Chapter 3

Encoding the Wisdom of Egypt

In the fifth book of his Stromateis, the Christian theologian Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150–ca. 215 C.E.) offers a famously enigmatic description of the three principal ancient Egyptian scripts, which he identifies as epistolographic (ἐπιστολογραφική), hieratic (ἱερατική), and hieroglyphic (ἱερογλυφική). After discussing the different types of hieroglyphic signs and explicating, or attempting to explicate, a handful of Egyptian symbols, Clement goes on to speak more generally about the Egyptians’ motivation for using hieroglyphs. “All then,” he says, “in a word, who have spoken of divine things, both Barbarians (Βάρβαροι) and Greeks (Ἕλληνες), have veiled the first principles of things, and delivered the truth in enigmas, and symbols, and allegories, and metaphors, and such-like tropes.”¹ Although Clement’s presentation of the various scripts, which will be discussed in more detail below, suggests that he had access to some accurate information about Egyptian writing systems, his contention that hieroglyphs served the explicit purpose of concealing information about the divine betrays his equal indebtedness to the classical discourse on hieroglyphs. The ideas about the hieroglyphic script that Clement articulates in Stromateis 5—notably, that it has a fundamentally symbolic quality and that it is intimately connected to the religious and intellectual traditions of the indigenous Egyptian priesthood—have roots that reach at least as far back as the work of Diodorus two centuries earlier and branches stretching as far forward as the Renaissance humanists who prized hieroglyphs as a universal means of symbolic communication.

In the previous chapter, we saw that the classical authors who first wrote about hieroglyphs established a series of tropes about Egyptian writing that proved to be remarkably stable over time—so much so that the Christian writers who later turned their attention to the subject of hieroglyphic writing were essentially forced to deal with the same themes, which they adapted to suit their individual theological agendas. The present chapter likewise examines two of the most tenacious ideas about hieroglyphs ever to emerge from the classical sources, the symbolic nature of the hieroglyphic script and its use to conceal Egyptian priestly wisdom, and it considers the way that these themes are dealt with in late antique Christian sources. As we shall see, the notion of the “wisdom of Egypt,” encoded in hieroglyphic inscriptions and carved on temple walls, represented something of a conundrum to Christian theologians. Christian and non-Christian sources alike tend to agree that hieroglyphs were used to conceal esoteric Egyptian knowledge, but they place a very different premium on that knowledge. Moreover, although church fathers like Augustine roundly condemned the “great evils … recorded for posterity not by poets, but in the mystic writings of the Egyptians,” they were simultaneously forced to confront the claim, irrefutable because grounded in Scripture, that Moses himself was “instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.” Moses’ connection to the wisdom of Egypt meant that Christian authors could not dismiss or reject the concept entirely, so in the late antique sources various strategies were deployed to problematize the wisdom tradition passed down by means of hieroglyphic texts. Among other charges, “Egyptian wisdom” is linked to boastfulness, corruption, and heresy; it is said to conduce to idolatry; and, perhaps most important, it is ultimately said to have been rendered unnecessary by new Christian modes of learning and understanding, which privilege the notion of wisdom “taught by the Spirit” over human wisdom passed down through mundane processes of textual transmission.²

Egyptian Scripts in Classical and Christian Sources

As described above in Chapter 1, the Egyptians utilized three principal scripts to render their language in written form: hieroglyphic, hieratic, and, beginning in the seventh century B.C.E., Demotic. The majority of ancient commentators, however, followed Herodotus in recognizing only a broad division between “sacred” (hieroglyphic) and “common” (Demotic) scripts. Diodorus echoes this view, while providing additional information about the educational process; he states,

In the education of their sons the priests teach them two kinds of writing (γράμματα διττά), that which is called “sacred” (τά τε ἱερὰ καλούμενα) and that which is used in the more general instruction (καὶ τὰ κοινοτέραν ἔχοντα τὴν μάθησιν).… As to the general mass of the Egyptians, they are instructed from their childhood by their fathers or kinsmen in the practices proper to each manner of life as previously described by us; but as for reading and writing, the Egyptians at large give their children only a superficial instruction in them, and not all do this, but for the most part only those who are engaged in the crafts.³

Later, he observes that “of the two kinds of writing (γράμματα) which the Egyptians have, that which is known as popular (δημώδης) is learned by everyone, while that which is called sacred (ἱερά) is understood only by the priests of the Egyptians, who learn it from their fathers as one of the things which are not divulged (ἐν ἀπορρήτοις μανθάνοντας).” This correlates well with the information on scribal pedagogy provided by the Egyptian sources, which indicate that apprentice scribes typically began their training with hieratic (later Demotic) and advanced to the study of the hieroglyphic script only if they intended to pursue a career in the priesthood.⁴

Only two ancient authors are known to have acknowledged the existence of not two, but three Egyptian scripts, and even then the distinctions that they draw do not always align perfectly with the modern tripartite classification of hieroglyphic, hieratic, and Demotic.⁵ The Neoplatonist philosopher Porphyry of Tyre (ca. 234–ca. 305 C.E.) writes in his Vita Pythagorae that the philosopher traveled to Egypt, where “he lived with the priests, and learned the language and wisdom of the Egyptians, and three kinds of letters, the epistolic, the hieroglyphic, and symbolic (γραμμάτων δὲ τρισσὰς διαφοράς, ἐπιστολογραφικῶν τε καὶ ἱερογλυφικῶν καὶ συμβολικῶν), whereof one imitates the common way of speaking, while the others express the sense by allegory and parable.”⁶ For Porphyry, therefore, although he claims to recognize three scripts, the primary distinction is actually between the script he calls “epistolic” (a reference to Demotic, known in Egyptian as sẖ n š^ϲ.t, or “document-writing”) and two forms of hieroglyphic scripts; the existence of hieratic is thus elided completely. Interestingly, however, later medieval Arabic sources that speak of Pythagoras’ studies in Egypt do appear to refer to hieratic as one of the objects of the philosopher’s learning. For example, the tenth/eleventh-century writer Ibn Fatik states that Pythagoras “attached himself to the priests in Egypt and learned wisdom from them. He excelled in the language of the Egyptians with the three types of script: the script of the commoners, the script of the elite which is the cursive one of the priests, and the script of the kings.”⁷

The distinction Porphyry draws between “hieroglyphic” and “symbolic” characters echoes the work of the second-century church father Clement of Alexandria, whose discussion of Egyptian writing appears in the Stromateis, a compilation of observations on a diverse array of religious subjects including, but not limited to, the relationship between Christianity and Greek philosophy.⁸ Book 5 of the Stromateis deals with the role of faith (πίστις) and knowledge (γνῶσις) in the individual seeker’s efforts to grasp the truth of God. In this book, as in the rest of the text, Clement is concerned with the tension between the notions of revelation and concealment; this leads him to examine the various means by which religious truths have been expressed in figurative language not only in Hebrew prophecy but also by Greeks and Egyptians. This leads him to expound at some length on the nature, as he understood it, of the Egyptian writing system. He writes, “those who, among the Egyptians, receive instruction learn firstly the style of Egyptian writing called epistolographic (ἐπιστολογραφική); and secondly, the hieratic (ἱερατική) style, which the sacred scribes practice.” He goes on, in a difficult passage that has generated a great deal of philological commentary, to distinguish between different types of hieroglyphic signs:

Lastly, the hieroglyphic type, which, in part, expresses things literally by means of primary letters and which, in part, is pictographic (ἧς ἣ μέν ἐστι διὰ τῶν πρώτων στοιχείων κυριολογική, ἣ δὲ συμβολική). In the pictographic method (τῆς δὲ συμβολικῆς), one sort expresses things literally by imitation (ἣ μὲν κυριολογεῖται κατὰ μίμησιν), another sort writes, so to speak, in a metaphorical fashion (ἣ δ’ ὥσπερ τροπικῶς γράφεται), while a third is frankly allegorizing by means of certain enigmas (ἣ δὲ ἄντικρυς ἀλληγορεῖται κατά τινας αἰνιγμούς).⁹

Clement then attempts to explain in more detail the system he has just outlined. He writes, “thus, wishing to express ‘sun’ in writing, they make a circle, and for ‘moon,’ the form of a crescent, according to the ‘literal’ type (κατὰ τὸ κυριολογούμενον εἶδος). In the ‘metaphorical’ type (τροπικῶς), they carve (signs), transferring and transposing (them) on the basis of their affinity (κατ’ οἰκειότητα μετάγοντες καὶ μετατιθέντες), in part substituting them (for other signs) and in part changing their shapes entirely (τὰ δ’ ἐξαλλάττοντες, τὰ δὲ πολλαχῶς μετασχηματίζοντες).” Although he does not provide specific examples of this “tropic” or “metaphorical” style of writing, he notes that “it is in this way that, wishing to transmit praises of their kings by means of religious myths, they inscribe (them) in bas-reliefs (ἀναγράφουσι διὰ τῶν ἀναγλύφων).” Finally, Clement offers a series of examples of what he refers to as the “enigmatic” type of hieroglyphs, in which the stars are represented by serpents “because of their sinuous paths” and the sun is represented by a scarab because of that creature’s natural qualities.¹⁰

The potential significance of this passage as a key to the decipherment of hieroglyphs was recognized early on, and Clement figures prominently in several of the notable early modern studies of hieroglyphs, including William Warburton’s lengthy excursus on Egyptian writing in The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated and Georg Zoega’s De origine et usu obeliscorum.¹¹ In many respects, however, the text represents a false signpost on the route to decipherment. The rather obscure terminology that Clement uses to characterize the different types of hieroglyphic signs, coupled with his insistence on the symbolic qualities of the script, largely frustrated attempts to use Stromateis 5 as a means of explaining how hieroglyphs functioned. Rather than Clement providing the key to decipherment, in the end it was Champollion’s decipherment of the Rosetta Stone that provided the key to reading Clement, and modern reinterpretations of this passage were, in turn, swiftly deployed to support Champollion’s radical new theories.¹²

The most convincing reassessment of Clement’s description of hieroglyphs in light of the modern Egyptological understanding of the script is that of Jozef Vergote.¹³ Unlike earlier scholars such as Albert Deiber and Pierre Marestaing, who felt that Clement possessed, at best, incomplete and secondhand knowledge of the hieroglyphic writing system, Vergote argues that Clement’s understanding of hieroglyphs was highly accurate, and he takes the outline of the hieroglyphic system presented in Stromateis 5 as an essentially faithful representation of the various types of signs now known to have existed in the hieroglyphic repertoire.¹⁴ In his analysis of this passage, which forms the basis of the translation given above, Vergote identifies references not only to ideograms (which “express things literally by imitation”) and cryptograms (which function “by means of certain enigmas”), but also to alphabetic signs (“primary letters”) and bi- or triliteral phonograms (signs that function “in a metaphorical fashion”). Vergote’s reading of πρῶτα στοιχεῖα as a reference to the corpus of alphabetic signs is particularly significant, insofar as this makes Clement the only surviving ancient author to clearly acknowledge the existence of hieroglyphs that functioned on a phonetic, rather than symbolic, basis.¹⁵

The similarity between Clement’s characterization of hieroglyphs and that of Porphyry, already mentioned above, has frequently been noted. Although it is not impossible that Porphyry drew on the text of Stromateis 5, it is more commonly held that Porphyry and Clement both depended on a common source for their understanding of the various Egyptian scripts, and the most likely candidate for that source is the Hieroglyphica of the Alexandrian Stoic philosopher and hierogrammateus Chaeremon.¹⁶ This first-century source, now lost but for scattered quotations preserved in the works of other authors, circulated widely in the ancient world, and its author was respected as a major authority on the nature and use of hieroglyphs.¹⁷ It is worth considering, however, that if Clement did owe his knowledge that some hieroglyphs functioned phonetically rather than symbolically to Chaeremon, this information is not explicitly mentioned in either the surviving fragments of Chaeremon’s own work or in any of the secondary works that are known to have relied on his Hieroglyphica, all of which insist on the fundamentally symbolic character of the hieroglyphic script.¹⁸ The equivocation of the sources on this point calls into question whether or not Vergote’s reading of this passage actually reflects the way Clement and Chaeremon were being understood in antiquity. That is, Vergote may have succeeded in reconstructing the intended meaning of Clement’s description of hieroglyphs, but this reconstruction may not fully align with the text’s ancient reception. A number of factors could have contributed to this mismatch, including Clement’s obscure terminology and the fact that he himself seems to have been much more interested in the symbolic and cryptographic uses of hieroglyphs than in their phonetic function.¹⁹ As noted above, Clement’s discussion of the Egyptian writing system appears in a chapter of the Stromateis devoted to the use of figurative or enigmatic language for the concealment of religious knowledge, and after he outlines the different types of Egyptian writing, Clement goes on to say that hieroglyphs are one mechanism among many for “deliver[ing] the truth in enigmas.”²⁰ In other words, even if he may have been better informed than most of his contemporaries about the different types of hieroglyphic signs, Clement still seems to have been working very much within the parameters of the classical discourse on hieroglyphs, which insisted on the notion the hieroglyphs were, above all, a means of rendering in written form the secrets of the Egyptian priesthood, while at the same time protecting those secrets from the uneducated majority of the population. It is to these notions of symbolism and secrecy that we must now turn, as they are a critical factor in the development of the late antique discourse on hieroglyphs.

Hieroglyphs as Symbols from Diodorus to Horapollo

The first author to claim that hieroglyphs functioned as a fundamentally symbolic script, rather than a phonetic one, was Diodorus. He highlights the nonsyllabic nature of Egyptian writing in a lengthy passage to which he adduces multiple examples of hieroglyphs and their purported meanings:

Now it is found that the forms of their letters (τύπος) take the shape (ὁμοίους) of animals of every kind, and of the members of the human body, and of implements and especially carpenters’ tools; for their writing (ἡ γραμματικὴ παρ᾿ αὐτοῖς) does not express the intended concept (οὐ γὰρ … τὸν ὑποκείμενον λόγον ἀποδίδωσιν) by means of syllables joined one to another (ἐκ τῆς τῶν συλλαβῶν συνθέσεως), but by means of the significance of the objects which have been copied (ἐξ ἐμφάσεως τῶν μεταγραφομένων) and by its figurative meaning which has been impressed upon the memory by practice (καὶ μεταφορᾶς μνήμῃ συνηθλημένης) … for by paying close attention to the significance which is inherent in each object (ἐν ἑκάστοις ἐνούσαις ἐμφάσεσι συνακολουθοῦντες) and by training their minds through drill and exercise of the memory over a long period, they read from habit (ἀναγινώσκουσι) everything which has been written.²¹

The implications of Diodorus’ remarks are clear; in his view, hieroglyphs do not represent individual phonemes or syllables, nor does he acknowledge any connection between the script and the spoken Egyptian language. Signs, which he emphasizes are primarily depictions of animals, body parts, and other material objects, obtain their meaning from the characteristics or “significance” (ἔμφασις) of the items they represent, and Diodorus highlights the key role of memory and convention in the practical application of this system. Because of the nonphonetic nature of the script, texts cannot be sounded out syllable by syllable, so the meaning of each individual sign must be memorized in order for trained scribes to be able to “read from habit everything which has been written.”

Within the Egyptian writing system as it is now understood, the closest parallel to the kind of symbols Diodorus describes here are determinatives, signs that are not read phonetically but that serve as metalinguistic classifiers to identify semantic categories and parts of speech. When Diodorus writes, for example, that “the hawk signifies to them everything which happens swiftly, since this animal is practically the swiftest of winged creatures. And the concept portrayed is then transferred (μεταφέρεταί τε ὁ λόγος), by the appropriate metaphorical transfer (ταῖς οἰκείαις μεταφοραῖς), to all swift things and to everything to which swiftness is appropriate, very much as if they had been named,” it is possible to see a reference to the use of a sign (the hawk) as a determinative, applied to a group of words that share a common semantic or conceptual link (in this case, the notion of swiftness).²² The problem is, of course, that Diodorus fails to recognize that determinatives are ordinarily used in conjunction with phonograms to form larger semantic units; they do not, in themselves, convey the full meaning of the words they are used to determine, and ideograms, which do have the potential to represent entire words, also do have a phonetic value, contrary to Diodorus’ claims. Diodorus’ failure to see the link between spoken and written Egyptian, coupled with his insistent claim that there was a direct link between the meaning of individual signs and the objects they represent, lays the foundation for the profound misunderstanding of the hieroglyphic system exhibited by later commentators.²³

Diodorus’ observations are echoed, in greater or lesser detail, in many subsequent Greek and Latin discussions of hieroglyphs. Lucan, for example, distinguishes between the Egyptians’ symbolic writing system, which he seems to regard as an earlier and more primitive mode of communication, and the Phoenicians’ discovery of the alphabet and its potential to record spoken language: “These Phoenicians first made bold, if report speak true, to record speech in rude characters for future ages, before Egypt had learned to fasten together the reeds of her river, and when only the figures of birds, beasts, and other animals, carved in stone, preserved the utterances of her wise men (et saxis tantum volucresque feraeque / Sculptaquae servabant magicas animalia linguas).”²⁴ Similarly, Lucian distinguishes between proper Greek letters and “signs and symbols (σημεῖα καὶ χαρακτῆρας) such as the many that the Egyptians use instead of letters—dog- and lion-headed men.”²⁵ Perhaps the clearest statement of the difference between Egyptian writing and the phonetic alphabets of the Greeks and Romans is articulated by Ammianus, who writes, “For not as nowadays, when a fixed and easy series of letters (litterarum numerus praestitutus et facilis) expresses whatever the mind of man may conceive, did the ancient Egyptians also write; but individual characters stood for individual nouns and verbs (singulae litterae singulis nominibus serviebant et verbis); and sometimes they meant whole phrases (non numquam significabant integros sensus).”²⁶ Although it is true that in the Egyptian system individual signs (ideograms) can represent whole words, Ammianus, like Diodorus, ignored (or was unaware of) the underlying phonetic basis of the script, and both authors’ insistence on the notion that entire phrases can be condensed into single signs played a major role in the hieroglyphic speculation of later centuries.²⁷

Although there was widespread agreement among most Greek and Roman commentators that the Phoenicians should be credited with the discovery of the alphabet and its subsequent dissemination to the Greek-speaking world, a handful of sources suggest that the Egyptians themselves were the originators of alphabetic writing; ironically, this view is sometimes expressed by the very same authors who insist on the symbolic nature of Egyptian hieroglyphs. For example, although Tacitus states that “the Egyptians … were the first people to represent thought by symbols,” he goes on to say that the Egyptians claimed to have invented the alphabet, an innovation that then spread to the Phoenicians and then the Greeks.²⁸ This view has some earlier precedents; Plato, in the Philebus, describes the creation by Thoth of a phonetic system of writing where individual sounds were assigned to individual letters, and Diodorus similarly reports that, according to the Egyptians, Hermes had invented the alphabet.²⁹ Pliny the Elder, although he considers the Assyrian writing system to be the most ancient, notes that one of his sources “records that a person named Menos invented the alphabet in Egypt 15,000 years before Phoroneus, the most ancient king of Greece, and he attempts to prove this by the monuments,” and Plutarch suggests that the Egyptians had an alphabet of twenty-five letters, observing that “the number five forms a square of itself, which is the same number as the Egyptians have of letters and as the Apis had of years to live.”³⁰

Could any of these authors have been aware of the existence of phonetic signs in the hieroglyphic corpus, or even of the group of monoconsonantal hieroglyphs that modern Egyptologists designate as “alphabetic”? A somewhat enigmatic remark in the ninth book of Plutarch’s Quaestiones conviviales suggests that he, at least, may have had access to some reliable information concerning the Egyptians’ own system of classifying the hieroglyphic corpus. In his response to “Question Three,” which deals with the number of letters in the (Greek) alphabet and the proportion of vowels to semivowels, the character Hermeias states the following: “Hermes … was, we are told, the god who first invented writing in Egypt (γράμματα πρῶτος εὑρεῖν). Hence the Egyptians write the first of their letters with an ibis, the bird that belongs to Hermes (διὸ καὶ τὸ τῶν γραμμάτων Αἰγύπτιοι πρῶτον ἶβιν γράφουσιν, ὡς Ἑρμῇ προσήκουσαν), although in my opinion they err in giving precedence among the letters to one that is inarticulate and voiceless (οὐκ ὀρθῶς κατά γε τὴν ἐμὴν δόξαν ἀναύδῳ καὶ ἀφθόγγῳ προεδρίαν ἐνγράμμασιν ἀποδόντες).”³¹ Although this remark greatly puzzled the editors of the Loeb volume, who noted that “the modern order of phonetic signs is … barely a hundred years old: there seems to be no evidence, unless it is to be found in this passage, to show which of these signs the Egyptians themselves placed first, or even that they had any fixed order of signs,” evidence has since come to light that seems to validate Plutarch’s remark.³² A small group of papyri, probably school texts, provide alphabetical lists of terms in which the scribes “designated each letter of the alphabet by a bird name beginning with the letter in question.” According to this system, which is documented from the fourth/third century B.C.E. into the Roman period, the first letter of the Egyptian alphabet, h, is given the name hb, “ibis.”³³ In his discussion of these alphabetical lists, François Gaudard notes further that Plutarch’s claim that there were twenty-five letters in the Egyptian alphabet does, in fact, agree with the number of alphabetic signs in the standard hieroglyphic corpus.³⁴

What should we make of this? Did Plutarch, alone of his compatriots, possess an accurate understanding of the hieroglyphic script? Despite his observations on the Egyptian alphabet, seemingly validated by the school texts just described, comments in Plutarch’s other works seem to suggest that, on the whole, he subscribed to the majority view and understood hieroglyphs as a primarily symbolic mode of communication. This attitude is clearly apparent in the passages from De Iside et Osiride where Plutarch offers “readings” of various inscriptions. For example, he writes that

in Saïs, at any rate, on the pylon in front of Athena’s temple there had been engraved a child, an old man, and after this a falcon, and then a fish, and behind them all a hippopotamus. It meant symbolically (ἐδήλου δὲ συμβολικῶς), “O you who are coming into being and you who are passing away, , the old man ; with a falcon they denote a god, with a fish hatred, as we have said, because of the sea, and with a hippopotamus shamelessness; for it is said to violate its mother after killing its father.³⁵

As Griffiths notes in his commentary on this passage, “enough is right to show that [Plutarch] was in contact with a source to which the hieroglyphs were not unfamiliar.” For example, the word “god,” ntr, can in fact be written with the sign of a falcon on a perch, and the fish sign is the regular determinative for the word “abomination,” bwt.³⁶ However, Plutarch’s use of the phrase “it meant symbolically” indicates that, like so many of his compatriots, he understood the hieroglyphic script to function as a symbolic, rather than a phonetic, system. A similar understanding seems to underlie many of the other passages where he discusses the meaning of individual signs; although he may correctly connect the signs to the words they are used to write (for instance, the use of the eye and scepter signs to write the name “Osiris”), his explanations remain firmly planted in the realm of allegory.³⁷

Writing some 130 years after Plutarch, the Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus (204/5–70 C.E.) offered an assessment of hieroglyphic writing in which we can see the development of some of the themes that had emerged from the earlier classical discourse on hieroglyphs. He writes,

the wise men of Egypt (οἱ Αἰγυπτίων σοφοί) … when they wished to signify something wisely (περὶ ὧν ἐβούλοντο διὰ σοφίας δεικνύναι), did not use the forms of letters which follow the order of words and propositions and imitate sounds and the enunciations of philosophical statements (μὴ τύποις γραμμάτων διεξοδεύουσι λόγους καὶ προτάσεις μηδὲ μιμουμένοις φωνὰς καὶ προφορὰς ἀξιωμάτων κεχρῆσθαι), but by drawing images and inscribing in their temples one particular image of each particular thing, they manifested the non-discursiveness of the intelligible world (ἀγάλματα δὲ γράψαντες καὶ ἓν ἕκαστον ἑκάστου πράγματος ἄγαλμα ἐντυπώσαντες ἐν τοῖς ἱεροῖς τὴν ἐκείνου <οὐ> διέξοδον ἐμφῆναι), that is, that every image is a kind of knowledge and wisdom and is a subject of statements, all together in one, and not discourse or deliberation (ὡς ἄρα τις καὶ ἐπιστήμη καὶ σοφία ἕκαστόν ἐστιν ἄγαλμα καὶ ὑποκείμενον καὶ ἀθρόον καὶ οὐ διανόησις οὐδὲ βούλευσις).³⁸

The nondiscursive nature of reality, Plotinus argues, finds a particularly appropriate expression in the (purportedly) nondiscursive hieroglyphic script, which has the potential to represent the world more accurately than strictly glottographic writing systems. Plotinus’ contention that each hieroglyphic sign represents, in a highly compressed form, the summation of accumulated wisdom or knowledge about a given subject would prove to be highly influential for later commentators on hieroglyphs, who sought, in their interpretive efforts, to “unpack” the information they believed to be encoded in each individual hieroglyph.

Nowhere is this mode of interpretation more central than in the composition known as the Hieroglyphica of Horapollo, which in many respects represents the apogee of late antique hieroglyphic speculation. Highly influential in the Renaissance and early modern period, following the discovery of a manuscript copy on the Greek island of Andros in 1419, the text played a central role in (unsuccessful) early attempts to decipher hieroglyphs, and for this reason it has also been central to modern histories of decipherment.³⁹ The composition of the Hieroglyphica is attributed to one Horapollo Nilous—that is, Horapollo the Egyptian—and is said, in its incipit, to have been composed by Horapollo in the Egyptian language and translated into Greek by a man identified only as “Philip.”⁴⁰ The date of composition of the text and the precise identity of the author remain somewhat uncertain. Following Maspero as well as Masson and Fournet, Thissen has argued for a connection to a grammarian and philosopher named Horapollo who was born in the Panopolite nome and was active in Alexandria in the latter decades of the fifth century, and this view is widely followed.⁴¹ The claim that the text represents the Greek translation of an Egyptian original is surely spurious, intended to enhance the authority of the text and its author. As Thissen states the introduction to his edition of the text, it is highly unlikely that Horapollo composed the text in Coptic, the vernacular Egyptian of his own time, and his clear incomprehension of how the hieroglyphic writing system actually functions precludes the (already remote) possibility that it was originally composed in hieroglyphs.⁴²

The Hieroglyphica is divided into two books, the first of which appears to be the work of Horapollo himself, perhaps based on earlier source material, and the second of which may have been written partly by Horapollo (chapters 1–30) and partly by a second individual, perhaps the purported editor/translator, Philip (chapters 31–119).⁴³ As Thissen notes, the entries in book 1 of the Hieroglyphica tend to follow a predictable pattern, a statement along the lines of “if they want to write A, they draw B, because of C,” where A is the word or subject to be expressed, B is the hieroglyphic sign, and C is an explanation of the connection between signifier and signified, which often takes an allegorical form.⁴⁴ A classic and much-discussed example is Hieroglyphica 1.26, which reads, “when they want to represent ‘opening,’ they paint a hare, because that animal always has its eyes open (Ἄνοιξιν δὲ θέλοντες δηλῶσι λαγωὸν ζωγραφοῦσι διὰ τὸ πάντοτε τοὺς ὀφθαλμοὺς ἀνεῳγότας ἔχειν τοῦτο τὸ ζῷον).” As numerous modern commentators have observed, although the hare hieroglyph, with its biconsonantal phonetic value of w + n, is indeed used to write the Egyptian verb wn, “to open,” Horapollo’s explanation of the conceptual link between signifier and signified completely ignores the underlying phonetic rationale for the use of that sign. Rather, it turns on a highly questionable zoological observation about the habits of hares.⁴⁵

Many of the entries in the Hieroglyphica follow a similar pattern; Horapollo may correctly identify the hieroglyphs used to write certain words, but his explanation of why they are used has nothing to do with the spoken Egyptian language and everything to do with the qualities and characteristics of the objects the hieroglyphs represent. For this reason, much of the Hieroglyphica reads like an extended set of case studies where Diodorus’ claim that hieroglyphs express meaning “by means of the significance of the objects which have been copied” is tested against a series of individual hieroglyphic signs. What the Hieroglyphica fails to offer, of course, is any coherent explanation of how individual signs might be combined into larger syntactic units; for this reason, the text has long been seen as another false lead on the road to decipherment, which required modern scholars to look beyond the purported symbolic meaning of individual signs to grasp the underlying phonetic structure of the language.

No late antique Christian counterpart to Horapollo’s Hieroglyphica is known to have existed, nor should we assume that there was any perceived need for such a composition; Christian scholars interested in the hieroglyphic script could consult Horapollo’s text as well as other hieroglyphic treatises known to have circulated in late antiquity but that have not survived to the present day. Manuscript copies of Horapollo’s work were still being produced as late as the sixteenth century, which suggests some degree of sustained interest in his subject matter, and the Hieroglyphica of Chaeremon, which may have been a source for Horapollo’s own work, is known from references in John Tzetzes’ scholia on the Iliad to have circulated in Byzantine intellectual circles as late as the twelfth century.⁴⁶ That Chaeremon, like Horapollo, adhered to the symbolic interpretation of hieroglyphs is illustrated by the statement, quoted by Tzetzes, that “since the more ancient of the sacred scribes wanted to conceal the theory about the nature of the gods (βουλόμενοι γὰρ οἱ ἀρχαιότεροι τῶν ἱερογραμματέων τὸν περὶ θεῶν φυσικὸν λὸγον κρύπτειν), they handed these things down to their own children by way of such allegorical symbols and characters (δι’ ἀλληγορικῶν [καὶ] συμβόλων τοιούτων καὶ γραμμάτων τοῖς ἰδίοις τέκνοις παρεδίδουν αὐτά), as the sacred scribe Chaeremon says.”⁴⁷ The symbolic or allegorical understanding of hieroglyphs, already established in the work of Diodorus and perpetuated by later classical authors, thus became ever more entrenched throughout the late antique period and thereafter, when it was accepted by Christian and non-Christian commentators alike.

Hieroglyphs, Secrecy, and Priestly Knowledge

Hand-in-hand with the prevailing Greco-Roman belief in the symbolic nature of the hieroglyphic script went the belief that hieroglyphs were, above all, a means of rendering in written form, and thus simultaneously concealing and revealing, the profound wisdom of the Egyptian priesthood. That the Egyptians had a reputation for knowledge, particularly of an arcane sort, is an observation that goes back at least to Herodotus and his claims that the Egyptians were the originators of many of the religious practices familiar to the Greeks of his own time.⁴⁸ This theme, which neatly complements the assertion, discussed above in Chapter 2, that the Egyptians were in possession of a particularly rich and ancient historical record, runs throughout the Greek and Latin commentaries on Egypt, and in many of these sources we encounter a direct correlation between Egyptian writing and the desire to both record and conceal Egyptian wisdom. A clear statement of this view is found in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, where the narrator describes his initiation into the mysteries of Isis:

After the service of the opening of the temple had been celebrated with exalted ceremony and the morning sacrifice performed, he brought out from the hidden quarters of the shrine (de opertis adyti) certain books in which the writing was in undecipherable letters (quosdam libros litteris ignorabilibus praenotatos). Some of them conveyed, through forms of all kinds of animals (figuris cuiusce modi animalium), abridged expressions of traditional sayings (concepti sermonis compendiosa verba); others barred the possibility of being read from the curiosity of the profane (a curiositate profanorum lectione munita), in that their extremities were knotted and curved like wheels or closely intertwined like vine-tendrils (nodosis et in modum rotae tortuosis capreolatimque condensis apicibus).⁴⁹

Apuleius appears to distinguish between two scripts in this passage, both of which he characterizes as “undecipherable letters.” One script was almost certainly hieroglyphic; the author’s reference to the conveyance of meaning using “forms of all kinds of animals” echoes, deliberately or unconsciously, Tacitus’ claim that the Egyptians utilize “animal-pictures” in their monumental inscriptions. The second script Apuleius refers to may be hieratic; the ornate style of certain hieratic documents offers a good parallel for Apuleius’ description of letters “knotted and curved like wheels or closely intertwined like vinetendrils.”⁵⁰ In both cases, the author claims a connection between the nature of the script and the books’ content; the hieroglyphs are not merely symbolic, but liturgical in character, and the elaborate appearance of the second script is deliberately intended to protect the books “from the curiosity of the profane.” These dual themes of arcane wisdom and its concealment recur in many of the classical sources and become a dominant theme in Greco-Roman hieroglyphic speculation. In speaking of Pythagoras, for example, Plutarch, emphasizes the philosopher’s supposed indebtedness to the Egyptian way of thinking, stating that he “imitated their symbolism and mysterious manner, interspersing his teaching with riddles (ἀπεμιμήσατο τὸ συμβολικὸν αὐτῶν καὶ μυστηριῶδες ἀναμίξας αἰνίγμασι τὰ δόγματα); for many of the Pythagorean sayings are not at all lacking in the lore of the writing which is called hieroglyphic (τῶν γὰρ καλουμένων ἱερογλυφικῶν γραμμάτων οὐθὲν ἀπολείπει τὰ πολλὰ τῶν Πυθαγορικῶν παραγγελμάτων).⁵¹

Plutarch’s own work, particularly his De Iside et Osiride, is likewise riddled with references to Egyptian symbolism, as noted above. This arcane Egyptian lore, quite literally enshrined in temple inscriptions and temple libraries, was said to be of interest to kings as well as prophets and philosophers. Lucan, for example, imagines Julius Caesar exhorting an Egyptian priest to “expound … your forms of worship and the shapes of your gods; reveal all that is engraved upon your ancient shrines (quodcumque vetustis / Insculptum est adytis profer), and disclose your gods who are willing that they should be known” (noscique volentes / Prode deos), and Cassius Dio relates that Septimius Severus, on his visit to Egypt in 199/200 C.E., “inquired into everything, including things that were very carefully hidden (ἐπολυπραγμόνησε πάντα καὶ τὰ πάνυ κεκρυμμένα).… Accordingly, he took away from practically all the sanctuaries all the books that he could find containing any secret lore, and he locked up the tomb of Alexander (κἀκ τούτου τά τε βιβλία πάντα τὰ ἀπόρρητόν τι ἔχοντα, ὅσα γε καὶ εὑρεῖν ἠδυνήθη, ἐκ πάντων ὡς εἰπεῖν τῶν ἀδύτων ἀνεῖλε καὶ τὸ τοῦ Ἀλεξάνδρου μνημεῖον συνέκλεισεν); this was in order that no one in future should either view Alexander’s body or read what was written in the above-mentioned books.”⁵² Although one must doubt the historicity of these accounts, they betray a common belief, especially prevalent in the later classical sources, that hieroglyphs were used to conceal secret knowledge from the uninitiated, particularly within the sacred precincts of Egyptian temples.

Did this reflect actual Egyptian practice? As Dieleman, Winand, and others have argued, the emphasis in the classical sources on the use of hieroglyphs to conceal knowledge actually parallels a major developmental trend in the use of hieroglyphs in the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, when the use of various forms of cipher-scripts reached unprecedented heights. A spectacular example of this style of graphic experimentation is provided by the famous Roman-period cryptographic hymns to Khnum from the temple of Esna, shown in Figures 6 and 7; in these texts, formulaic hymns of praise to the deity are rendered almost entirely through variations on ram and crocodile hieroglyphs.⁵³ However, as Dieleman has observed, in such temple contexts, “cryptographic texts were usually displayed at an eye-catching spot with free access, while the reading of the enigmatic signs was more often than not facilitated by the presence of ordinary hieroglyphs or by a parallel text recorded in regular script.” So, although secrecy and the protection of ritual information was certainly a feature of Egyptian religious thought from very early periods, the connection between concealment and the cryptographic use of hieroglyphs was probably not as straightforward as the classical sources would seem to suggest. That said, in practical terms the very low level of hieroglyphic literacy among the general population (and the complete illiteracy in hieroglyphs of Greek and Roman visitors) would certainly have had the effect, intended or not, of concealing the meaning of hieroglyphic inscriptions from the vast majority of people who viewed them.⁵⁴

Even if hieroglyphs were not always, or even usually, used with the intent to hide or encrypt information, the classical view of a nexus between hieroglyphs and the concealment of esoteric knowledge was strongly affirmed in both the Hermetic and Neoplatonic corpora (a fact that has contributed to the ongoing vitality of this notion up to the present day).⁵⁵ Particularly significant in this context is the work of the late antique Neoplatonist Iamblichus (245–325 C.E.), who offers a highly influential reading of Egyptian symbolism in his work De mysteriis. Like Plotinus before him, Iamblichus argues that hieroglyphic writing is essentially nondiscursive, claiming that the Egyptians, “imitating the nature of the universe and the demiurgic power of the gods, display certain signs of mystical, arcane and invisible intellections (τῶν μυστικῶν καὶ ἀποκεκρυμμένων καὶ ἀφανῶν νοήσεων εἰκόνας τινὰς … ἐκφαίνουσιν) by means of symbols (διὰ συμβόλων), just as nature copies the unseen principles in visible forms through some mode of symbolism.” Moreover, Iamblichus continues, this semiotic system of the Egyptians is “a mode of concealment that is appropriate to the mystical doctrine of concealment in symbols (τὸν πρόσφορον αὐτῆς τρόπον τῆς κεκρυμμένης ἐν τοῖς συμβόλοις μυσταγωγίας).”⁵⁶ Although, as the editors of the text point out, the examples that Iamblichus chooses to illustrate this system—“mud,” “the lotus,” “the solar barque,” and “the zodiac”—are drawn from the realm of Egyptian iconography and are not, strictly speaking, actual hieroglyphs, Iamblichus’ remarks further promulgate the notion that the Egyptians were concerned not only with communication via symbols, but also with using those symbols for the purpose of concealment.⁵⁷

Figure 6. Cryptographic ram inscription (Esna II, 103) from the temple of Esna. Photo courtesy of Foy Seal£

Figure 7· Cryptographic crocodile inscription (Esna II, 126) from the temple of Esna. Photo courtesy of Foy Scalf.

One of the principal motifs that cuts across both classical and Judeo-Christian sources and unites the themes of concealment, revelation, and Egyptian wisdom is the tradition of the hieroglyphic stela (or stelae, or tablets) of Thoth-Hermes, said to have been engraved before the Flood with the accumulated arcane knowledge of the Egyptians. The notion of a compendium of knowledge, particularly knowledge of cosmic or astrological matters, inscribed in stone so as to protect it from a coming cataclysm and later revealed/translated, has roots reaching back to Jewish pseudepigrapha of the Hellenistic period. The Book of Jubilees, for example, recounts the discovery, by Cainan, of “a writing which former (generations) had carved on the rock”; Cainan “read what was thereon, and he transcribed it and sinned owing to it; for it contained the teaching of the Watchers in accordance with which they used to observe the omens of the sun and moon and stars in all the signs of heaven.”⁵⁸ Josephus, in his Antiquitates Judaicae, attributes the composition of a similar cosmological text to the descendants of Seth, who are said to have “discovered the science with regard to the heavenly bodies and their orderly arrangement.” Having received the knowledge, from Adam, that the universe was to be destroyed by fire and deluge, “they made two pillars, one of brick and the other of stones and inscribed their findings on both, in order that if the one of brick should be lost owing to the flood the one of stone should remain and offer an opportunity to teach men what had been written on it and to reveal that also one of brick had been set up by them. And it remains until today in the land of Seiris.”⁵⁹

Adapted to an Egyptian context, these pillars of brick and stone become stelae, the author becomes Thoth-Hermes, and the script becomes hieroglyphic or hieratic. Thus, Iamblichus refers to a cosmological text passed down from Hermes and discovered by the prophet Bitys “inscribed in hieroglyphic characters (ἀναγεγραμμένην ἐν ἱερογλυφικοῖς γράμμασι) in a sanctuary (ἄδυτον) in Sais in Egypt.”⁶⁰ Ammianus Marcellinus, in his description of the “syringes,” or rock-cut tombs of western Thebes, writes that “those acquainted with the ancient rites, since they had fore-knowledge that a deluge was coming, and feared that the memory of the ceremonies might be destroyed, dug in the earth in many places with great labour; and on the walls of these caverns they carved many kinds of birds and beasts, and those countless forms of animals which they called hierographic writing (quas hierographicas litteras appellarunt).”⁶¹ As we have already seen, the same motif appears in George Syncellus’ Ecloga Chronographica, in which the so-called Book of Sothis attributed to Manetho is said to have been based on antediluvian stelae written in hieroglyphs by Thoth.⁶² One might also compare the command given by the master to his disciple in the Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth: “My son, write this book (ⲡⲉⲉⲓϫⲱⲙⲉ) for the temple at Diospolis in hieroglyphic characters (ϩⲛ̅ ϩⲉⲛⲥϩⲁ ⲛ̅ⲥⲁϩⲡⲣⲁⲛϣϣ̅) … write the language of the book (ⲡϣⲁϫⲉ ⲙ̅ⲡϫⲱⲱⲙⲉ) on steles of turquoise. My son, it is proper to write this book on steles of turquoise, in hieroglyphic characters (ϩⲛ̅ ϩⲛ̅ⲥϩⲉⲉⲓ ⲛ̅ⲥⲁϩⲡⲣⲁⲉⲓϣ). For Mind himself has become overseer of these. Therefore I command that this teaching (ⲡⲉⲉⲓϣⲁϫⲉ) be carved on stone, and that you place it in my sanctuary.”⁶³ In his analysis of this motif, Christian Bull notes that the use of hieroglyphs in carving these inscriptions, a specific feature of the Egyptian variations on the theme, serves the dual purpose of revelation (the secrets of the universe were committed to writing in a monumental context) and concealment (few people could read hieroglyphs, therefore the information contained in the inscriptions was protected from the unworthy).⁶⁴

In some ways, this notion of simultaneous revelation and concealment is reminiscent of the inscriptions in cryptographic hieroglyphs discussed briefly above—simultaneously difficult to read, yet also prominently displayed and sometimes accompanied by a “key” facilitating their interpretation.

The church fathers generally concur with the classical sources in seeing Egyptian temples and their hieroglyphic inscriptions as the locus for the transmission of Egyptian wisdom, although as we shall see below, they tend to regard that “wisdom” from a sharply critical vantage point. Clement, for example, notes that Pythagoras underwent circumcision so that he might enter the sacred space of the Egyptian temples and learn from the priests there, and in his effort to refute the allegation that Jesus was a magician, the apologist Arnobius clearly articulates the conceptual link between temples, hieroglyphs, and Egyptian wisdom (or “wisdom”). He writes, “my opponent will perhaps meet me with many other slanderous and childish charges which are commonly urged. Jesus was a magician; he effected all these things by secret arts. From the shrines of the Egyptians he stole the names of angels of might, and the religious system of a remote country (Aegyptiorum ex adytis angelorum potentiam nomina et remotas furatus est discplinas).”⁶⁵

The claim that Jesus was a magician whose miracles were not fundamentally different from the ritual expertise attributed to Egyptian priests was, as Arnobius notes, a staple of anti-Christian polemic, and the details Arnobius provides reinforce the association between the Egyptian temples and the esoteric wisdom thought to be enshrined there. The reference to the “names of angels of might” purportedly stolen by Jesus from the Egyptian shrines is especially striking in its resonance with the passage from Lucan discussed briefly above (Pharsalia 10.176–81), in which Caesar asks the Egyptian priest to disclose what is written on the temple walls and, in so doing, to reveal the identities of the gods. In the Christian sources as in the classical works dealing with Egypt, Egyptian temples are repositories of arcane knowledge, including the names of supernatural beings, and at least some of this information is difficult of access, concealed the in form of hieroglyphic texts.

Moses and the “Wisdom” of Egypt

Just as Christian authors like Eusebius and Augustine were forced to confront the common belief that Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions might preserve the historical records of the antediluvian past, they also had to respond to the assertion that hieroglyphs, particularly those carved on temple walls, served as a means of transmitting an ancient and powerful esoteric tradition. The biblical claim that Moses had been “educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians (πάσῃ σοφίᾳ Αἰγυπτίων) and was powerful in his words and deeds” precluded the wholesale rejection of the concept, so we find Christian authors simultaneously acknowledging and problematizing the tradition of Egyptian wisdom as expressed in hieroglyphic sources. Although, as Clement acknowledges, “barbarian” arts might be “inventive and practically useful” insofar as they could lead to the invention of scientific disciplines such as geometry and metallurgy, several of the church fathers associate the wisdom of Egypt with a variety of negative qualities, including boastfulness, corruption, heresy, and idolatry. Some also claim that it is fundamentally unnecessary under the new Christian dispensation, worldly wisdom having given way before the wisdom of God, taught by the Holy Spirit.⁶⁶

At the heart of any discussion of Christian views on the “wisdom of Egypt” must be the claim about the education of Moses recorded in Acts 7:22. As Ton Hilhorst has observed in his commentary on this passage, the author of Acts was here amplifying the brief comment in Exodus 2:10 that states only that Moses had been adopted by Pharaoh’s daughter, without further commenting on his upbringing.⁶⁷ Acts 7:22 also echoes the wording of 1 Kings 4:30, where it is stated that “Solomon’s wisdom surpassed the wisdom of all the people of the east, and all the wisdom of Egypt.”⁶⁸ Although the author of Acts does not further specify the precise nature of Moses’ education, other Jewish and Christian commentators filled this lacuna on the basis of existing notions of what training in “wisdom” might look like in the context of an Egyptian upbringing. Particularly influential was the account of Philo, whose De vita Mosis provides a vivid picture of the young Moses at his lessons: “Arithmetic, geometry, the lore of metre, rhythm and harmony, and the whole subject of music as shown by the use of instruments or in textbooks and treatises of a more special character, were imparted to him by learned Egyptians. These further instructed him in the philosophy conveyed in symbols, as displayed in the so-called sacred characters (τὴν διὰ συμβόλων φιλοσοφίαν, ἣν ἐν τοῖς λεγομένοις ἱεροῖς γράμμασιν ἐπιδείκνυνται), and in the regard paid to animals, to which they even pay divine honours.”⁶⁹

Philo’s description of Moses’ education deploys a fairly stereotypical set of ideas about what might constitute the “wisdom of Egypt,” already well established in the classical tradition by the time of his writing. Arithmetic, geometry, and music were all commonly identified as Egyptian specialties, geometry in particular being seen as an Egyptian invention; and the writing of hieroglyphic texts and the worship of sacred animals were, as we have already seen, two of the quintessential hallmarks of Egyptian cultural identity.⁷⁰ Clement of Alexandria offers a glimpse of the Egyptian (priestly) curriculum in book 6 of the Stromateis, in which he enumerates the “forty-two books of Hermes, indispensably necessary”; the contents of these books range from the “hymns of the gods” to astrology, law, geography, and medicine, among other topics. Hieroglyphic writing is said to be the province of the sacred scribe, or hierogrammateus, “and he must be acquainted with what are called hieroglyphics (τὰ [τε] ἱερογλυγικὰ καλούμενα) and know about cosmography and geography, and the position of the sun and the moon, and about the five planets; and also the description of Egypt, and the chart of the Nile; and the description of the equipment of the priests and of the places consecrated to them, and about the measures and the things used in the sacred rites.”⁷¹ Philo’s characterization of Moses’ course of study under the tutelage of the “learned Egyptians” is, thus, generally consistent with Clement’s sketch of the body of knowledge that an individual who had gone through the rigors of an Egyptian priestly education might be expected to master.

Philo’s De vita Mosis was widely held to be an authoritative source for the life of the great Jewish culture hero, and Philo’s description of Moses’ education was frequently repeated by later Christian authors.⁷² Clement, for example, quotes Philo directly in Stromateis 1, noting that Moses’ learning included “the philosophy which is conveyed by symbols, which they point out in the hieroglyphic characters (τὴν διὰ συμβόλων φιλοσοφίαν, ἣν ἐν τοῖς ἱερογλυφικοῖς γράμμασιν ἐπιδείκνυνται).” He adds, again following Philo, that Moses “learned, besides, the writing of the Assyrians (τὰ Ἀσσυρίων γράμματα), and the knowledge of the heavenly bodies from the Chaldeans and the Egyptians; whence in the Acts he is said to have been ‘instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.’”⁷³ Other Christian writers offer similar assessments, adding the occasional detail; Origen notes, for example, that Moses obtained his learning from “ancient writings not accessible to the multitude,” by which we should probably again understand hieroglyphic or hieratic inscriptions and/or books, and Augustine, quoting Origen, identifies Moses as “the man of God,” who, by virtue of his Egyptian education, “loved geometry.” Basil specifies that Moses “received a royal education” and “had for his teachers the wise men of Egypt.”⁷⁴

If Moses’ education in the wisdom of the Egyptians could not be dismissed entirely, given its scriptural pedigree, the nature and benefits of that education could at least be problematized, and the church fathers went about this task with considerable creativity. Augustine lays out the Christian predicament with remarkable candor, observing that “it must … be admitted that there existed before Moses—not, indeed, in Greece, but among barbarous nations such as Egypt—some degree of learning which might be called their ‘wisdom.’ Otherwise it would not be written in the holy books that ‘Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.’”⁷⁵ Augustine goes on to point out, of course, that this so-called Egyptian wisdom, although it might have been earlier than that of the Greeks, could not possibly predate the wisdom of the Hebrew prophets and patriarchs such as Abraham, for “what wisdom could there be in Egypt before the art of letters had been taught by Isis?” The Egyptians’ misplaced pride in the antiquity of their intellectual traditions recurs at a number of points in De civitate Dei, as we saw in Chapter 2, and Augustine does not restrict his critique to the chronological position of Egyptian thinkers within the intellectual history of the nations. Rather, he attacks the content of Egyptian teaching as well, referring to the “great evils” transmitted in the “mystic writings of the Egyptians” and emphasizing that what the Egyptians categorize as wisdom at best comprised sciences like astronomy, “which usually serve rather to exercise men’s ingenuity than to illuminate their minds with true wisdom.”⁷⁶ At worst, Egyptian wisdom is tantamount to sacrilege, as Augustine makes clear in his identification of the first-century Alexandrian Stoic philosopher Chaeremon as “a man learned in these sacred—or, rather, sacrilegious—matters.” It is worth recalling in this context that Chaeremon was known in late antiquity not only for his tutelage of the young Nero but also as the author of widely cited treatises on the Egyptian priesthood (the Aegyptiaca) and on the hieroglyphic writing system (the Hieroglyphica). With this one turn of phrase, Augustine thus casts aspersions not only on Chaeremon himself, but on the whole Egyptian intellectual and religious tradition of which Chaeremon was a highly prominent exponent.⁷⁷

Augustine was not alone in condemning the Egyptians’ pride in their wisdom tradition as foolish and vainglorious. A number of the other church fathers also took up this theme, simultaneously acknowledging Egyptian claims to primordial wisdom while also stating that those claims were ill founded. Moses is once again central to this line of argumentation, for he is said both to have received an Egyptian priestly education and also to have beaten the Egyptian priests at their own game, as it were, thereby proving the superiority of divine inspiration over human intellectual effort. Origen makes this point clearly in Contra Celsum, where, as discussed above, he makes specific reference to Moses having obtained his learning “wholly from ancient writings.” In the same passage, Origen goes on to say that because of his intellectual formation, many people suspected that Moses’ miracles came about, not from God, but “by means of his Egyptian knowledge, in which he was well versed (κατὰ τὰ Αἰγυπτίων μαθήματα, σοφὸς ὢν ἐν αὐτοῖς).” When Pharaoh summoned the best of his “Egyptian magicians, and wise men, and enchanters,” however, their best efforts availed them nothing “against the wisdom of Moses, which proved superior to all the wisdom of the Egyptians (πρὸς τὴν ἐν Μωυσεῖ σοφίαν ὑπὲρ πᾶσαν Αἰγυπτίων σοφίαν).” Having learned all that the Egyptian priests and their hieroglyphic writings could teach him, Moses demonstrates the false nature of those teachings by defeating the Egyptians in the competition set up by Pharaoh, a victory that the church fathers present as a conflict of two opposing intellectual systems.⁷⁸

Augustine likewise returns to this theme in De civitate Dei, where he observes that although the Egyptian magicians were “permitted to perform certain marvels only so that they might be vanquished by still greater ones” the competition was lopsided at best, insofar as Moses was in the right, had greater power, and had angels on his side. Similarly, in a letter to Volusianus, Augustine draws a sharp contrast between Pharaoh’s Egyptian magicians, who were “working wonderfully by impious enchantments,” and Moses himself, who “by simply calling upon God in prayer, overthrew all their machinations.”⁷⁹ The message is consistent across all these sources: the venerable tradition of Egyptian wisdom, which is closely associated with both hieroglyphic inscriptions and magical practices, is shown to be inadequate by one of its own erstwhile practitioners, and the Egyptians’ proud claims of superior knowledge are thereby shown to be empty boasting.

Hieroglyphs, Corruption, and Heresy

In addition to their claims that Egyptian wisdom is fundamentally false, and therefore not to be seen as a source of pride, some of the church fathers also assert that Egyptian priestly traditions are suspect because of their connection to material wealth. The Egyptian temples were widely recognized as sumptuous spaces, where “the halls are surrounded with many pillars; and the walls gleam with foreign stones, and there is no want of artistic painting; and the temples gleam with gold, and silver, and amber, and glitter with particoloured gems from India and Ethiopia; and the shrines are veiled with gold-embroidered hangings,” but where the object of worship was revealed to be a “beast, unworthy of the temple, but quite worthy of a den, a hole, or the dirt.”⁸⁰ In much the same way, the Egyptian mysteries are shown to be false, with outward display and solemn ceremonial concealing a spiritual vacancy within. Moreover, the priests who preside over these luxurious spaces, and who are thus seen as gatekeepers of the Egyptians’ mystical traditions, are said to be corruptible. Origen, for example, refers to “the feats performed by those who have been taught by Egyptians, who in the middle of the market-place, in return for a few obols, will impart the knowledge of their most venerated arts,” including the expulsion of demons, the summoning of souls, and the animation of material objects—all activities that were commonly identified, in both the classical and Christian traditions, as falling under the purview of Egyptian ritual specialists. Ps.-Clement of Rome similarly refers to purchasing the secrets of the Egyptian mysteries, writing, “I shall go into Egypt, and I shall become friendly with the hierophants of the shrines, and with the prophets; and I shall seek and find a magician, and persuade him with large bribes to effect the calling up of a soul, which is called necromancy, as if I were going to inquire of it concerning some business. And the inquiry shall be for the purpose of learning whether the soul is immortal.”⁸¹ The implication underlying both passages is that a wisdom tradition that has been commodified is necessarily suspect. This perceived connection between Egyptian temples, their priests, and material wealth will prove to be a tenacious one, as we shall see in Chapter 5.

Another useful tool in the patristic arsenal that could be directed against the valorization of Egyptian wisdom was the claim that an Egyptian education could lead to heresy or even to that most quintessentially Egyptian of sins, idolatry. Merely residing in Egypt, it would seem, had the potential to corrupt one’s thinking; in his Historia Ecclesiastica, Socrates relates the story of a “Saracen” who married a woman from the Thebaid and settled with her in Egypt. “Having versed himself in the learning of the Egyptians (τὴν Αἰγυπτίων παιδείαν),” Socrates writes, “he subtly introduced the theory of Empedocles and Pythagoras among the doctrines of the Christian faith (τὴν Ἐμπεδοκλέους καὶ Πυθαγόρου δόξαν εἰς τὸν Χριστιανισμὸν παρεισήγαγεν).”⁸² These corrupt Egyptian doctrines, Socrates claims, lie at the root of Manichaeism. The author of the Refutatio omnium haeresium likewise notes that a number of movements deemed heretical had their roots in specifically Egyptian modes of thought. He singles out in particular what he calls the “heresy of Valentinus,” claiming that Valentinus’ teachings derive ultimately from ancient Egyptian traditions by way of Plato and Pythagoras. Another suspect movement, the “heresy of Basileides,” is likewise said to be the strange and undesirable fruit of an Egyptian education: “these are the myths of Basileides, who studied in Egypt (σχολάσας κατὰ τὴν Αἴγυπτον). From the Egyptians, then, he was taught so great a ‘wisdom’ and produced a like harvest” (καὶ παρ’ αὐτῶν τὴν τοσαύτην σοφίαν διδαχθείς, ἐκαρποφόρησε τοιούτους καρπούς).⁸³

The connection between heresy and Egyptian wisdom, particularly as articulated in hieroglyphic temple inscriptions, is expressed in somewhat greater detail in a fascinating passage from the twelfth book of Gregory of Nyssa’s treatise Contra Eunomium. Gregory claims that, in trying to comprehend where the Arian Eunomius came by his understanding of the nature of the Trinity, “the thought struck me, whether it could be that he was an admirer of the speculations of the Egyptians on the subject of the Divine, and had mixed up their fancies with his views concerning the Only-begotten.” Drawing an analogy between the Egyptians’ composite human-animal divine images, which he says are an “enigmatic symbol” of the “mixed nature” of daemons, and Eunomius’ Arian understanding of the “mixed” nature of Christ, Gregory writes,

our sage theologian seems to us to be importing into the Christian creed an Anubis, Isis, or Osiris from the Egyptian shrines (ἐκ τῶν Αἰγυπτίων ἀδύτων), all but the acknowledgment of their names: but there is no difference in profanity between him who openly makes profession of the names of idols, and him who, while holding the belief about them in his heart, is yet chary of their names. If, then, it is impossible to get out of Holy Scripture any support for this impiety, while their theory draws all its strength from the riddles of the hieroglyphics (ἐκ δὲ τῶν ἱερογλυφικῶν αἰνιγμάτων), assuredly there can be no doubt what right-minded persons ought to think of this.⁸⁴

It is unlikely that Gregory actually believed Eunomius had derived his Arian Christology from the study of Egyptian temple inscriptions; rather, in Contra Eunomium, alluding to Egyptian wisdom traditions is a way of establishing Eunomius’ guilt by association. Comparing his teaching to Egyptian idolatry—which, many of the church fathers agreed, represented the absolute nadir of polytheistic religious practice—is effectively a shorthand way of demonstrating how utterly irredeemable it is.⁸⁵

Even such a seemingly banal subject as geometry—widely viewed in antiquity as an Egyptian specialty, as we have already seen, and closely associated in the classical tradition with the hieroglyphic teachings of the Egyptian priesthood—was imbued with dangerous potential. Thus Ambrose asks, “what shows such darkness as to discuss subjects connected with geometry and astronomy … to measure the depths of space, to shut up heaven and earth within the limits of fixed numbers, to leave aside the grounds of salvation and to seek for error?” He goes on to state that Moses, “learned as he was in all the wisdom of the Egyptians,” turned away from the study of these subjects as “both harmful and foolish” and instead “sought God with all the desire of his heart, and thus saw, questioned, heard Him when He spoke. Who is more wise than he whom God taught, and who brought to naught all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and all the powers of their craft by the might of his works?”⁸⁶ In Ambrose’s assessment, the wisdom attained through the study and practice of empirical disciplines like astronomy and geometry, which he identifies as specifically Egyptian intellectual traditions, cannot possibly stand against the spiritual teachings of God. This type of argumentation is characteristic of Ambrose’s larger agenda in De officiis, throughout which, as Ivor Davidson notes, “Ambrose again and again sets up antitheses between classical thought and exemplars and the teaching and characters of the Bible,” aiming thereby to supplant Cicero’s original text with a Christianized version suitable for the intellectual culture of the late fourth century.⁸⁷

Ambrose’s remarks in De officiis concerning Moses’ repudiation of his Egyptian education point to one of the church fathers’ most consequential arguments against the Egyptian wisdom tradition—namely, the claim that all human wisdom, including but by no means limited to that wisdom expressed in hieroglyphic texts, has been rendered obsolete by the coming of Christ. This line of argumentation is grounded in a reading of 1 Corinthians 2:6–16, which outlines a distinction between worldly wisdom (“a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age”) and “God’s wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreed before the ages for our glory.” In their commentaries on this passage, the church fathers frequently state that the worldly wisdom to which Paul refers can be identified with the intellectual traditions of various peoples, including the Egyptians. Origen, for example, writes that the “wisdom of the rulers of this age” is exemplified by “the secret and occult philosophy, as they call it, of the Egyptians, and the astrology of the Chaldeans and Indians,” as well as “that manifold variety of opinion which prevails among the Greeks regarding divine things.”⁸⁸

Moreover, just as Paul writes in 1 Corinthians that the Christian community is distinguished by its privileging of spiritual over worldly wisdom, the church fathers at times privilege the knowledge of God over the achievements of science. Eusebius claims, for example, that the Egyptians, “who through their excess of knowledge boast of the discovery of geometry and astronomy and mathematics,” nonetheless failed to “recognize or understand how to weigh in their hearts and calculate the measure of the power of God and its superiority to mortal, irrational nature.” (This failing, Eusebius goes on to say, ultimately led the Egyptians to the sin of animal worship.) Similarly, John Chrysostom writes of the distinction between education and faith, noting that the apostles, through their faith, “were victorious over Plato and Pythagoras, in short, over all that had gone astray; and they surpass those whose lives had been worn out in astrology and geometry, mathematics and arithmetic, and who had been thoroughly instructed in every sort of learning.”⁸⁹ Although John Chrysostom does not speak explicitly about the Egyptians in this passage—which he prefaces with the wearily rhetorical question “why have not the Greeks been able to find out anything?”—Egyptian wisdom traditions are nevertheless a plausible subtext, given the widespread belief that Plato and Pythagoras had studied in Egypt and the oft-repeated statement that the fields of geometry and mathematics were peculiarly Egyptian specialties.

Conclusion

Other Christian writers take the problematization of traditional sources of wisdom even further than the examples cited above. Clement of Alexandria, for example, writes that “since the Word Himself has come to us from heaven, we need not, I reckon, go any more in search of human learning to Athens and the rest of Greece, and to Ionia,” and Origen inverts classical notions of paideia by identifying the uneducated not with those who are untrained “in the branches of Greek learning,” as he puts it, but with idolaters, “who are not ashamed to address (supplications) to inanimate objects, and to call upon those for health that have no strength, and to ask the dead for life, and to entreat the helpless for assistance.” In the same passage, Origen goes on to claim that Christian wisdom, which comes from God, is accessible to the most ignorant and the most educated alike, for “all human wisdom is folly in comparison with the divine.”⁹⁰ This argument anticipates claims that would be made in later hagiographic literature, in which desert monks are lauded for their spiritual discernment even as they proclaim their lack of formal education. One is reminded, for example, of Athanasius’ characterization of Antony as illiterate yet wise, and of Antony’s own claim that a sound mind obviates the need for literacy.⁹¹ This point should not be carried too far, of course; Antony is now thought to have been literate in Coptic, at least, and Gregory of Nazianzus’ passionate invectives protesting Emperor Julian’s edict forbidding Christians from teaching the Greek classics show that many of the church fathers, themselves highly educated, continued to see great value in the traditions of classical paideia, even if they rejected the religious content of the classical literary canon.⁹² What the remarks of Origen, Clement, and the other authors discussed above suggest, however, is that alternative sources of intellectual authority were emerging in the late antique Christian worldview, and that the locus of “wisdom” was to some extent shifting away from the learned philosophers and priests of the Greek and Egyptian traditions toward the divinely inspired ascetics and mystics who populate the late antique literary landscape. This notion will be explored further in Chapter 5 below, which deals with Christian attempts to “translate” hieroglyphic inscriptions; in certain of the late antique sources, as we shall see, divine inspiration essentially supplants actual literacy in the hieroglyphic script as the necessary prerequisite for successful hermeneutic activity.