καὶ ἱερογραφικοῖς γράμμασι κεχαρακτηρισμένων) by Thoth, the first Hermes, and translated after the Flood from the sacred language into Greek wording {with hieroglyphic characters} (καὶ ἑρμηνευθεισῶν μετὰ τὸν κατακλυσμὸν ἐκ τῆς ἱερᾶς διαλέκτου εἰς τὴν Ἑλληνίδα φωνὴν {γράμμασιν ἱερογλυφικοῖς}).⁸⁷ They were committed to books (ἀποτεθέντων ἐν βίβλοις) by the second Hermes, the son of Agathodaimon and the father of Tat, in the shrines of the holy places of Egypt (ἐν τοῖς ἀδύτοις τῶν ἱερῶν Αἰγύπτου).⁸⁸

As represented by Syncellus, then, Manetho’s work in the Book of Sothis was not merely derived from hieroglyphic Egyptian temple records (as is claimed for the Aegyptiaca). Rather, Manetho is said to have had access to antediluvian sources written, in hieroglyphs, by Thoth-Hermes himself.

This Hermetic connection is further elaborated as Syncellus goes on to quote the dedication of the Book of Sothis, which takes the form of a letter from Manetho to Ptolemy II. In this document, Manetho identifies himself as “high-priest and scribe of the sacred shrines of Egypt, born at Sebennytus and dwelling at Heliopolis” (ἀρχιερεὺς καὶ γραμματεὺς τῶν κατ’ Αἴγυπτον ἱερῶν ἀδύτον).⁸⁹ This claim of a Heliopolitan connection is no idle remark; not only was the city a very ancient center of Egyptian cult practice, but Greek tradition going back to Herodotus had identified the Heliopolitan priesthood as particularly wise. Thus, Herodotus writes that “the Heliopolitans are said to be the greatest chroniclers among the Egyptians,” and Strabo claims to have seen the house where Plato himself lived during the fourteen years he allegedly spent studying with the priests of Heliopolis.⁹⁰ Having thus established his priestly bona fides, and his connection to this well-known ancient cult site, Manetho addresses the king: “as you are doing research about the future of the universe, in response to your request, I will produce for you those sacred books composed by our forefather, Hermes Thrice-Greatest.” Shifting back into his own voice, Syncellus concludes, “this is what he says about the translation of the books by the second Hermes. Now after this, he also narrates about the five Egyptian classes [of kings], in thirty dynasties, called by them gods, demigods, spirits of the dead, and mortal men.”⁹¹

As we have already seen, the connection between Thoth-Hermes and the Egyptian writing system was well established in both the classical and the patristic traditions, as was the belief that the Egyptian priests used the hieroglyphic script to maintain meticulous genealogical and historical records in inscriptions and “sacred books.” The Book of Sothis, as presented by Syncellus, takes these associations a step further, linking the presentation of Egyptian history with the Hermetic tradition and with the legend, also reported by Josephus and Ammianus Marcellinus, that maintained that inscribed stelae had been erected prior to the Flood in an attempt to preserve the wisdom of Egypt for subsequent generations.⁹² In both tone and content, the dedication of the Book of Sothis is strongly reminiscent of the claims made in some of the Greek magical papyri, which likewise purport to have been translated from hieroglyphic originals.⁹³ Although such claims were most commonly associated with texts from the magical and scientific, rather than historiographic, traditions, such was the vaunted authority of the Egyptian priests and their written sources that they could evidently be used to bolster the authority of texts in other genres as well.

So what did Christian chronographers like Eusebius and his later counterparts, including Syncellus, actually take from Manetho, whether from the Aegyptiaca or from the so-called Book of Sothis? Manetho’s Aegyptiaca, described by Eusebius as “a three-volume work about the gods, demi-gods, spirits, and the mortal kings who ruled over the Egyptians, to the time of the Persian king Darius,” furnishes the basic framework for much of the portion of Eusebius’ Chronicle that deals with Egypt. Indeed, as a glance at any modern history of pharaonic Egypt can confirm, Manetho’s division of pharaonic history into a sequence of dynasties, stretching from Menes in the First Dynasty to the last native Egyptian kings of the Thirtieth Dynasty, continues to serve as a fundamental organizing principle for the reconstruction of ancient Egyptian political history. In Chron. 1.44–54, Eusebius reproduces Manetho’s dynastic schema with relatively little comment, seemingly content to accept the accuracy of his source, which is supported by Manetho’s priestly credentials and by Diodorus’ identification of the Egyptian priests as the individuals most responsible for the maintenance of historical records. As Eusebius himself remarks, “it is fitting and proper to add to this Manetho’s account of the Egyptians, since his history seems quite reliable.”⁹⁴ Following the conclusion of the third book of the Aegyptiaca with the reign of Darius, Eusebius proceeds to quote an extended passage of Josephus’ Contra Apionem in which Josephus presents Manetho’s account of the Hyksos kings.⁹⁵ In his Ecloga Chronographica, Syncellus likewise utilizes Manetho’s dynastic framework in discussing Egyptian political history; indeed, he makes a side-by-side comparison of the epitomes of Manetho preserved in both Julius Africanus and Eusebius, generally viewing the former as the more accurate.⁹⁶

Eusebius’ decision to make such heavy use of Egyptian source material like Manetho’s Aegyptiaca in his reconstruction of world chronology—and to accord such respect to those sources—was really a remarkable one, given the apologetic nature of the genre in which he was writing.⁹⁷ The respective value of Hebrew and other Near Eastern sources for the establishment of a universal chronology from the time of Creation was hardly an academic question for Christian chronographers, as claims to Hebrew (and thus, by extension, Christian) cultural and chronological primacy played a critical role in Christian apologetics. As one modern commentator writes, “from early on, Christianity was locked in an argument with Greco-Roman culture about the antiquity of its traditions.… Platonist and Stoic philosophers in this period widely adhered to the idea that earliest mankind had discovered philosophical knowledge about [the] cosmos and had hidden this in the symbolism of religion. The older a tradition was, the closer it therefore was to that primitive wisdom.”⁹⁸ Christian chronographers, then, had a strong vested interest in demonstrating that Hebrew patriarchs and prophets such as Abraham and Moses predated the rise of the Greek philosophical and legal traditions. Chroniclers from the Egyptian and Near Eastern traditions, who were, as we have just seen, widely acknowledged as skilled record keepers, could offer support for the Christian effort to challenge Greek cultural primacy. However, those same chroniclers could also challenge the Hebrews’ own claim to primeval antiquity.

With his extravagant claims of a 150,000-year recorded history for the Chaldaeans, Berossos was a notably difficult source for Christian authors to deal with, but his Egyptian counterpart, Manetho, presented challenges of his own.⁹⁹ Although Eusebius’ predecessor and major source, Julius Africanus, utilized both Berossos and Manetho in his Chronographiae, his adherence to a rigid millennialist conception of history virtually obligated him to cast aspersions on the accuracy and authority of the two Hellenistic historians. Thus, he speaks critically of those Egyptians who, “in order to make something of an impression, have set forth outlandish cycles and myriads of years according to some sort of system based on astrological calculations made by them.” He goes on to mention Manetho by name, stating that he was engaged in “telling falsehoods himself just like Berossos.” The problem with both Berossos’ and Manetho’s accounts of history, in Africanus’ view, is that they are simply too outrageously long to be harmonized with the “more modest and moderate” six-thousand-year chronology that could be reconstructed based on the Scriptures and that underpinned his calculation of the coming end times.¹⁰⁰ Grafton and Williams, in their discussion of Africanus, suggest that the chronicler brought Berossos and Manetho into his chronological discussion specifically in order to prove them wrong: “He wished to protect his readers from the infectious pagan belief in the deep antiquity of the world—a belief that could lend support to the popular view that the Chaldeans and Egyptians had cultivated the sciences for thousands of years.”¹⁰¹ Africanus, then, was seemingly unmoved by claims that the cuneiform sources utilized by Berossos and the hieroglyphic sources underlying Manetho’s Aegyptiaca held any claim to greater authority (or antiquity) than the Hebrew Scriptures.

Although Eusebius himself did not adhere to such a rigid chronological model as Julius Africanus—in fact, he was willing to concede that even the Scriptures themselves could not always provide an accurate chronological record—he nonetheless shared Africanus’ belief in the primacy of the Hebrews and his concerns with the overly lengthy chronologies of the Egyptians and Babylonians. For this reason, although he shows himself more willing than Africanus to make use of Berossos and Manetho, Eusebius finds himself needing to modulate those chroniclers’ claims in an effort to harmonize them with the biblical tradition. This could result in some questionable argumentation; hence, for example, Eusebius’ dubious contention that the “years” recorded in Egyptian historical records are actually “lunar years,” or months. The remaining discrepancy, Eusebius goes on to say, can be explained by the phenomenon of coregency and the tendency of Egyptian chroniclers to treat contemporaneous kings as if they had reigned sequentially: “if the number of years seems excessive, we must examine the reasons for it. It is conceivable that there were many kings ruling in Egypt simultaneously.”¹⁰² Although Eusebius was not alone in these contentions—the theory that Egyptian regnal “years” were actually lunar months had already been proposed by Diodorus in an attempt to rationalize the extremely long life spans credited to Egypt’s archaic rulers—they were not universally accepted, even by other Christian commentators.¹⁰³ Particularly outspoken in their criticisms of Eusebius’ sources and methodology were his fifth-century Alexandrian successors, the chronographers Annianus and Panodorus; their lost chronicles, now known principally from quotations in Syncellus, were sharply critical of what Annianus called Eusebius’ “deranged thinking,” which caused his chronology to differ from theirs by some 290 years.¹⁰⁴ Syncellus inherited this particular critical stance, and although he did on occasion defend his illustrious Caesarean predecessor, he also criticized Eusebius on various grounds, including erroneous calculations, faulty logic, and failure to properly vet his sources.¹⁰⁵

What can we conclude about the significance of Egyptian hieroglyphs for Eusebius and for the Christian chronographic tradition more generally speaking? It is clear that the Christian chronographers, like their Jewish forebears, were well aware of the tradition that positioned Egyptian priests as the keepers of their country’s ancient historiographic legacy. Consequently, Egyptian historiographic texts are variously described in the Jewish and Christian sources as “priestly writings” and “sacred books,” among other designations.¹⁰⁶ These sources were obviously not accessible to Greek- and Latin-speaking chronographers in their original form, thus we encounter them in the chronographic tradition principally as mediated by Manetho’s Aegyptiaca and the various epitomes of the latter which were in circulation by late antiquity. Like the Babyloniaca of Berossus, Manetho’s work offered both promise and danger to authors seeking to challenge Greek claims to cultural and chronological primacy. It is by now well established that chronography played an integral role in both Jewish and, later, Christian polemic against the Greeks and in the efforts of Christian apologists to establish the antiquity of their religious traditions.¹⁰⁷ Eusebius consequently made extensive use of Manetho in his efforts to reconstruct a universal chronology from the time of Abraham. However, as William Adler has noted, the access to deep history provided by Berossus and Manetho was, in some respects, “too much of a good thing,” as the lengthy chronologies that both authors offered threatened the primacy of Greek and biblical traditions alike.”¹⁰⁸ Cautious in his approach to source material that diverged so significantly from chronological calculations based on Scripture, but still wishing to utilize it, Eusebius equivocated, proposing various strategies for harmonizing the Manethonian and biblical chronological systems but stopping short of fully accepting or rejecting either one. Although such an approach left Eusebius open to significant criticism, as noted above, it indicates that the Egyptian historiographic tradition, as represented by Manetho, was an integral part of late antique chronographic thinking and could not be simply dismissed or ignored. Indeed, the fifth century saw Augustine confronted with similar concerns and forced to grapple with the question of the nature and authority of Egyptian source material in his own historical and chronographic writings.

Augustine’s De civitate Dei and the Problem of Egyptian Historiography

Although Augustine is not typically counted among the ranks of late antique Christian chronographers, he devoted a significant amount of space in De civitate Dei to the question of world chronology and the age of the earth. Relying heavily on Jerome’s Latin translation of Eusebius’ Chronici canones for his understanding of chronological synchronisms, Augustine inherited the same fundamental problem that had plagued Africanus, Eusebius, and their fellow Christian chronographers: that is, the vast discrepancy between the chronological span provided by Near Eastern authorities such as Berossos and Manetho and the much shorter scripturally based chronologies that placed the creation of the universe circa 5500 B.C.E.¹⁰⁹ Augustine’s dependence on and engagement with Eusebius is especially pronounced in book 12, which deals with the creation of mankind and with various theories of human history, and in book 18, which outlines a series of synchronisms between biblical and secular histories.

Despite his apparent regard for Eusebius’ Chronicle (or, more precisely, for the Chronici canones), and his willingness to make use of chronological arguments for his own apologetic purposes—as, for example, in Civ. 18.37, where he utilizes Eusebius’ synchronism of Pythagoras with the date of the Exodus to argue for the chronological precedence of Hebrew prophecy over the Greek philosophical tradition—Augustine was highly conscious of the dangers posed by the acceptance of Near Eastern historiographic records over and against scriptural authority. His stance in this regard is more rigid than Eusebius’ own approach. Eusebius was willing to allow for a certain amount of chronological ambiguity, accepting that even the biblical tradition itself could not produce an absolutely reliable chronology for the earliest ages of human existence and acknowledging that it might never be possible to fully reconcile the biblical chronological tradition with the various Near Eastern chronologies. Augustine, however, absolutely rejects such equivocation. In his view, when the various chronographic traditions diverge, scriptural chronology is automatically to be preferred, “for the truth of the account of the past given in these books is shown by the very fact that their predictions of future events have been so entirely fulfilled.”¹¹⁰

The three-way comparison of the Egyptian, Greek, and biblical chronologies for the Persian and Macedonian empires that Augustine outlines in Civ. 12.11 clearly demonstrates that he was aware of some of the methods by which earlier chronographers had attempted to harmonize divergent chronological traditions, including the argument that the regnal “years” attested in the ancient Egyptian historiographic sources actually represent a period shorter than the full solar year. However, when such methods fail to produce agreement among the sources, Augustine argues that the shorter Greek chronology should be preferred to the longer Egyptian one because it yields a result closer to that provided by the Scriptures: “we must be more ready to have faith in the former, for it does not exceed the true account of the years contained in our writings, which are truly sacred.”¹¹¹ The sacred origins of biblical chronology, in Augustine’s assessment, trump any possible authority that might be vested in the chronographic traditions and historiographic records of other nations, and any notion that biblical chronology might be checked against or corrected by these outside sources is utterly rejected.

Augustine returns to this theme of problematizing the antiquity and authority of Near Eastern historiographic sources multiple times in De civitate Dei, and he reserves special scorn for the widely held notion that the Egyptian priests transmitted accurate historical information via their hieroglyphic records. In introducing the chronographic argument of Civ. 12.11, discussed above, he directly refutes what he calls “certain wholly untruthful writings which purport to contain the history of many thousands of years of time.” These sources are automatically suspect because they contradict the much shorter biblical chronology: “for we compute from the sacred writings that six thousand years have not yet passed since the creation of man. Hence, the writings which make reference to far more thousands of years than there have been are vain, and contain no trustworthy authority on the subject.”

As his chief exemplar of such a misleading document, Augustine cites a letter purportedly written by Alexander the Great to his mother, Olympias, detailing “the narrative which he had received from a certain Egyptian priest, which the latter had taken from writings held to be sacred among the Egyptians, and which contained an account of kingdoms known also to Greek history.”¹¹² Augustine is clearly aware of the long-standing tradition associating Egyptian priests with historical record keeping, but the theological imperative of his work, which is aimed at the validation of his scripturally based chronology, precludes him granting any authority to the Egyptian sources.

The purported letter of Alexander to Olympias is referenced at two other points in De civitate Dei, and in those references Augustine provides some additional information about the nature and content of this document. In Civ. 8.5, where Augustine argues that the Platonists have come closer than any other philosophical school to a correct understanding of God, he speaks of written sources dealing with the “sacred rites” devoted to the various gods and notes that “to this same class of writings belong the letters which Alexander of Macedon wrote to his mother.” He goes on to say that “in them, he (Alexander) relates what had been revealed to him by the Egyptian high priest Leo” and that this same Leo, fearful “because he had revealed a mystery, … adjured and admonished Alexander that, when he had communicated these things in writing to his mother, he was to command that the letter should be burnt.” The content of the letter, according to Augustine, demonstrated that various mythological figures honored with cultic rites, including Romulus, Hercules, and Aesclepius, were in fact mortal men.

Although such a euhemeristic interpretation of classical mythology is not inconsistent with Augustine’s own views, he objects to the notion that such individuals should be accorded cultic honors and prefers the Platonic theory of an incorporeal deity as theologically closer to the Christian understanding of divinity. Augustine returns to this same theme later when he differentiates between the respect paid to Christian martyrs and the sacred rites of the polytheistic traditions. Singling out Egyptian religious practices for particular scorn, he writes,

It is written that Isis, the Egyptian goddess and wife of Osiris, and all their ancestors, were royal personages.… All the great evils which she wrought were recorded for posterity not by poets, but in the mystic writings of the Egyptians. Let those who will and can do so read the letter written by Alexander to his mother Olympias in which he relates the things revealed to him by the priest Leo; and let those who read reflect upon it and see what manner of men they were, and what their deeds were, for whom sacred rites were instituted after their death as if they were gods.¹¹³

In Augustine’s account, then, the “letter of Alexander” appears to serve as a convenient shorthand for the transmission of two different Egyptian textual traditions: ritual texts detailing the cultic honors paid to the gods, and historiographic sources extending into the distant past and cataloguing the deeds of famous men and women who were later deified; needless to say, the Christian theologian finds both to be equally objectionable.

That a letter pertaining to theological matters did indeed circulate under the name of Alexander is known from a number of attestations in the works of various Christian apologists, who cite it (or at least its existence) in support of their larger euhemeristic arguments against pagan mythology and cult practice. Minucius Felix writes, for example, that “the famous Alexander the Great, of Macedon, in a remarkable letter to his mother, wrote that his power had awed a priest into unfolding to him the secret concerning deified men; in it, he makes Vulcan first of the line, followed by the family of Jupiter.” Athenagoras adds the detail that Alexander is to be trusted in this because he, like Herodotus, had as his interlocutors the priests of Heliopolis, Memphis, and Thebes.¹¹⁴

The identity of “the high priest Leo,” said by Augustine to be Alexander’s Egyptian source, has long been the subject of debate, with some scholars taking Augustine’s statement essentially at face value, and others preferring to see Leo as the actual author of the letter that subsequently circulated under Alexander’s name.¹¹⁵ Whichever of these roles the historical Leo may have fulfilled, the testimonia to the letter, in Augustine’s oeuvre and elsewhere, utilize a number of common tropes pertaining to Egyptian source material that were in wide circulation in late antiquity. These include the recognition that Egyptian priests, particularly those attached to prominent cultic sites like Heliopolis and Thebes, were the guardians of Egypt’s literary and historiographic heritage, and the notion that these priestly records were bound up in a tradition of secrecy and arcane wisdom that could be transmitted to outsiders only at great risk (witness, for example, the anxiety of Alexander’s priestly informant in Civ. 8.5).

The problematization of Egyptian source material like the purported letter of Alexander goes hand in hand with Augustine’s claim that the Egyptian writing system was a relatively recent invention, attributable to Isis rather than to Thoth-Hermes-Mercury. Although the classical discourse on hieroglyphs had enshrined the notion that Egyptian priestly records preserved accurate historiographic information stretching back into the primordial past, leading Christian chronographers to try and mine this information for ammunition in their polemic against the Greeks, the lengthy king lists provided by Manetho and subsequently transmitted by Africanus and Eusebius in their chronographic studies threatened the fundamental Judeo-Christian belief in the chronological primacy of the Hebrews and therefore had to be approached with caution, if at all. For Augustine, who argued much more strongly than Eusebius for the absolute authority of scriptural chronology, the Egyptian historiographic sources (like their Babylonian counterparts, transmitted by Berossus) could not be used independently to verify scriptural chronology but could only be checked against that standard and rejected when they diverged from it. The attribution of the invention of hieroglyphs to Isis “not much more than two thousand years ago” (Civ. 18.41) vitiates the claim that the Egyptian historiographic tradition, as preserved in hieroglyphic “priestly writings,” could have extended into an earlier period than the Hebrew scriptures and allows Augustine to ignore the Egyptian material when it suits him to do so. His approach is not entirely consistent, however, as we can see in the case of the letter (or letters?) of Alexander. As an exemplar of the euhemeristic reinterpretation of the pagan gods, Augustine cites this pseudepigraphic work as an authoritative source (Civ. 8.5 and 8.27); as a representative specimen of the Egyptian historiographic tradition, however, Augustine classifies the same text as “wholly untruthful” and discounts it entirely (Civ. 12.11).

Conclusion

Although many of the classical authors who discuss hieroglyphs seem to have been content to follow Egyptian tradition and acknowledge “the famous old god whose name was Theuth” as the inventor of the hieroglyphic script, this view posed a certain conundrum for the church fathers in their efforts to challenge Greek cultural primacy and to assert the antiquity of the Jews and thus, by extension, that of the Christians as heirs to the Hebrew biblical tradition. On the one hand, if hieroglyphic sources existed that reached back into the primordial past, such documents might allow Christian chronographers to extend their accounts of world history back to a much earlier point than was possible on the basis of the Greek historiographic record—a fact that was seen as vindicating the (Judeo-)Christian claim that the Greeks were a young civilization with respect to their Near Eastern forebears. On the other hand, the great antiquity claimed for the hieroglyphic and cuneiform traditions represented a real challenge to the church fathers’ reconstruction of world chronology computed on the basis of Scripture, which produced a timeline of only about six thousand years from creation to late antiquity.

The church fathers responded to these challenges in a few different ways. Eusebius’ Chronicle represents one possible approach. Although he acknowledged the antiquity and, to some extent, the authority of the Egyptian historiographic tradition and made extensive use of Egyptian historical records as mediated by Manetho, he also recognized that those records had the potential to challenge scriptural chronology and offered a variety of possible methodologies for harmonizing the divergent traditions, including recalculating the length of Egyptian regnal years and compressing the Egyptian king lists by looking for cases of coregency or simultaneous dynasties. In his assessment, Manetho’s account is a “fitting and proper” source for Christian historiography, even if it must be used cautiously. Augustine’s approach to the same material is, in contrast, simultaneously more critical and less scholarly. Although he acknowledged that the Egyptian priests were known for keeping extensive historical records, when those records failed to harmonize with the scriptural tradition he saw no reason to make use of them. He also called into question the widely held tradition that Thoth-Hermes-Mercury was the inventor of hieroglyphs, which placed the invention of writing in Egypt in the depths of the mythical past. Such a tradition, which would seem to validate the common notion that the Egyptians possessed a particularly ancient historiographic tradition, did not serve Augustine’s apologetic purposes. Far more congenial, from his perspective, was an alternative tradition that identified Isis as the inventor of Egyptian writing. Granting this role to Isis, who in Augustine’s euhemeristic reworking of Egyptian mythology was a queen of Egypt approximately two thousand years before his own time, undercut the claims to great antiquity conventionally accorded to the hieroglyphic writing system and ensured that the historiographic sources emanating from that tradition could be dismissed as needed when they conflicted with scriptural chronology.

As the examples of Eusebius and Augustine demonstrate, the church fathers typically expressed little intellectual interest in the actual history of the hieroglyphic script, nor (with a few exceptions that will be discussed in Chapter 3) were they especially concerned with understanding how that script functioned. They received from the classical historians and geographers a well-defined and well-rehearsed discourse on hieroglyphs whose salient points—invention by Thoth-Hermes-Mercury, great antiquity, connection to the Egyptian priesthood, use for writing historical records—they redeployed as they saw fit in their own works. And when those tropes failed to conform to the dictates of their apologetic or polemical writings, they could either seek out variant traditions that better suited their line of argumentation (as Augustine did in the case of Isis), or dismiss the Egyptian material entirely (as he did in his defense of scriptural chronology). In the end, these patristic sources tell us very little about hieroglyphs themselves, but a great deal about both the persistence and, crucially, the malleability of the classical discourse on hieroglyphs that the church fathers had inherited.