Chapter 5

Translating Hieroglyphs, Constructing Authority

The complex linguistic situation that prevailed in Egypt from the Hellenistic period onward necessarily resulted in extensive translation activity as the country’s various language communities sought to communicate with one another and with the state. Over the course of the millennium separating the Ptolemies from the early caliphs, legal, financial, and administrative documents were translated into and from Egyptian (in various scripts), Greek, Latin, Aramaic, Pahlavi, and Arabic, among other languages. The sources occasionally refer to this process explicitly, as in the case of a sixth-century decree issued by the dux of the Thebaid, which includes instructions for the document’s translation “into the vernacular language,” that is, from Greek into Coptic (τῇ ἐπιχωρίῳ μεθερμηνε̣[υ]θ̣ῆ̣ναι διαλ̣έ̣κτῳ). More commonly, however, the translation of such texts seems to have passed largely unremarked as a necessary and unexceptional aspect of daily life in a multilingual environment.¹

Documentary sources were not alone in receiving such treatment; literary and religious texts were also the object of translation activity during this time period. The most famous example is probably the production of the Septuagint, purportedly carried out at the behest of Ptolemy II for the benefit of the Alexandrian Library, but the Septuagint represents only one example of a much larger corpus of religious and literary translations produced in the Hellenistic and Roman periods.² These range from Greek translations of Egyptian cultic texts such as the Book of the Temple to the Coptic translation of a portion of Plato’s Republic, and from the Greek translation of the Demotic Myth of the Sun’s Eye to the Coptic translations of the Old and New Testaments.

In the midst of all this interpretive activity, the translation of Egyptian hieroglyphic texts into Greek, Latin, or other languages always remained something of a special case. Although such translations are known, as are translations in the opposite direction, from Greek or Latin into hieroglyphs, they are relatively uncommon, their production and consumption constrained by the increasingly restricted use of the hieroglyphic script and by the small number of individuals who would have been capable of engaging with that script in any meaningful way.³ Somewhat more common are claims that a text in Greek or Latin represents the translation of a hieroglyphic or Demotic Egyptian original. As discussed briefly in Chapter 2, these have often been interpreted as a kind of marketing ploy, whereby the author of a Greek or, less commonly, Latin text sought to lend his work additional gravitas by providing it with a pedigree tied to the ancient and highly respected Egyptian scribal and priestly traditions. At the same time that such claims were in circulation, however, there also developed a kind of counterdiscourse that proposed that hieroglyphs were fundamentally untranslatable—or rather, as some authors argued, that they should not be translated, lest they lose their intrinsic magical efficacy. Such is the view expressed, for example, in treatise 16 of the Corpus Hermeticum and echoed in the work of Iamblichus, who argues (De mysteriis 7.4–5) that the Egyptian language possesses unique properties that would be vitiated by the act of translation.

The translation of hieroglyphic texts thus became, in late antiquity, a kind of contested space, where claims to authority—both the authority to translate a text or inscription and the authority gained from the act of translation—were constantly being negotiated. This chapter examines three late antique cases where such a negotiation can be closely observed: the presentation of a Greek translation of the Piazza del Popolo obelisk inscriptions in Ammianus Marcellinus’ Res Gestae; the legend of the discovery and interpretation of mysterious “cross-shaped” hieroglyphs following the destruction of the Serapeum in Alexandria, as related in the ecclesiastical histories of Rufinus, Socrates, and Sozomen; and finally the story of the patriarch Theophilus’ discovery and miraculous translation of hieroglyphic temple inscriptions, recounted in a cycle of late Coptic homilies.

Although the authors of these various accounts came from different linguistic, cultural, and religious backgrounds, a similar pattern can be discerned in all three cases. Despite the widespread belief that hieroglyphs were by nature untranslatable, attempts were nonetheless made in late antiquity to translate them, and the resulting translations (or “translations”) served the authority-building agendas of various constituencies. Ammianus’ obelisk translation speaks to the establishment of Roman imperial authority over Egypt; the interpretation of the cross-shaped hieroglyphs at the Serapeum lends strength to the Christian Church’s claims to superiority over the cult of Serapis; and Theophilus’ divinely inspired reading of the temple inscriptions allows him access to the riches of the temple treasury, giving him the means to cement his reputation as a prolific builder of new churches. Spurious though the majority of these “translations” undoubtedly were, they were nevertheless powerful tools that might be used in shaping both imperial and ecclesiastical authority. The works of the Christian authors under consideration here also signal a sea change in the location of hermeneutic agency. Whereas Ammianus appeals to an outside expert, the scholar Hermapion, to provide the translation for the obelisk inscription he quotes in the Res Gestae, the ecclesiastical historians and the author(s) of the homilies on Theophilus present the ability to read hieroglyphs as the result, not of a traditional Egyptian education in the House of Life, but of inspiration by the Holy Spirit.

The (Im)possibility of Translation in Classical and Christian Sources

P.Berol.inv. 21243, a magical text from Abusir el-Melek dating to the reign of Augustus, opens with a prologue stating the document’s pedigree: “Excerpt from spells in the sacred book (ἱερὸς βύβλος) called ‘of Hermes,’ found in Heliopolis in the sanctuary (ἄδυτον), written in Egyptian characters (Αἰγυπτίοις γράμμασιν) and translated (διερμηνεύειν) into Greek.”⁴ Such a claim is hardly unprecedented, particularly in the genre of magical texts. Hermes was, as we have already seen, widely reputed as a master magician, and Heliopolis was viewed, particularly among classical authors, as one of the preeminent centers of Egyptian priestly learning. Nor is the statement that the Greek-language text represents the translation of an Egyptian original particularly unusual. The editor proposes that this should be regarded as an attempt to provide the text, which was probably composed in Greek, with “a hint of authenticity, age, and sacredness,” and similar claims appear in other magical texts as well, probably for much the same reason.⁵ PGM IV 885–86 offers a particularly striking parallel; in this text, written in Greek, the practitioner bids the spirits come to him “since I speak your names which thrice-greatest Hermes wrote in Heliopolis with hieroglyphic letters.” A string of voces magicae follows in which the name of the Egyptian deity Osiris features prominently.⁶ At roughly the same time as the translation claims of texts like P.Berol.inv. 21243 and PGM IV.885–86 were being articulated, however, a countervailing discourse was emerging that problematized the very possibility of translation, especially of theological and ritual texts. A forceful statement of this issue is expressed in the opening lines of treatise 16 of the Corpus Hermeticum, which famously begins with a meditation on the differences between the Greek and Egyptian languages and an injunction against the act of translation from Egyptian to Greek. The speaker, Asclepius, claims that he had been told by his teacher, Hermes, that his writing “is unclear and keeps the meaning of its words concealed.” Although a modern reader might take this as a criticism, both Hermes and Asclepius see it as a good thing, and Asclepius goes on to relate the rest of Hermes’ remarks: “furthermore, it will be entirely unclear (ἀσαφής) (he said) when the Greeks eventually desire to translate (μεθερμηνεύειν) our language (διάλεκτος) to their own and thus produce in writing the greatest distortion and unclarity. But this discourse (λόγος), expressed in our paternal language (τῇ πατρῴᾳ διαλέκτῳ), keeps clear the meaning of its words. The very quality of the speech and the of Egyptian words have in themselves the energy of the objects they speak of (καὶ γὰρ ἀυτὸ τὸ τῆς φωνῆς ποιὸν καὶ ἡ τῶν Αἰγυπτίων ⟨ἠχὼ⟩ ὀνομάτων ἐν ἑαυτῇ τὴν ἐνέργειαν τῶν λεγομένων).” Asclepius then makes a request of “King Ammon,” to whom the treatise is addressed. He says,

Therefore, my king, in so far as you have the power (who are all powerful), keep the discourse uninterpreted (ἀνερμήνευτος), lest mysteries (μυστήριον) of such greatness come to the Greeks, lest the extravagant, flaccid, and (as it were) dandified Greek idiom extinguish the gravity, the solidity, and the efficacious quality (ἐνεργητικός) of the words (ὄνομα) of (our) speech (φράσις). For the Greeks have empty discourses (λόγος), O king, that are energetic only in what they demonstrate, and this is the philosophy of the Greeks, an inane foolosophy of speeches. We, by contrast, use not discourses (λόγος) but sounds (φωνή) that are full of action (ἔργων).⁷

In this introduction, Asclepius lays out a series of contrasts between Greek and Egyptian: Greek, characterized by the production of empty philosophical discourses, is weak and overly ornamented, while Egyptian is serious, solid, and above all efficacious. Translating a text from Egyptian into Greek risks not only the loss of clarity but also, more important, the loss of a fundamentally energetic quality that is intrinsic to the very sounds of the Egyptian language but wholly absent from the Greek.⁸

The supreme irony of CH 16 is, of course, that the text survives only in Greek and was almost certainly composed in that language. The tension between the linguistic attitude expressed by the author and the language in which the text is preserved presents the reader with a striking paradox, which scholars have been at some pains to resolve over the course of the last several decades.⁹ In a seminal article on the subject, Claire Préaux argues that, within the Hermetic corpus in particular, the arguments for and against translation reflect two distinct Greek modes of thinking about both language and religion. In the first mode, articulated most forcefully in CH 16, the refusal to translate stems from a desire to both preserve the efficacy of the words in which divine knowledge was first revealed to mankind and also to restrict access to that knowledge.¹⁰ The second mode of thought, expressed in treatise 12 of the Corpus Hermeticum, proposes that although languages differ from one nation to another, “humanity is one; therefore, speech is also one, and when translated it is found to be the same in Egypt and Persia as in Greece.”¹¹ Préaux characterizes this as a quintessentially rationalistic and Hellenistic outlook, consistent with the extensive translation activity carried out under the Ptolemies and reflecting an “egalitarian” understanding of the communicability of religious revelation.¹²

Also focusing his attention primarily on the Corpus Hermeticum, Garth Fowden has argued that the authors of the Hermetic treatises themselves recognized the tension between their claims to linguistic exclusivity and the existence of Greek-language Hermetica, and that they attempted to resolve this tension by appealing to the tradition articulated in the Book of Sothis. In that text, discussed above in Chapter 3, hieroglyphic stelae carved before the Flood by “Thoth, the first Hermes” were said to have been subsequently translated into Greek “by the second Hermes, the son of Agathodaimon and the father of Tat.” In Fowden’s estimation, this tradition offers a tidy resolution to the paradox of translation; moving from one language to another may be problematic, but who better to meet that challenge than the god who invented language in the first place?¹³

More recently, Jacco Dieleman has examined the “paradox of translation” in his study of linguistic and cultural interactions in the milieu of the so-called Theban Magical Library. Reflecting on the attitudes expressed in CH 16, which he sees as originating in an Egyptian priestly milieu, he argues that the author of this text was self-consciously playing with the classical discourse on Egypt, on Egyptian hieroglyphs, and on the famously secretive and exclusive Egyptian priesthood, essentially giving his Greek-speaking audience what they wanted and expected to hear.¹⁴ Similarly, in a discussion of the concept of “mysteries” in the Hermetic corpus, Christian Bull suggests that language choice, and the decision to translate or not to translate, offers a measure of control over the material encoded in the hieroglyphic text: “the loss of meaning which occurs when translating the sacred books of the Egyptians into Greek, as seen in CH 16.1–2, is thus a way to keep the appearance of possessing an inviolate secret while divulging it only piecemeal.”¹⁵

The concepts expressed in CH 16, in particular the uniquely efficacious quality of the Egyptian language and the impossibility of translating from Egyptian into Greek, were shared to some degree by the later Neoplatonists who dealt with the subject of Egyptian hieroglyphs. As discussed above in Chapter 3, Plotinus and Iamblichus both present the hieroglyphic script as a unique means of communication. Plotinus, for his part, emphasizes the difference between Egyptian hieroglyphs, which he claims manifest “the non-discursiveness of the intelligible world” according to a system by which “every image is a kind of knowledge and wisdom,” and other writing systems, which “use the forms of letters which follow the order of words and propositions and imitate sounds and the enunciations of philosophical statements.” Egyptian, he stresses, is not a matter of “discourse or deliberation.”¹⁶ Plotinus does not explicitly state that his primary comparison is between the Egyptian and Greek languages, but his emphasis on the notions of rational discourse and “the enunciations of philosophical statements” that characterize the language or languages that he sets in opposition to the Egyptian hieroglyphic script echoes the phrasing of CH 16, which similarly insists on philosophical discourse as particularly characteristic of the Greek language in contrast to the Egyptian. Unlike the author of CH 16, however, Plotinus appears to reject the idea that associates Egyptian with efficacious speech; if the hieroglyphs are purely images, then no sounds can be associated with them. Translation is nonetheless problematized, for how could one hope to move between a system that offers a direct representation of reality via symbols and a system that relies instead on the imitation of sounds and the linkage of those sounds into words and then into discourses?

Writing a generation or so after Plotinus, Iamblichus’ view of hieroglyphs and the issue of translation echoes the theories articulated in both Plotinus’ Enneads and in the Corpus Hermeticum. As discussed above in Chapter 3, Iamblichus, like Plotinus, understood hieroglyphs as a fundamentally symbolic system whereby the Egyptians “display certain signs (εἰκών) of mystical, arcane and invisible intellections by means of symbols (διὰ συμβόλων).”¹⁷ However, he was also concerned with spoken Egyptian and its use in ritual practice, and here his comments align very closely with the views expressed in CH 16. Because the meaning of divine names in the “barbarian” languages of Egyptian and Assyrian is not dictated by convention but directly reflects reality, he argues that “the names (ὄνομα) do not exactly preserve the same meaning when they are translated (μεθερμηνεύειν); rather, there are certain idioms in every nation that are impossible to express in the language (φωνή) of another. Moreover, even if one were to translate them, this would not preserve their same power (δύναμις). For the barbarian names possess weightiness (ἔμφασις) and great precision (συντομία), participating in less ambiguity, variability, and multiplicity of expression. For all these reasons, then, they are adapted to the superior beings.”¹⁸ In other words, for Iamblichus as for the author of CH 16, Egyptian is uniquely appropriate to ritual contexts by virtue of its very nature; unlike Greek, which is innovative and experimental, Egyptian is eternal, pleasing to the gods, and “wholly suitable for sacred rituals.”

Christian authors shared many of the same concerns about the possibility of translation, particularly in the realm of ritual practice. This is exemplified by a section of Origen’s Contra Celsum in which the apologist discusses the use of sacred names. Origen was responding to Celsus’ claims that, on the one hand, Christians obtain supernatural power by “the names of certain demons, and by the use of incantations” and, on the other hand, to the syncretistic proposition that “it makes no difference whether the God who is over all things be called by the name of Zeus, which is current among the Greeks, or by that, e.g., which is in use among the Indians or Egyptians.”¹⁹ In his reply to the first of these allegations, Origen argues that Christians do indeed produce miracles by speaking the name of Jesus. He takes issue, however, with the notion that sacred names are interchangeable. Rather, following the Platonist and Stoic position that saw the development of language and the assignment of names to things and beings as a function of nature rather than convention, Origen argues strongly against the possibility of translation, especially of sacred names and ritual formulae: “those who are skilled in the use of incantations, relate that the utterance of the same incantation in its proper language can accomplish what the spell professes to do; but when translated into any other tongue, it is observed to become inefficacious and feeble. And thus it is not the things signified, but the qualities and peculiarities of words, which possess a certain power for this or that purpose.”²⁰ As John Dillon points out in his analysis of these passages from Contra Celsum, Origen’s understanding of the nature of language, the power of sacred names, and the difficulty of translation is wholly in line with the attitudes expressed in contemporary Hermetic and Neoplatonic sources.²¹ Indeed, these attitudes seem to have been fairly common currency in late antique intellectual circles; as such, they form the cultural backdrop against which the translation activity surveyed in this chapter must be evaluated.

In Ammianus’ Res Gestae, the translation of the Piazza del Popolo obelisk inscription occasions no particular anxiety, although Ammianus otherwise adheres to the norms of the classical discourse on hieroglyphs and might have been expected to share the common belief that the translation of hieroglyphs was intrinsically problematic. Such an anxiety over the possibility of translation does appear in the ecclesiastical histories, however, where viewers of different religious backgrounds dispute each other’s interpretation of the cross-shaped hieroglyphs discovered at the Serapeum. And finally, in the homilies on Theophilus and his church-building activities, the translation of a hieroglyphic inscription becomes the mystical key that opens a sealed temple doorway, in a clear echo of contemporary discussions of the magical efficacy of the Egyptian language.

Translation and Quotation in Classical and Early Christian Historiography

Despite Greco-Roman authors’ well-documented fascination with the hieroglyphic script, discussed in Chapters 2 and 3 above, the translation of extended passages from Egyptian hieroglyphic texts into Greek or Latin is relatively rare in classical sources. When hieroglyphic translations are presented, they are normally restricted to individual words and short phrases, often related to the etymology of sacred names and toponyms. For example, Plutarch quotes Manetho as stating that the name of the god Amun “means ‘what is concealed’ and that concealment is signified by this word.” In a similar vein, Josephus comments unfavorably on Manetho’s explication of the name Moses, arguing that “his real name means ‘saved out of the water,’ for the Egyptians call water ‘mōy.’”²² In both cases, the writers are aware of the meaning of individual Egyptian words—the name Amun does reflect the notion of concealment, and mw is the Egyptian word for water—but they stop short of offering translations of continuous text. Elsewhere, Greek and Roman authors may correctly transmit the general sense of inscriptions without attempting a literal translation. A good example of this is Tacitus’ account of the tribute lists seen by Germanicus at Thebes, discussed above in Chapter 2; although the historian accurately represents the kind of information conveyed in Theban temple inscriptions like the annals of Thutmose III at Karnak, he does not purport to actually translate those texts.

It is noteworthy that even those writers who visited Egypt at a time when hieroglyphic inscriptions were still being produced, and could presumably have been translated for them by native interlocutors, make little use of translated sources in their work. This has sometimes been put down to a simple lack of curiosity or intellectual rigor. Iversen, for example, observes that among the Greek writers who discuss hieroglyphs, “none of them had taken the trouble to get acquainted with the practical and theoretical problems of the system, and, irrespective of their insufficiency, certain conceptions were generally accepted and acknowledged and uncritically handed over from one author to another.”²³ This view was echoed more recently in the introduction to an important survey of the reception history of pharaonic Egypt, where Timothy Champion and Peter Ucko argue that despite the prominence of hieroglyphs in the classical discourse on Egypt, few authors “showed any interest in how this writing system actually worked.” This phenomenon is, for Champion and Ucko, an indicator of “how intellectually incurious the various writers seem to have been,” and on this basis they are led to question how genuine classical interest in Egypt really was.²⁴ Such a view is not universally accepted, however. John Winkler, for example, has argued strongly against judging what he claims is the primarily “theosophical” interest of most Greek and Roman commentators on hieroglyphs against the modern study of Egyptian philology, and he also notes that the “rather fanciful allegorical etymologies” so prevalent in sources like Plutarch and Horapollo actually reflect genuine Egyptian ways of speaking about their own writing system.²⁵ This latter point has been echoed more recently by Jean Winand in his work on the history of decipherment; although Winand, like Iversen, remarks on the classical writers’ seeming lack of curiosity in the inner workings of the hieroglyphic system, he demonstrates that, in many cases, the accounts of the classical authors do directly reflect the reality of late hieroglyphic inscriptions, produced at a time when hieroglyphic writing “had taken on, in some of its manifestations, a particularly concise form which accentuated the symbolic aspect.”²⁶

Leaving aside for a moment the question of curiosity (or lack thereof) on the part of the classical authors who address hieroglyphs, what other factors might have prevented them from incorporating more translated hieroglyphic inscriptions into their work? The phenomenon may be due in part to a simple question of access, which was constrained by the high degree of specialization within the ranks of the Egyptian priestly elite in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. As discussed above in Chapter 1, even within the priesthood, literacy in hieroglyphs was a highly specialized skill that few individuals would have possessed, and Greek and Roman visitors could not necessarily guarantee that their tour guides and informants came from that most highly educated population. Given the widespread Greco-Roman belief in the wisdom of the Egyptian priesthood, it may also be the case that the Egyptian interlocutors cited as authorities by Herodotus and his later colleagues were, in some cases at least, simply trying to live up to the prevailing model of priestly wisdom, regardless of whether or not they actually possessed the requisite educational background. It is not hard to imagine a priest who, tasked with showing a visitor around the temple, offered a creative reading of inscriptions he could not really translate rather than confessing his ignorance of what was, after all, his own cultural heritage.²⁷

The generic conventions of classical geography and historiography probably also contributed to the relatively infrequent appearance of translated Egyptian sources in texts belonging to those genres. As Momigliano has argued, the direct quotation or transcription of primary sources in any language was uncommon in the work of classical historians, who preferred to utilize “a maximum of invented speeches and a minimum of authentic documents.” If they declined to make use of primary sources in their own native tongues, how much less may we fault the classical authors for failing to incorporate source material translated from other languages? The norms of historiography began to change with Eusebius’ heavy reliance on primary sources in the Ecclesiastical History. However, his focus, and that of later Christian historians, was on those documents that illuminated the larger narrative of the church triumphant, a story in which hieroglyphic inscriptions could not be expected to play a large role—although they do occasionally appear in this context, as we shall see shortly.²⁸

Symbols of Empire

One place where we can observe some kind of translation activity at work is in Ammianus Marcellinus’ account of the Egyptian obelisks that were transported to Rome and reerected on the spina of the Circus Maximus, the first by Augustus in 10 B.C.E. and the second by Constantius II in 357 C.E.²⁹ Ammianus begins this section of the Res Gestae with a general description of the Egyptian city of Thebes and its monuments, particularly its obelisks, “which kings of long ago, when they had subdued foreign nations in war or were proud of the prosperous condition of their realms, hewed out of the veins of the mountains which they sought for even among the remotest dwellers on the globe, set up, and in their religious devotion dedicated to the gods of heaven.”³⁰ Noting that obelisks were often furnished with inscriptions, Ammianus continues with a brief précis of the hieroglyphic writing system, which betrays all the traditional misconceptions discussed in Chapters 2 and 3 above:

Now the infinite carvings of characters called hieroglyphics (formarum autem innumeras notas, hieroglyphicas appellatas), which we see cut into it on every side, have been made known by an ancient authority of primeval wisdom (initialis sapientiae vetus insignivit auctoritas). For by engraving many kinds of birds and beasts, even of another world, in order that the memory of their achievements might the more widely reach generations of a subsequent age, they registered the vows of kings, either promised or performed. 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 Egyptian also write; but individual characters stood for individual nouns and verbs (sed singulae litterae singulis nominibus serviebant et verbis); and sometimes they meant whole phrases (non numquam significabant integros sensus). The principle of this thing for the time it will suffice to illustrate with these two examples: by a vulture they represented the word “nature,” because, as natural history records, no males can be found among these birds; and under the figure of the bee making honey they designate “a king,” showing by this imagery that in a ruler sweetness should be combined with a sting as well; and there are many similar instances.³¹

Like his earlier Greek and Roman counterparts, Ammianus sees a close connection between the use of hieroglyphs and the institution of Egyptian kingship; he also emphasizes the widely noted fact that many hieroglyphic signs take the form of animals. But how exactly should we understand the transmission of knowledge that Ammianus speaks of here? The implied indirect object of insignivit is ambiguous: to whom were the hieroglyphs made known—the Egyptians themselves, or classical viewers of hieroglyphs, including Ammianus? The sense of vetus auctoritas is also somewhat ambiguous. It might refer to the accumulated body of traditional knowledge about hieroglyphs that was passed down within the Egyptian priesthood, but it could also refer to the works of the earlier classical authors who had investigated the “primeval wisdom” of the Egyptians and whose earlier discussions of hieroglyphs so clearly influenced Ammianus’ own. Elsewhere in the Res Gestae, auctoritas is used in both senses; in 22.14.7, for example, Ammianus describes the lifespan of the Apis bull as having been “prescribed by the secret authority of the mystic books” (quam secreta librorum praescribit auctoritas mysticorum), while in 15.9.8 he refers to the authority of a specific author, in this case Pythagoras (auctoritas Pythagorae). Whichever meaning is intended here, in this passage Ammianus situates the hieroglyphic obelisk inscriptions squarely within the prevailing classical paradigm of the ancient wisdom of Egypt and suggests that he has drawn on a body of preexisting information in his presentation of this material.

Ammianus goes on to offer a profoundly unoriginal assessment of the purportedly analphabetic nature of the hieroglyphic script, emphasizing the contrast between the ancient Egyptian writing system and the “fixed and easy series of letters” that characterizes Greek and Latin. As Iversen notes, Ammianus’ account of hieroglyphs is “couched in conventional terms.”³² Although he is not entirely incorrect in stating that individual hieroglyphic signs could signify entire nouns and verbs, Ammianus’ claim that single signs could represent entire sentences clearly derives from the prevailing late classical view of hieroglyphs as a symbolic, rather than phonetic, system. Nor is Ammianus particularly original in the examples he selects to illustrate the nature and interpretation of hieroglyphs, namely the vulture and bee signs. Both hieroglyphs are discussed by Horapollo, and it is likely that Ammianus and Horapollo relied on a common source for these shared examples; the Hieroglyphica of Chaeremon is a possible candidate, for the vulture and bee signs both appear as examples in the fragment of Chaeremon preserved in John Tzetzes’ Exegesis in Iliadem 1.97.³³

In the case of both hieroglyphs, however, the information provided by Ammianus, Horapollo, and Chaeremon diverges somewhat. Whereas Ammianus notes that the vulture sign is used to signify the word “nature,” Horapollo identifies a different set of words that can be written with that hieroglyph (“mother,” “sight,” “limit,” “prescience,” “year,” “heaven,” “merciful,” “Athena,” “Hera,” or “two drachmas”).³⁴ Charemon, for his part, aligns more closely with Horapollo: “for ‘[a woman] who generates females’ and for ‘mother’ and ‘time’ and ‘heaven,’ a vulture.”³⁵ Like Ammianus, Horapollo also explains the use of the vulture sign with reference to the purported nonexistence of male vultures, but he also adduces an extended natural-historical excursus on the reproductive habits of the species. Similarly, although Ammianus, Horapollo, and Chaeremon all report that the bee hieroglyph is used to denote the concept of kingship, and both Ammianus and Horapollo explain this connection with reference to the combination of sweetness and sting that is seen as desirable in a ruler, Horapollo again provides a lengthier and more detailed exegesis of the sign, connecting his explanation to the observed behavior of bees.³⁶ Breaking no new ground here, Ammianus seems content to reiterate what was, essentially, the common “knowledge” of his day, as one might expect from a historian with a passing familiarity with the earlier Greek and Latin sources on hieroglyphic writing.

Although his overall assessment of the nature of hieroglyphic writing is wholly conventional and substantially incorrect in its emphasis on the symbolic nature of the script, Ammianus differs greatly from his earlier counterparts by providing readers with a lengthy example of a hieroglyphic text in translation. Having described in some detail the transportation of Constantius’ obelisk from Egypt to Rome and its reerection in the Circus Maximus, and having spoken in general terms about the nature of hieroglyphs, he inserts into his narrative a Greek translation of “the text of the characters cut upon the ancient obelisk which we see in the Circus (notarum textus obelisco incisus est veteri, quem videmus in Circo)”—that is, the Heliopolitan obelisk of Ramesses II that had been removed to Rome and placed on the spina of the Circus Maximus by Augustus and that now stands in the Piazza del Popolo (Figure 9).³⁷ This translation, which Ammianus ascribes to an individual referred to only as “Hermapion,” is essentially unparalleled in the surviving classical and late classical sources on hieroglyphs, and it offers a remarkable opportunity to observe Egyptian-to-Greek translation activity in practice.³⁸

Hermapion’s translation has suffered greatly over the centuries at the hands of Latin-speaking copyists who struggled to faithfully reproduce the interpolated Greek text. In one of the earliest surviving manuscripts of the Res Gestae, the ninth-century codex Fuldensis, the scribe appears to have given up in despair, copying only ninety-seven Greek characters and leaving the following thirty-eight lines blank, evidently with the intention of returning to complete the burdensome task at a later point in time. The version of the text that has survived to the present day is based on Sigismond Gelenius’ 1574 edition of the now-lost ninth-century codex Hersfeldensis.³⁹ There exist two major modern studies of Hermapion’s translation and its relationship to the text of the Flaminian obelisk—Adolf Erman’s seminal 1914 article and a detailed analysis by Bérénice Lambrecht from 2001. Whereas Erman concluded that Hermapion’s work represented a rather fluid and casual translation, not of the Flaminian obelisk, but of another obelisk since lost, Lambrecht convincingly demonstrates that Hermapion’s text is certainly a translation of the hieroglyphic inscriptions on the Flaminian obelisk.⁴⁰

Figure 9. View of the Piazza del Popolo (Flaminian) obelisk. Photo by author.

Hermapion’s translation, as it has come down to us through this troubled process of transmission, presents three lines of text (στίχοι, corresponding to columns of hieroglyphic signs) from the south face of the obelisk, three lines from a face whose orientation is not specified, and one line from the east face. The present orientation of the obelisk in the Piazza del Popolo represents a 180-degree rotation from its position at the time when Hermapion had access to it (perhaps when it stood in the Circus Maximus, or even in Heliopolis prior to its removal to Rome). As a result, Hermapion’s “south face” is now oriented to the north, his unidentified face is identifiable as the actual south face, and his “east face” corresponds to the present west face. According to Lambrecht’s calculation of the number of characters that could have fit into the long lacuna of codex Fuldensis, the original text of Hermapion probably included the translation of all four faces of the obelisk.⁴¹

Lambrecht’s parallel analysis of the obelisk inscription and the text of Hermapion enables us to see the process by which an Egyptian text was presented to a Greek-speaking audience. For example, the left-hand column of text on the (present) south face of the obelisk reads as follows in Egyptian: Ḥr kꜣ-nḫt mrymꜣ^ϲt nb ḥb.w-sd mỉ ỉt⸗f Ptḥ Tnn nsw.t bỉty Wsr-M ꜣ^ϲt-R^ϲ stp.n-R^ϲ s R^ϲ R^ϲ-ms- sw ms-nṯr. w ḳd ḥw.t⸗sn nb tꜣ.wy Wsr-M ꜣ^ϲt-R ^ϲ stp.n-R ^ϲ s R^ϲ R^ϲ-ms- sw dỉ ^ϲnḫ mỉ R^ϲ, “Horus: mighty bull, beloved of Maat, lord of jubilees like his father Ptah-Tenen, king of Upper and Lower Egypt, Usirmaatre Setepenre, son of Re, Ramesses, who engenders the gods, who builds their temples, Lord of the Two Lands, Usirmaatre Setepenre, son of Re, Ramesses, given life like Re.”⁴² Hermapion renders this as follows: Ἥλιος θεὸς δεσπότης οὐρανοῦ Ῥαμέστῃ βασιλεῖ· δεδώρημαι τὸ κράτος καὶ τὴν κατὰ πάντων ἐξουσίαν, ὃν Ἀπόλλων φιλαλήθης δεσπότης χρόνων καὶ Ἥφαιστος ὁ τῶν θεῶν πατὴρ προέκρινεν διὰ τὸν Ἄρεα βασιλεύς παγχαρής, Ἡλίου παῖς, καὶ ὑπὸ Ἡλίου φιλούμενος, “Helios the god, lord of heaven, to King Ramestes (Ramesses): I have given you strength and power over everything, you whom Apollo, lover of truth and master of time, with Hephaistos the father of the gods, has chosen, through Ares the king, full of joy, son of Helios, and beloved of Helios.”⁴³ In Lambrecht’s analysis, the phrase Ἥλιος θεὸς … πάντων ἐξουσίαν represents the interpolation of a passage that corresponds roughly to the legend accompanying the scene carved on the south face of the pyramidion, which reads R^ϲ-Ḥr-ꜣḫty nṯr ^ϲꜣ, nb pt. Ḏd mdw <ỉn>: ỉ.n.dı.̉ n.ı ̉ n⸗k ^ϲnḫ ḏd wꜣs nb, “Re-Harakhty, great god, lord of heaven. Words spoken: I have given you all life and all stability.”⁴⁴ Hermapion then proceeds with the translation of the text from the shaft of the obelisk itself, beginning with the equation of Horus and Apollo.

Although Lambrecht emphasizes the overall fidelity of Hermapion’s translation, noting in particular that there are only a few instances where the Greek text cannot be matched to any Egyptian expression appearing on the obelisk, she acknowledges that the translation is not fully literal and that in several instances Hermapion elected to leave certain names and epithets untranslated. This is evident from the example quoted above, where the epithets ḳd ḥw.t⸗sn and nb tꜣ.wy are omitted from the translation, as is the second iteration of Ramesses’ praenomen. Lambrecht suggests that at least some of these omissions may have been due to the translator’s desire to avoid what he saw as unnecessary repetition, and she argues that Hermapion sought above all to provide his reader, not necessarily with a literal translation, but with a reasonably accurate sense of the text’s content. Other omissions, however, may reflect the translator’s imperfect command of the hieroglyphic script.⁴⁵

If the text of Hermapion’s translation has proven challenging for generations of subsequent copyists and commentators, the identity of the translator himself remains no less mysterious.⁴⁶ Ammianus does not refer to Hermapion elsewhere in the surviving books of the Res Gestae, nor is such an individual known from other ancient sources, although it has been suggested that Tertullian’s reference to one “Hermateles” in De Spectaculis could be an error for “Hermapion.” Speaking of the Circus Maximus as a space dedicated to the sun, Tertullian writes, “the huge obelisk, as Hermateles maintains, has been set up in honor of the Sun. Its inscription which, like its origin, is Egyptian, contains a superstition.”⁴⁷ Given the frequent references to Helios in the translation of Hermapion, where that deity is equated with the Egyptian figure of Re-Harakhty, this is certainly suggestive, and it is not inconceivable that both Tertullian and Ammianus had access to the same work on obelisks. However, given that neither “Hermapion” nor “Hermateles” is known from other sources, this can remain only speculative.⁴⁸ The circumstances under which the translation was produced also remain unclear, although Lambrecht points out that if the translation had been made in Egypt prior to the obelisk’s removal to Rome, Ammianus would have had no clear way of knowing that the obelisk in the Circus Maximus was the same one translated by Hermapion; thus it is more likely that the translation was produced sometime after the obelisk was brought to Rome, or even at the time of its erection in the Circus.⁴⁹

Although much of the existing scholarship on the translation of Hermapion has focused on establishing the text and determining which obelisk inscription was actually being translated, it is also necessary to consider what role the translation plays in Ammianus’ larger narrative. What would a reader of the Res Gestae have taken away from this lengthy interpolation, with its strings of Egyptian titles and epithets? In his commentary on the text, de Jonge proposes that this excursus offers Ammianus the opportunity to display his “historical erudition,” and in fact the presence of lengthy, learned digressions is a well-known feature of Ammianus’ work.⁵⁰ The translation of the obelisk inscription essentially represents a digression within a digression. Ammianus’ larger subject in 17.4 is, ostensibly, Constantius’ erection of the second obelisk in the Circus Maximus, which affords the historian the opportunity to speak at length about ancillary matters, including the nature of hieroglyphs and obelisks more generally, and the chapter ends abruptly with the (truncated) conclusion of the translation. However, the inclusion of the translation does more than just demonstrate Ammianus’ learning. The text begins with a statement of Ramesses’ divine and universal kingship: “This is what We have given to King Ramesses, who reigns with joy over the whole earth, whom Helios loves, and mighty Apollo,” and the connection between Ramesses, Helios, and Apollo is reaffirmed throughout the text, as is the notion that the king’s dominion was the direct result of divine benefaction.⁵¹ A Roman reader, encountering this text with the knowledge that the obelisk now resided, not in the land of Egypt, but in the city of Rome itself, would have been forcibly reminded of the impact of Roman imperial power throughout the Mediterranean world—power that was capable of appropriating even the greatest of Egyptian kings’ monument to his own divine magnificence.

In a recent response to Erik Iversen’s classic monograph, Obelisks in Exile, Grant Parker has suggested that obelisk inscriptions in Rome, especially those newly carved in hieroglyphs at the behest and in the name of Roman emperors, like the obelisk inscription of Domitian now in the Piazza Navona, may be seen as “performances of power, that is, the very display of writing as a means of exercising power.” Completely illegible to the vast majority of Roman viewers, the inscriptions on Domitian’s obelisk could have signaled both the alterity of the monument’s Egyptian origins and the power of the emperor to master (or to command scholars and artisans who mastered) the notoriously mysterious Egyptian script.⁵² I would argue that the translation of the obelisk inscription in the Res Gestae, like the presence of the obelisk itself in the Circus Maximus, was similarly intended to function as a demonstration of power, both imperial and intellectual; it was, after all, the Roman annexation of Egypt that brought the obelisk within the sphere of Roman scholars like Ammianus. Such a connection between translation and power is also a feature of the sources to which we shall now turn, the ecclesiastical histories of Rufinus, Socrates, and Sozomen. In these Christian works, however, the power to translate is as much spiritual as it is temporal; so too is the power derived from the act of translation.

Translation and Triumphalism

The destruction of the great Serapeum in Alexandria late in the reign of Theodosius I has frequently been read as a sign of the end of antiquity. As an event that resonated on a greater than local scale, it was widely reported in the works of ancient historians and has also been much discussed by modern scholars, who have sought to establish the exact date of the temple’s destruction and to reconstruct the precise sequence of events from the conflicting and often tendentious sources. Although the demolition of the temple and the subsequent Christian remodeling of the site has often been presented as a sign of Christian triumph over polytheism (a view that goes back to the late antique sources themselves), more recent work has sought rather to situate this dramatic moment within the broader contexts of the religious policies of Theodosius I, the aggressive program of urban Christianization promoted by the archbishop Theophilus, and the underlying tensions that affected the relationships between the various religious communities of the late antique metropolis.⁵³ In their accounts of the destruction of the Serapeum, the three sources that will be the focus of the following discussion (Rufinus, HE 11.29; Socrates, HE 5.17; Sozomen, HE 7.15) all preserve variations on a common motif: an attempt at interpretation across linguistic, cultural, and religious lines. The object of this interpretive activity is variously understood as an Egyptian hieroglyph and a Christian cross, and the ecclesiastical historians’ commentary on the subject offers a late antique view on the nature and meaning of hieroglyphs, and the nature of the translation process, which at times contradicts and at times complements that of Ammianus, discussed above.

The encounter with hieroglyphs that is the focus of the present discussion occurs toward the end of what Edward Watts has characterized as a “series of disturbances” related to the patriarch Theophilus’ efforts to “replace the city’s pagan infrastructure with something that better served the needs of its growing Christian population.”⁵⁴ As related by Rufinus, the event that precipitated these disturbances was the discovery of an underground shrine during the course of construction work sponsored by Theophilus; Socrates adds the detail that the shrine still contained a variety of cultic objects, which the patriarch decided to parade through the city in a mockery of traditional ritual processions. Whether sparked by the mere uncovering of the shrine or by the further humiliating public display of its cult images, street fighting followed between pagan and Christian factions, whereupon the pagans barricaded themselves in the Serapeum complex, taking with them a group of Christian prisoners.⁵⁵ The Roman officials in the city appealed to the emperor for guidance, and Theodosius responded with a letter stipulating that while the Christians killed during the riots were to be accorded the status of martyrs, their pagan opponents were to be granted amnesty. The letter further refers to the elimination of “the cause of the evils and the roots of the discord which had taken up the defense of the idols,” which Rufinus seems to understand as an injunction to close down pagan cults throughout the city, lest further conflicts arise in the future.⁵⁶ After the emperor’s letter had been read out and the protestors had vacated the Serapeum site, an intrepid Christian soldier, “armed with faith rather than weapons” took an axe to the great cult statue of Serapis, which was then chopped into pieces and dragged throughout the city, only to be ceremonially burned in what has been described as “a ritualized purification of the city.”⁵⁷

According to Rufinus, the destruction of the Serapeum led to the demolition of temples throughout Egypt and to the exposure of the various stratagems by which pagan priests were wont to deceive their followers, ranging from the use of magnets to levitate the cult image of Serapis to the hollowedout “speaking” statue of Saturn that allowed a lascivious priest by the name of Tyrannus to seduce pious women in the guise of the deity. Overall, Rufinus presents a picture of the near-immediate and cataclysmic destruction of the physical apparatus of traditional religious practice in Alexandria itself and in the chora.⁵⁸ “After the death of Serapis,” he writes (HE 11.28), “who had never been alive, what temples of any other demon could remain standing?” Rufinus goes on to specify that, far from being abandoned or deserted in the wake of these events, the Serapeum site itself was thoroughly transformed: “on the site of Serapis’s tomb the unholy sanctuaries were leveled, and on the one side there rose a martyr’s shrine, on the other a church.”⁵⁹ Although Rufinus himself does not directly attribute these transformative actions to Theophilus, the patriarch is accorded a prominent role by Sozomen and Eunapius, and the construction of Christian churches and shrines on the site of former pagan temples in Alexandria has been explained as an effort by Theophilus to “secure the territory he and his allies had just conquered” by means of “a building and resettlement program designed to garrison these formerly pagan sites with strong Christian fighters.”⁶⁰ As we shall see in the following pages, in the works of the ecclesiastical historians who wrote about the Serapeum, this reconstructive and reinterpretive agenda extended beyond the treatment of the temple complex’s physical remains to encompass the rereading and virtual reinscription of the temple walls in light of the newly achieved Christian dominion over the site.

The motif of hieroglyphic interpretation or translation first appears in Rufinus, the earliest of the sources under consideration here. Having discussed the destruction of the Serapeum itself and the subsequent demolition of temples in the chora, Rufinus returns to Alexandria to speak of “another thing” that was done in the city. The widespread destruction of pagan cultic infrastructure also extended to the busts of Serapis that had been a prominent feature in Alexandrian private homes. These statues, he claims, were so thoroughly destroyed that no trace of their presence remained, and “in their place everyone painted the sign of the Lord’s cross (sed pro his crucis dominicae signum unusquisque … depingeret).” He continues,

It is said that when the pagans who were left (qui superfuerant ex paganis) saw this, they were reminded of an important tradition which had come down to them from of old (rei magne ex traditione sibimet antiquitus). The Egyptians are said to have this our sign of the Lord’s cross (signum hoc nostrum dominicae crucis) among the characters which they call “hieratic,” or priestly (inter illas, quas dicunt hieraticas, id est sacerdotales litteras), as one of the letters making up their script. They state that the meaning of this character or noun (cuius litterae seu vocabuli) is “the life to come (vita ventura).” Those then who were coming over to the faith out of astonishment at what was happening said that it had been handed down to them from of old that the things now worshiped (haec, quae nunc coluntur) would remain until they saw that the sign (signum) had come in which was life. Hence it was the temple priests and ministers (qui erant ex sacerdotibus vel ministris templorum) who came over to the faith rather than those who enjoyed the tricks of error and devices of deceit.⁶¹

According to Rufinus, then, the Christian symbol of the cross was present “of old” in the repertoire of the Egyptian script, and the Egyptians themselves knew of a prophecy that said when this sign came to light, their traditional forms of worship would come to an end. Moreover, in speaking of the conversions that resulted from this discovery, Rufinus emphasizes that the converts came, not from among the rank-and-file worshippers who had been so profoundly misled by the priestly stratagems he had just described in such lavish detail, but from among their misleaders, the very same “temple priests and ministers” who had been responsible for keeping their followers “enmeshed for so many centuries in such vile and shameful deceptions.”⁶² The nature of these cross-shaped “priestly” characters, their interpretation, and the identity of the priests who are thus driven to convert to Christianity will be discussed in more detail below; first, however, it is necessary to consider the later accounts of Socrates and Sozomen and to see how they embellish Rufinus’ tale.

Like Rufinus, on whose work he drew heavily, Socrates also undertook to write a continuation of Eusebius’ Historia Ecclesiastica, bringing the story from the proclamation of Constantine in 305 up to the year 439. Sozomen, writing slightly later in the mid-fifth century and drawing on Socrates as one of his principal sources, covered a slightly shorter span of time, from 323 to 425. Consequently, both texts deal with the same critical period in the early 390s when the cultic landscape of Alexandria was being profoundly reshaped, and both present interesting variations on Rufinus’ tale of the cross-shaped hieroglyph and its interpretation by pagan and Christian communities in the city.⁶³

Socrates takes the motif of the discovery and interpretation of the cross sign, which Rufinus had presented as a citywide phenomenon, following but not directly caused by the destruction of the Serapeum, and he ties it much more specifically to that famous landmark. He writes,

When the Temple of Serapis was torn down and laid bare, there were found in it, engraved on stones, certain characters which they call hieroglyphic (ηὗρητο γράμματα ἐγκεχαραγμένα τοῖς λίθοις, τῷ καλουμένῳ ἱερογλυφικῷ), having the forms of crosses (σταυρῶν ἔχοντες τύπους). Both the Christians and pagans (Ἕλληνες) on seeing them, appropriated and applied them to their respective religions: for the Christians who affirm that the cross is the sign of Christ’s saving passion, claimed this character as peculiarly theirs; but the pagans alleged that it might appertain to Christ and Serapis in common; “for,” said they, “it symbolizes one thing to Christians and another to pagans.” While this point was debated among them, some of the pagan converts to Christianity (τινὲς τῶν Ἑλλήνων τῷ Χριστιανισμῷ προσελθόντες), who were conversant with these hieroglyphic characters (τὰ ἱερογλυφικά τε γράμματα ἐπιστάμενοι), interpreted (διερμηνεύοντες) the form of a cross (τὸν σταυροειδῆ χαρακτῆρα) and said that it signifies “Life to come” (ἔλεγον σημαίνειν ζωὴν ἐπερχουμένην). This the Christians exultingly laid hold of, as decidedly favorable to their religion. But after other hieroglyphs had been deciphered (ἐδηλοῦτο) containing a prediction that “When the cross should appear,”—for this was “life to come,”—“the temple of Serapis would be destroyed,” a very great number of the pagans embraced Christianity, and confessing their sins, were baptized.⁶⁴

Socrates goes on to say that he personally is not entirely convinced that the sign was meant to represent a Christian cross, remarking, “I cannot imagine that the Egyptian priests foreknew the things concerning Christ, when they engraved the figure of a cross.” Rather, he sees the situation as analogous to Paul’s interpretation of the Athenian altar inscription “to an unknown God” recounted in Acts 17:23.⁶⁵ This qualification of the story hints at the contours of a much larger debate over attempts to identify prophecies of Christianity in a wide range of pre-Christian sources, of which more will be said shortly.

In Socrates’ retelling of the story, several key elements have been significantly altered, although the basic narrative structure of the episode mirrors Rufinus’ account.⁶⁶ The cross-shaped symbols are located, not in the private homes of Alexandrian citizens, but in the Serapeum itself, and the inscriptions are not characterized as Christian crosses that merely remind viewers of an Egyptian symbol, but as actual Egyptian hieroglyphs that are potentially susceptible to a kind of polyvalent reading or interpretive process. As in Rufinus’ account, here the cross-shaped hieroglyphs are associated with a prophecy foretelling the end of pagan worship, but Socrates adds another level of complexity to the story. In his version, the prophecy relates not to the generalized end of pagan ritual practice but specifically to the destruction of the Serapeum, and it is not simply said to have been “handed down from of old,” as Rufinus would have it, but actually encoded in a secondary hieroglyphic inscription. The end result of Socrates’ editorializing is a story that is at once much more detailed and rather less plausible than the original version of Rufinus; it also affords considerably greater scope for discussing late antique notions of translation and interpretation, as we shall see shortly.

In comparison to Socrates’ lengthy discussion of the matter, from which it seems to be derived, Sozomen’s account of the cross-shaped hieroglyphs is remarkably laconic. Like Socrates, and unlike Rufinus, Sozomen attaches the story to the sack of the Serapeum, writing, “It is said that when the temple was being demolished, some stones were found, on which were hieroglyphic characters (τῶν καλουμένων ἱερογλυφικῶν χαρακτήρων) in the form of a cross (σταυροῦ σημείῳ ἐμφερεῖς), which on being submitted to the inspection of the learned (ἐπιστημόνων δὲ τὰ τοιάδε), were interpreted (ἑρμηνευθεῖσαν) as signifying the life to come. These characters led to the conversion of several of the pagans, as did likewise other inscriptions (γράμματα ἕτερα) found in the same place, and which contained predictions of the destruction of the temple.” This is, in essence, a pared-down version of the story Socrates tells, stripped of any additional narrative detail but retaining all the critical plot points.⁶⁷

Looking at the three accounts side by side, it is apparent that they share the same basic four-part narrative arc, beginning with the destruction of either statues of Serapis (as in Rufinus) or the temple of Serapis itself (as in Socrates and Sozomen), followed by the painting (in Rufinus) or the discovery (in Socrates and Sozomen) of cross-shaped symbols. These symbols are then interpreted as signifying “the life to come” (all three accounts). Thereupon a prophecy is either remembered (Rufinus) or discovered in another inscription (Socrates and Sozomen) that foretells either the end of pagan worship generally (Rufinus) or the sack of the Serapeum specifically (Socrates and Sozomen). All three accounts conclude with the conversion of pagans, or “Hellenes,” to Christianity, which is presented as the direct outcome of this process of discovery and interpretation. With this basic narrative schema in mind, we may now turn to some of the larger issues raised by these three accounts, including the nature of the purported hieroglyphic signs, the identity of the so-called “translators,” and their interpretive methodology.

The Ankh and the Cross

Although the main concern of the present study is “not with the past as such, but only with the past as it is remembered,” to borrow Jan Assmann’s formulation, the historical verisimilitude of the church historians’ accounts nonetheless needs to be considered.⁶⁸ Would a late antique Alexandrian reader of Rufinus, Socrates, and Sozomen have recognized his city, and its preeminent temple, from their depictions? And can there be any historical basis to the claim that cross-shaped hieroglyphs were found in the Serapeum precinct, and that they were interpreted as described above? In confronting these questions, I follow the lead of Françoise Thelamon in seeing Rufinus’ narrative of the destruction of the Serapis statues and the ensuing discussion of the painted crosses as the more original and more plausible variation on the theme, even if its historicity cannot be established beyond doubt. As Thelamon observes, the late antique Christian practice of carving or painting crosses on the doorjambs and windows of residences, tomb-chapels, and converted temples is attested in both archaeological and textual sources, as in the example from the temple of Isis at Philae depicted in Figure 10. The notion that non-Christian observers familiar with traditional Egyptian iconography might read their own meaning into these symbols is well within reason.⁶⁹

It has been recognized at least since the work of Jean-Antoine Letronne in the mid-nineteenth century that the “cross-shaped” signs attested in the ecclesiastical histories correspond to a genuine sign in the hieroglyphic repertoire.⁷⁰ This hieroglyph, with the phonetic value ^ϲnḫ, is continuously attested throughout Egyptian history, from the Early Dynastic (ca. 3000 B.C.E.) through the late Roman period; the primary meaning of the Egyptian word ^ϲnḫ, or “life,” likewise remains stable across this chronological expanse.⁷¹ In addition to its role as a phonetic sign, which allowed it to be used in writing a wide range of different words, the ankh also appears very frequently as an iconographic element in Egyptian art, where it symbolizes life both in this world and after death. In temple and tomb reliefs, gods and goddesses frequently extend the ankh sign to the nostrils of the king, and the ankh is ubiquitous as a motif in amulets and also in larger three-dimensional figurines. The iconographic use of the ankh sign continued throughout the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, both in temple reliefs and especially on funerary paraphernalia including coffins, mummy cases, and shrouds like the late antique example pictured in Figure 11.⁷² In other words, this cross-shaped hieroglyph was a very well-attested iconographic motif in late antiquity as in earlier periods, and it is entirely reasonable to think that there would have been individuals familiar with its meaning present in late fourth-century Alexandria.

It is less clear how seriously we should take the claim that the demolition of the Serapeum resulted in the discovery of hieroglyphic inscriptions. Such inscriptions are, of course, a hallmark of Egyptian-style temple décor, and this remained true even in the case of Egyptian temples constructed during the Ptolemaic and Roman periods. Indeed, as discussed in Chapter 1, some of the temple inscriptions produced during those periods demonstrate a truly virtuosic proficiency with the hieroglyphic script. The Serapeum, however, is not described in the ancient sources as an Egyptian-style temple, and the recent efforts by Judith McKenzie and her colleagues to reconstruct the building phases of the temple complex from the archaeological evidence indicate that in both its Ptolemaic and Roman incarnations, the architecture and décor of the Serapis temple were thoroughly classical rather than Egyptian. This point should not be pressed too far, however, as McKenzie and her colleagues do cite evidence for the presence of Egyptian-style statuary and inscribed obelisks within the temple complex, and they note that masonry blocks with inscribed hieroglyphs were reused in constructing the base of Diocletian’s column, so hieroglyphic inscriptions would not have been altogether foreign to that space.⁷³ However, given that the discovery of mysterious (and conveniently prophetic) inscriptions is not an uncommon motif in late antique Christian literature, as we shall see shortly, I would argue that the purported hieroglyphic texts from the Serapeum should be seen as a convenient fiction. Introducing this element into his revision of Rufinus’ narrative allows Socrates (and Sozomen after him) to fully exploit the long-standing Greco-Roman tradition that presented Egyptian hieroglyphs as one of the most important indicators of Egyptian cultural identity and alterity. In the works of many of the church fathers, traditional Egyptian religion is presented as the very worst kind of idolatry—Augustine, for example, refers to the Romans having “almost descended to the superstition of the Egyptians, who worship beasts and birds”—so emphasizing the identity of the Serapeum as a recognizably Egyptian temple makes the story of its overthrow all the more glorious.⁷⁴

Figure 10. Cross and Greek inscription (I.Philae II 204) from the temple of Isis at Philae. Photo by author.

Figure 11. Funerary shroud of a woman, from the Fayum. Roman period, third century C.E. Paris, Musée du Louvre, AF 6440. © Musée du Louvre, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/ Georges Poncet/ Art Resource, New York.

It is also possible that the story of the ankh and its interpretation, as presented in the ecclesiastical histories, represents an attempt to explicate—even to legitimize—a process of cultural appropriation that was already well underway. The use of the ankh symbol is attested in securely Christian contexts even before the composition of the histories of Rufinus, Socrates, and Sozomen. A good example of this usage is depicted in Figure 12, which shows the last page of a papyrus codex preserving the book of Proverbs in Akhmimic Coptic; the codex has been dated to the late fourth century and is thought to have come from the library of the White Monastery. Clearly visible in the image, the ornamental panel enclosing the work’s title is flanked on either side by the symbol of an ankh.⁷⁵ That this symbol was deemed appropriate for use in a biblical manuscript—perhaps even a manuscript from the library of Shenoute’s own monastery—suggests that it had already acquired a Christian gloss before the cross-shaped hieroglyphs at the Serapeum were ever “discovered.” With this usage in mind, the story presented by the ecclesiastical historians may represent a retrospective effort to justify the Christian adoption of this sign, which was clearly already in progress. The success of this endeavor is demonstrated by the ongoing Christian use of the ankh motif, which, in the fifth and sixth centuries, began to move from the margins of manuscripts to textiles, funerary stelae, and other monumental contexts, as depicted in Figures 13 and 14.⁷⁶ Coptic usage of the motif continues to the present day; it may be seen, for example, in the logo of the Saint Mark Foundation for Coptic Studies, where its use is explained by reference to the ecclesiastical histories discussed here.⁷⁷

Figure 12. Leaf from a papyrus codex preserving the book of Proverbs in Akhmimic Coptic. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin–Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Orientabteilung, Ms. or. oct. 987, 82ro. Courtesy of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin–Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Orientabteilung.

Expertise and Authority

One of the intriguing features of the ecclesiastical historians’ accounts is the characterization of the individuals who are called on to interpret the hieroglyphic signs once they are discovered (or, in Rufinus’ version, who volunteer their interpretation upon seeing the painted crosses that replace the statues of Serapis). They are identified variously as “the remaining pagans” (Rufinus, HE 11.29), “pagan converts to Christianity, who were conversant with these hieroglyphic characters” (Socrates, HE 5.17.4), and “the learned” (Sozomen, HE 7.15). Who were these individuals, and what was the nature of their hieroglyphic expertise? In her discussion of the ecclesiastical histories, Thelamon asserts that Socrates’ recent converts who are “conversant” with hieroglyphs can be none other than the last surviving members of the Egyptian priesthood.⁷⁸ The rationale underlying this claim is clear; as discussed in Chapter 1, by late antiquity the priests of Egypt were the sole remaining caretakers of the country’s hieroglyphic heritage and the only people who would have been even marginally literate in the use of that script. The sheer ubiquity of the ankh sign meant that it was one of the few hieroglyphs that the majority of Egyptians, literate or illiterate, would have been able to interpret with some accuracy, so it is not absolutely necessary to see “the learned” individuals in the ecclesiastical histories as members of the Egyptian priesthood, but this was probably the authors’ intended meaning.

Figure 13. Textile fragment showing ankh signs, crosses, and chi rho monogram, said to be from a tomb at Akhmim. London, Victoria and Albert Museum 258-1890. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Figure 14. Limestone stela with ankh sign and crosses from el-Badari. London, British Museum EA 1998. © Trustees of the British Museum.

As we have already seen, in the classical discourse on Egypt, the figure of the Egyptian priest was intimately connected to both the general concept of the “wisdom of Egypt” and to the specific encoding of that wisdom in the hieroglyphic writing system. Priests also appear very frequently in the classical sources as interpreters par excellence, who explicate Egyptian culture on behalf of their Greco-Roman interlocutors.⁷⁹ In the ecclesiastical histories, these interlocutors have become the Christian residents of Alexandria, but the hermeneutic authority of the Egyptian priests is still acknowledged. That authority has some significant limitations, however, as we see most clearly in the account of Socrates. In that text, the author dramatizes not only the hermeneutic act itself, but also the Christian rejection of certain portions of the resulting interpretation. Although the Christian audience is happy to accept the reading of the ankh sign as signifying “life to come,” the interpreters’ claim that the same sign might simultaneously signify both Christ and Serapis is rejected. As Socrates says, “the Christians who affirm that the cross is the sign of Christ’s saving passion, claimed this character as peculiarly theirs.”⁸⁰

The Christians’ modification of their pagan interlocutors’ interpretation may also bear witness to a developing shift in the locus of spiritual and intellectual authority away from the traditional Egyptian priesthood. The Christian interpreters who “claim” the ankh sign as a symbol of Christ’s passion derive their authority to interpret the inscriptions not from any training, and not from any particular hieroglyphic literacy, but from the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Socrates makes this explicit when he passes from reporting the testimony he has heard to offering his own opinion on the subject. Although he does not approve of the idea that the priests of Serapis could have had foreknowledge of Christ when they carved the ankh sign, he accepts the Christian reading of the sign as correct, and he explicitly associates the interpretive method that identifies the ankh as a sign of Christ with the method by which the apostle Paul interpreted the Athenian altar inscription in Acts 17:23. “For he,” Socrates writes, “being made wise by the Divine Spirit, employed a similar method in relation to the Athenians, and brought over many of them to the faith, when on reading the inscription on one of their altars, he accommodated and applied it (προσαρμόζειν) to his own discourse.”⁸¹ Such a shift toward spiritually guided hermeneutic practice would seem to correlate with the broader pattern discussed above in Chapter 3, where the concept of Egyptian wisdom passed down through the written traditions of the priesthood was problematized, if not altogether rejected, in favor of divine wisdom conveyed by the Holy Spirit. Similarly, in Socrates’ narrative, interpretive authority grounded in the traditional system of Egyptian priestly education is, I would argue, being rejected in favor of a new model of spiritually guided interpretation. This trend is even more clearly in evidence in the cycle of homilies associated with the figure of Theophilus of Alexandria, discussed later in this chapter.

If the “learned” Alexandrian readers of hieroglyphs discussed in the ecclesiastical histories are indeed to be seen as Egyptian priests, the mass conversion that follows the interpretation of the ankh signs in all three accounts takes on added significance. Egyptian religion was commonly presented as the worst possible sort of idolatry in the patristic sources. Egyptian priests, as guardians and promoters of that tradition, were frequently vilified as well, presented as charlatans at best and ministers of the devil at worst.⁸² For this reason, the conversion of Egyptian priests and/or their family members is frequently highlighted, even celebrated, in triumphalist accounts of Christianization. For example, both the Coptic Life of Aaron and the Life of Moses, two texts that deal with the cessation of traditional cult practices at prominent ritual centers, emphasize the conversion of the local priests’ children.⁸³ It is perfectly in keeping with this larger literary trend for the ecclesiastical historians to highlight the conversion of the individuals who interpret the Serapeum inscriptions, whom we should most likely understand as representatives of the indigenous priesthood.

Hieroglyphs and Cultural Translatability

In a 2010 article on the destruction of pagan statuary in late antique Alexandria, Troels Myrup Kristensen represents the interpretive action described in the ecclesiastical histories as a “wishful misunderstanding” on the part of late antique Christians.⁸⁴ As we have just seen, however, the ecclesiastical historians actually utilized a carefully considered rhetorical strategy, one that made use of contemporary trends in late antique hieroglyphic speculation and translation theory in order to make the case for the assertion of Christian authority over Alexandria’s cultic landscape. The historians’ remarks on the Serapeum inscriptions generally echo the widespread view that the hieroglyphic script was symbolic rather than phonetic, and the focus of hermeneutic activity on a single hieroglyphic sign, the ankh, is reminiscent of the approach taken in the classical commentaries on hieroglyphs, which likewise tend to privilege the explication of individual signs over and above that of larger syntactic units. Socrates’ account in particular, with its confrontation of Christian and pagan interpretations of the ankh sign, also echoes some of the larger late antique arguments over the nature of language and the possibility of translation between languages and cultures. Origen’s comments, discussed above, about the translatability of divine names in Contra Celsum are particularly relevant in this context. In response to Celsus’ claim that sacred names are essentially interchangeable, so that the name of Zeus, for example, could apply equally well to the Greek deity as to the Christian one, Origen argues strongly against the possibility of translating sacred names and ritual formulae in this fashion, leaning heavily on the Platonist and Stoic position that saw the development of language and the assignment of names to things and beings as a function of nature rather than convention.⁸⁵

In Socrates’ account of the Serapeum hieroglyphs, the learned pagans who interpret the hieroglyphs for their Christian interlocutors echo Celsus in their argument that the same symbol could represent both Christ and Serapis, while the Christian viewers, who reject this possibility, take a position much closer to that of Origen himself and arrogate the symbol exclusively to their own tradition. Jan Assmann has argued that a belief in the untranslatability of divine names is often a feature of religions that claim to possess exclusive truth; he writes, “If one religion is wrong and the other is right, there can be no question of translating the gods of the one into those of the other. Obviously they are about different gods.”⁸⁶ Socrates seems to be making a similar claim about the untranslatability of divine symbols in his discussion of the Serapeum hieroglyphs; the validity of the exclusionary Christian reading of these signs over the syncretistic pagan reading is, of course, confirmed by the conversion to Christianity of the pagan interpreters themselves.

If the ecclesiastical historians’ presentation of the debate over the meaning of the ankh sign reflects contemporary concerns about hieroglyphs and translation, it also participates in a very significant late antique debate about the existence of pagan prophecies testifying to the Christian message. The belief that certain “wise pagans” had, like the prophets of the Old Testament, foreseen the coming of Christ and left written evidence to that effect was widespread in late antiquity, but the church fathers were divided in their opinions on the subject. Some, like Lactantius and Cyril of Alexandria, embraced the idea and integrated into their theological writings numerous quotations from classical sources that, they claimed, offered evidence for the foreknowledge of Christian truth.⁸⁷ Others, like Eusebius and Augustine, displayed a more cautious approach, desiring on the one hand to diminish the significance of the pagan oracular tradition (and particularly that of the anti-Christian oracles included in Porphyry’s Philosophy from Oracles) while on the other hand making selective use of that same tradition for their own apologetic purposes.⁸⁸ By the late fifth century, a compilation of “pagan witnesses” to Christianity, including oracular statements and quotations from classical authors, was available in the form of a Greek text known as the Tübingen Theosophy, which formed the appendix to a now-lost anonymous work entitled On True Belief.⁸⁹ The popularity of the theosophical genre over several centuries is attested by the existence of later Syriac and Coptic translations of similar compendia.⁹⁰

The claim advanced in the ecclesiastical histories of Socrates and Sozomen—that a prophecy had been discovered in the ruins of the Serapeum, written in hieroglyphs and predicting the downfall of the temple and the subsequent conversion of pagans to Christianity—fits seamlessly into this larger theosophical tradition, which included prophecies purporting to foretell the end of polytheistic ritual practice. So, for example, the Tübingen Theosophy presents an oracle in which Apollo predicts the future abandonment of his temples, and the Coptic theosophical fragments collected by van den Broek include prophecies attributed to Odysseus and Pythagoras urging an end to the building of temples and the fashioning of cult images on the grounds that both will soon become obsolete.⁹¹ Some of these oracles related specifically to Egypt: the apocalyptic section of the Asclepius (§24–26) was cited in late antiquity as a prophecy of the end of traditional Egyptian religion that was being fulfilled by the spread of Christianity in Egypt, and a prophecy concerning the destruction of the Serapeum itself was said to have been uttered (though in Greek, not in hieroglyphs) by the late fourth-century philosopher Antoninus.⁹²

Moreover, Socrates’ statement—that he personally could not “imagine that the Egyptian priests foreknew the things concerning Christ, when they engraved the figure of a cross. For if ‘the advent’ of our Savior into the world ‘was a mystery hid from ages and from generations,’ as the apostle declares; and if the devil himself, the prince of wickedness, knew nothing of it, his ministers, the Egyptian priests, are likely to have been still more ignorant of the matter”—likewise echoes contemporary concerns over whether or not pagan oracles, which Christian commentators typically attributed to the agency of demons, could be seen as truly prophetic.⁹³ Although Socrates himself comes down on the negative side of the question, the emphatically personal way in which he introduces his opinion—ἐγὼ δὲ οὔ φημι—suggests that he recognizes his own as a minority opinion. Indeed, the Tübingen Theosophy and related texts demonstrate that the belief that pagan prophecies could convey Christian messages continued to spread in the centuries after Socrates’ writing. The same belief is also foregrounded in the texts to which we shall now turn, a cycle of Coptic homilies in which hieroglyphic inscriptions are likewise said to convey a deeper Christian truth.

Theophilus of Alexandria’s “Fantastic Images”

In the reading of the ecclesiastical historians presented above, I argue that the act of interpretation those authors described as taking place in late fourth-century Alexandria represents an assertion of Christian authority over the hieroglyphic texts being translated. By extension, the same authority is also asserted over the polytheistic Egyptian culture from which those texts derive and of which hieroglyphic writing was one of the most ancient and visible identifying markers. This assertion of authority is most clearly expressed in Socrates’ rendition of the story, where the possibility that the same sign might represent both Serapis and Christ is explicitly rejected by Christian interpreters, who claim the sign, and the site of the erstwhile temple, as entirely their own. That such an understanding of the power of translation was not unique to the ecclesiastical historians is suggested by a thematically similar episode in a later Coptic text that likewise dramatizes the act of cross-cultural translation (or “translation”). The text in question is an encomium on Ananias, Azarias, and Misael, the three youths in the fiery furnace from the third chapter of the book of Daniel. Pseudonymously attributed to the fifth-century patriarch Cyril of Alexandria but more probably dating from the seventh or the eighth century, the encomium is preserved in two tenth-century Bohairic manuscripts now in the collection of the Vatican Library.⁹⁴

At the start of the encomium, the patriarch Theophilus expresses a desire to build a martyrium for the Three Youths in the city of Alexandria. Although he lacks the funds to carry out the project, in a prophetic dream he hears a voice that tells him, “Theophilus, you will build many churches, and I will arrange these works for you (ⲭⲛⲁⲕⲱⲧ ⲛⲟⲩⲙⲏϣ ⲛ̅ⲉⲕⲕⲗⲏⲥⲓⲁ ⲟⲩⲟϩ ⲁⲛⲟⲕ ⲉⲑⲛⲁϯⲑⲱϣ ⲛⲁⲕ ⲉⲛⲟⲩϩⲃⲏⲟⲩⲓ).” Sometime thereafter, Theophilus and his nephew Cyril (the narrator of the story, later patriarch of Alexandria himself) are walking in the countryside when they come upon a temple that is identified, later in the text, as “the temple of Alexander (ⲡⲓⲉⲣⲫⲉⲓ ⲛ̅ⲧⲉ ⲁⲗⲉⲝⲁⲛⲇⲣⲟⲥ)”: “And it happened that, as I was walking with my Father, we came upon a temple of the pagans (ⲟⲩⲉⲣⲫⲉⲓ ⲛ̅ⲧⲉ ⲛⲓϩⲉⲗⲗⲏⲛⲟⲥ), there being some fantastic images and inscriptions on it along with some other pagan inscriptions (ⲉⲟⲩⲟⲛ ϩⲁⲛⲫⲁⲛⲧⲁⲥⲓⲁ ⲛⲉⲙ ϩⲁⲛⲥϦⲁⲓ ⲥϦⲏⲟⲩⲧ ⲉⲣⲟϥ ⲛⲉⲙ ϩⲁⲛⲕⲉⲥϦⲁⲓ ⲛϩⲩⲗⲉⲛⲏⲕⲏ). I examined the lintel of the door (ⲡⲓⲑⲟⲩⲁⲓ ⲛ̅ⲧⲉ ⲡⲓⲣⲟ), and I saw three large thetas that were carved on it (ⲅ̅ ⲛ̅ⲛⲓϣϯ ⲛ̅ⲑⲏⲧⲁ ⲉⲩⲕⲗⲓⲡⲓ ⲉⲣⲟϥ), and I marveled. I said to my Father, ‘My holy Father, do you see the works of the pagans (ⲛⲓϩⲃⲏⲟⲩⲓ ⲛ̅ⲧⲉ ⲛⲓϩⲉⲗⲗⲏⲛⲟⲥ) and these three thetas, which are so large?’”

Theophilus is then filled with “a holy prophetic spirit (ⲟⲩⲡⲛ͞ⲁ ⲙ̅ⲡⲣⲟⲫⲏⲧⲓⲕⲟⲛ ⲉⲑⲟⲩⲁⲃ).” He replies to Cyril, saying, “there is a great mystery (ⲟⲩⲛⲓϣϯ ⲙ̅ⲙⲩⲥⲧⲏⲣⲓⲟⲛ) in these three thetas,” and he proceeds to interpret (ⲉⲣⲙⲏⲛⲉⲩⲓⲛ) the thetas as standing for theos, Theodosius, and Theophilus.⁹⁵ As the patriarch is speaking, the doors of the temple swing open, and gold comes pouring out. The two men are understandably astonished by this, and the narrator goes on to describe how Theophilus seals up the temple and sends a letter to the emperor asking him what to do. In his reply, Theodosius orders Theophilus to use the money for the construction of new churches, and the episode closes with the patriarch constructing the martyrium for the Three Youths as he had envisioned at the start of the sermon.

In this text, as in the ecclesiastical historians’ accounts of the Serapeum and the sermon of Shenoute discussed in Chapter 4, Christian viewers are confronted with a temple covered in mysterious inscriptions. However, Ps.-Cyril’s presentation of this space differs from these earlier accounts in several important particulars. Unlike the Serapeum, which was situated in a prominent and well-trafficked location in Alexandria, the temple described in the encomium is explicitly said to lie “outside the city in a desert place which was barren (ⲥⲁⲃⲟⲗ ⲛ̅ϯⲃⲁⲕⲓ ⲡⲉ Ϧⲉⲛ ⲟⲩⲙⲁ ⲛ̅ϩⲉⲣⲏⲙⲟⲥ ⲉϥϣⲏϥ).” This emphasis on the temple’s rural environs echoes, consciously or not, the language of a law promulgated by Arcadius and Honorius in 399 that permitted the demolition of “any temples in the country districts (in agris).”⁹⁶ More important, the deserted character of the temple and its surroundings allows Theophilus to make his interpretation of the “thetas” unchallenged by any individuals offering alternate (and perhaps better-informed) readings.

Ps.-Cyril’s characterization of the temple also differs significantly from the temple description offered in Shenoute’s sermon. Far from being a “place of making sacrifice to Satan and worshipping and fearing him,”⁹⁷ the temple in the encomium is described in less colorful terms, first as “a temple of the pagans (ⲟⲩⲉⲣⲫⲉⲓ ⲛ̅ⲧⲉ ⲛⲓϩⲉⲗⲗⲏⲛⲟⲥ),” and later, in the context of Theophilus’ letter to the emperor, as “the temple of Alexander (ⲡⲓⲉⲣⲫⲉⲓ ⲛ̅ⲧⲉ ⲁ̅ⲗⲉⲝⲁⲛⲇⲣⲟⲥ).” And here there are no soul-killing inscriptions dripping with blood; rather, the façade of the temple is covered with “fantastic images (ϩⲁⲛⲫⲁⲛⲧⲁⲥⲓⲁ),” “inscriptions (ϩⲁⲛⲥϦⲁⲓ),” and “some other pagan inscriptions (ϩⲁⲛⲕⲉⲥϦⲁⲓ ⲛϩⲩⲗⲉⲛⲏⲕⲏ).”⁹⁸ Theophilus’ interpretive action is also strikingly different from that of Shenoute; whereas the latter’s insistence on the figural qualities of the hieroglyphic inscriptions precludes any attempt to read them, Theophilus offers a detailed exegesis of what he and Cyril observe carved on the façade of the temple.

The focal point of the description, as of the façade itself, are the three so-called thetas carved on the door lintel. Egyptologist László Kákosy, in his discussion of the text, has argued that this may be a reference to the three winged sun disks often carved on the lintels of temple doorways from the Ptolemaic and Roman periods; an example of this motif can be seen in Figure 15.⁹⁹ Such a visual association between the Egyptian sun disk and the Greek letter theta is supported by a passage in Eusebius’ Praeparatio evangelica. Quoting Philo of Byblos’ Phoenician History, Eusebius writes, “moreover the Egyptians, describing the world from the same idea, engrave the circumference of a circle, of the color of the sky and of fire, and a hawk-shaped serpent stretched across the middle of it, and the whole shape is like our theta, representing the circle as the world, and signifying by the serpent which connects it in the middle the good daemon.”¹⁰⁰ The fire-colored circle can easily be identified as an Egyptian representation of the sun disk, commonly painted in orange or red in relief carvings, and the hawk-shaped serpent may be a reference to the pendant uraei that typically accompany the winged sun disk, although these normally flank the disk rather than cutting across it. Taking the “thetas” of Ps.-Cyril’s encomium as a reference to this extremely common Egyptian motif, we find that Theophilus’ interpretive strategy in the encomium closely parallels that of the Christian interpreters in the ecclesiastical histories, faced with the cross-shaped hieroglyphs from the Serapeum.¹⁰¹ Like Socrates, Ps.-Cyril shows a Christian reader, in this case Theophilus himself, taking an Egyptian icon, the winged sun disk, and transforming it into a Christian message, which is accessible to him only through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. The validity of Theophilus’ interpretation is immediately (and conveniently) confirmed by the miraculous opening of the temple doors and the shower of gold that spills out of them, just as the validity of the Christian interpretation of the hieroglyphic ankh sign is confirmed by the mass conversion that follows that exegetical act.

Figure 15. Granodiorite naos of Ptolemy VIII and Cleopatra II, said to be from Philae. London, British Museum EA 1134. © Trustees of the British Museum.

This story of the discovery of a mysterious inscription, its translation by means of divine inspiration, and the subsequent recovery of hidden temple treasure that is then used to finance church building, must be regarded as a literary trope, rather than as a reference to any specific historical event. The motif of the “thetas,” elaborated to a greater or lesser degree, is one of the most characteristic features of later Coptic literary sources concerned with the ecclesiastical construction projects of Theophilus and Cyril.¹⁰² It appears, for example, in the widely popular apocryphal narrative now known as the Vision of Theophilus, which recounts the tale of the Holy Family’s visit to the site of Mount Coscam (or Qosqam, modern al-Qusiya) during their sojourn in Egypt and which was transmitted in Arabic, Syriac, and Ethiopic recensions. A Coptic Vorlage to this text was long assumed to have existed, and a manuscript fragment of the Coptic version has indeed recently been identified.¹⁰³ The “thetas” also appear in the Arabic recension of a Coptic homily attributed to Cyril, detailing the dedication of an Alexandrian church to the Archangel Raphael,¹⁰⁴ and they are briefly referenced in the Arabic History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria attributed to Severus ibn al-Muqaffa¹⁰⁵ and in the Arabic translation of the Coptic Synaxarium, under the entry for the eighteenth of Babeh (the feast of Theophilus).¹⁰⁶ As Coquin has noted, the references in the latter two texts are so cursory that they seem to suppose prior knowledge of the story on the part of the reader; the existence of multiple recensions of the Vision of Theophilus, in particular, suggests that that text may have been especially influential in spreading the motif of Theophilus and his divinely guided interpretive efforts.¹⁰⁷

A more distant parallel to this group of texts is to be found in the Vita of the late fourth-century bishop Epiphanius of Salamis. The Greek text of the Vita is thought to have been composed sometime in the fifth century, and a Sahidic Coptic translation is preserved in a codex now in the collection of the Egyptian Museum in Turin. In one episode from the Vita, Epiphanius finds himself, like Theophilus, in need of funds, although the need in his case is occasioned by the desire to buy wheat in order to feed the hungry during a famine. He is instructed by God to go into a local temple, where he is told he will find treasure with which he can accomplish his purpose. When Epiphanius approaches the entrance of the temple, the seals magically fall away from the doors, the doors open, and he goes in and gets the money he needs.¹⁰⁸ While it is certainly possible that Ps.-Cyril and the author(s) of the cycle of texts dealing with Theophilus’ construction program knew of and drew on this episode from the Vita of Epiphanius, it is noteworthy that the Coptic stories about Theophilus invariably insist on the process of textual interpretation as the key that literally opens the door to the temple where Theophilus obtains his treasure. Theophilus is clearly presented in the texts as the legitimate heir of his polytheistic predecessors—indeed, in several cases he is said to have been given the keys to all the temples of Egypt by the emperor himself—but it is his correct reading of the “thetas” that provides him with the authority to take up that charge. This is arguably a late expression of a concept with very deep roots in Egyptian culture, as reading and textuality played a major role in Egyptian ritual and magical practice in all periods.¹⁰⁹ It also relates to the notion expressed in a wide range of late antique sources, including the Corpus Hermeticum and Iamblichus’ De mysteriis, that saw the Egyptian language in general and hieroglyphs in particular as possessing magical efficacy.¹¹⁰

Another striking feature of the texts dealing with Theophilus and the “thetas” is the fact that the treasure that Theophilus recovers through his interpretive efforts is explicitly associated with the figure of Alexander the Great. In the Bohairic encomium on the Three Youths, this connection is not spelled out in any great detail; the site of the discovery is simply identified as “the temple of Alexander.” The Synaxarium entry for the Feast of Theophilus provides only slightly more information; it states that the treasure, which was found beneath a paving stone engraved with the “thetas,” dated to the time of Alexander, the son of Philip the Macedonian.¹¹¹ The long Arabic, Ethiopic, and Syriac recensions of the Vision of Theophilus, in contrast, offer a more detailed narrative, as does the Arabic homily on the Archangel Raphael. The Vision of Theophilus locates the treasure in the “Camp of Alexander” and specifies that Alexander himself had sealed the doors with the symbol of the “thetas,” in order to protect the space until the coming of Theophilus: “indeed, it had never been opened from the day of Alexander down to this day in which God who opened the eyes of the blind from their mothers’ womb opened it.”¹¹² Finally, the homily on the Archangel Raphael preserves two versions of the story of the “thetas,” and Alexander figures prominently in both. In the first version, Theophilus and Theodosius go to “the temple in which the treasure was.” Theophilus interprets the “thetas” carved on the lintel, and the two men enter the temple; the treasure they discover inside is vast and is said to represent the spoils that Alexander had gathered in the course of his conquests.¹¹³ The second version of the story is considerably more detailed; in this case, the door of the temple is said to have been covered with engraved signs of a magical nature, which Theophilus specifies are not written in his own mother tongue. However, the Holy Spirit enables him to interpret them, and when he does so, the text is revealed to be a dedication written by Alexander the Great himself. In this text, the Macedonian conqueror of Egypt is presented as a kind of Christian avant la lettre; he states that the temple contains unimaginable riches, attainable only through the will of God and the correct interpretation of the three “thetas.” Theophilus, of course, proceeds to interpret the “thetas” correctly, and the rest of the story unfolds much as before—treasure is revealed, and a church is built using those funds.¹¹⁴

The motif of Theophilus as a despoiler of temples (indeed, as the one chosen by the emperor to carry out that destruction) can be traced back to the historical figure of the patriarch and his aggressive campaign to Christianize the Alexandrian landscape.¹¹⁵ But why should the Christian authors of these late homilies have insisted so strongly on the association with Alexander the Great? Although scholars could, as late as the 1990s, point to the relative paucity of Coptic manuscript witnesses to the Alexander Romance and suggest that Alexander might have been “too much of a Greek to stimulate the imagination of the nationalistic Copts,” it is now widely admitted that Alexander was very much alive in the imagination of late antique Egyptian Christians, as indeed he was throughout the Christian and Muslim cultures of the late antique Near East and beyond.¹¹⁶ Respected as a world conqueror and reimagined as a protomonotheist, Alexander could, as Faustina Doufikar-Aerts puts it, become “the model of everything one wanted to see in him,” from philosopher-king to prophet of the One God, and the authors of the cycle of texts associated with Theophilus make good use of this malleability.¹¹⁷ The claim that Alexander had set treasure aside for later Christian usage, implicit in the homily on the Three Youths and stated explicitly in the Vision of Theophilus and the homily on the Archangel Raphael, clearly echoes the representation of Alexander as a “pious ruler, seeking world dominion in order to convert all nations to monotheism,” which can be seen in the Syriac, Ethiopic, and Arabic Pseudo-Callisthenes traditions.¹¹⁸ And the protections that Alexander is said to have placed around the site where the treasure is stored—not only the “thetas,” which must be properly interpreted, but also the “amulets” or “phylacteries” described in the homily on the archangel, which prevent the unworthy from accessing the site—have a close parallel in the powerful talismans that Alexander is described as fashioning in the Syriac and Arabic tales of Al-Iskander/Dhū ‘l-Qarnayan and his construction of an iron wall to defend against Gog and Magog. In one of the texts discussed by Doufikar-Aerts, a manuscript of the Sīrat al-Malik Iskandar Dhū ‘l-Qarnayan, we are told that after the construction of the wall was completed, Alexander fashioned a gate in the wall on which he set a wide range of protections:

Then he made the front and also closed the gate with yāsūs, and these are qalfaṭīniyāt [magic signs] from Greek books, which prevent the gate from being opened, except upon God’s orders. Then he called for iron and copper, had it kneaded and made for the gate a key with twelve teeth that had to be carried by several men. For that he made a copper lock by which he closed the gate and said: “When the promise made by God the Exalted is fulfilled and He orders it to be opened, this [key] will open it. We make it [so] special that people will be amazed.” When he had finished the gate and had locked, reinforced and strengthened it and covered it with magical signs, against which neither iron, fire, nor any other material has any power, he placed an inscription in Greek above the gate, like the inscription on the lighthouse in Alexandria.¹¹⁹

This inscription, much like the one translated by Theophilus in the homily on the archangel, states that the gate will remain impermeable “until the moment that God orders it.”¹²⁰

Given the extraordinary dispersal of Alexander literature across linguistic, cultural, and religious lines during the late antique and early medieval periods, it is not altogether surprising to see motifs from the Alexander legends appearing in Coptic, Syriac, and Christian Arabic homiletic sources, but it remains to be seen why the authors of those homilies felt the need to insert Alexander into the narrative in the first place. Tito Orlandi offers a route to answering this question in his proposal that the texts of the Theophilus cycle were composed in an effort to celebrate the antiquity and importance of certain Alexandrian churches by attributing their construction to the historical figure of Theophilus.¹²¹ The common motif of the “thetas” and the connection to Alexander the Great takes this process of institutional lineage building a step further. By emphasizing that the churches were built using the funds from temple treasuries that had been set under seal by no less an authority than the proto-Christian Alexander, these establishments are able to trace their lineage back into the pre-Christian period and present their construction even more strongly as the fulfillment of divine preordination.

Conclusion

Even more than the case of the cross-shaped hieroglyphs at the Serapeum or Ammianus’ translation of the Flaminian obelisk, the story of Theophilus and the “thetas” offers an opportunity to speak about both the act of translation from one language or semiotic system to another and what we might now consider a kind of cultural appropriation. If Kákosy’s interpretation of the text is correct and Theophilus really is speaking about iconographic elements of the temple’s décor, then the identification of those elements as Greek thetas goes well beyond translation; rather, it represents a redefinition of sorts, whereby the Christian viewer effectively claims the symbols as Greek letters—letters that, moreover, his spiritual authority uniquely qualifies him to interpret.

In all three of the case studies examined in this chapter, the hermeneutic act is closely bound up with notions of power and authority. Ammianus presents Hermapion’s translation of the Flaminian obelisk within the larger context of a meditation on imperial power, and it is the quintessentially imperial act of returning to Rome with a trophy that brings the obelisk within the ambit of Roman scholars in the first place. In the ecclesiastical histories, the translation (or appropriation) of an ancient and culturally significant Egyptian symbol directly follows the Christian takeover of the Serapeum complex and serves as a justification or spiritual authorization for that takeover. Finally, Theophilus is authorized to interpret the “thetas” by a “holy prophetic spirit,” and his interpretation of the signs grants him entry into the temple and access to the temple treasury.

Moving from the earliest of these texts to the latest, we can also see a significant shift in the identity of the translators carrying out the interpretation of hieroglyphic inscriptions and in the source of their authority to translate. Ammianus, illiterate in hieroglyphs himself, calls on the outside authority of Hermapion to provide a translation of the obelisk inscription; Theophilus, equally illiterate in hieroglyphs but guided by the Holy Spirit, sees no such need. In some respects, the story of Theophilus and the “thetas” can thus be seen as the logical outcome of the shifting attitudes discussed in Chapter 3 above, as the traditional temple-centered study of the Egyptian language and scripts gives way to a spiritually guided hermeneutic process. The image that emerges from the Coptic homilies concerning Theophilus, of the Coptic priest or monk standing before a hieroglyphic inscription and offering an authoritative translation of it, had a remarkably long and tenacious afterlife. In the medieval Arabic sources, Coptic monks are not infrequently presented as possessing the ability to read hieroglyphs; so, for example, the thirteenth-century astrologer Al-Jobry described a monk from Al-Bahnasa as “a brilliant philosopher who knows the secrets of the ancient priests, and uncovered their symbols and understood their sciences.”¹²²