In writing this book, I set out to uncover the “mnemohistory” of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing in the period of late antiquity, an era that has been relatively little studied in prior discussions of the reception of pharaonic Egypt and in histories of hieroglyphic decipherment. Of particular interest was the treatment of hieroglyphs by late antique Christian authors, whom modern scholarship has too often dismissed as indifferent to—or even hostile toward—the hieroglyphic tradition. Three principal questions animated my research: what did late antique Christian writers actually know about hieroglyphs, an utterly foreign writing system to most of them? On what basis did they engage with the classical discourse on hieroglyphs, which was already well established by late antiquity? And finally, what light, if any, do these authors’ remarks on hieroglyphs shed on their attitudes toward pharaonic Egyptian culture more broadly conceived? Although the case studies examined in the previous chapters have, in some cases, raised as many questions as they have answered, it is possible to at least begin to sketch a picture of how hieroglyphs appeared in the late antique imagination and to outline some directions for future research.
Piecing together references to hieroglyphs from the works of the late antique church fathers and ecclesiastical historians gives us some idea of what those authors knew about the ancient Egyptian writing system. Numerous late antique sources attest to the close connection between hieroglyphs and the gods, although those deities are often subjected to a euhemeristic treatment and reclassified as human culture heroes. Thoth-Hermes-Mercury is most commonly identified as the inventor of the Egyptian writing system, and sometimes of human language and writing more generally, but Augustine’s remarks in De civitate Dei demonstrate the persistence of a parallel tradition crediting Isis with the invention of writing. As we saw in Chapter 2, that seems to be the version Augustine preferred as being a better fit for his chronological argumentation. It was also widely acknowledged that the Egyptian writing system was very ancient, certainly older than that of the Greeks, although here, too, this chronological primacy could be challenged if it conflicted with scriptural authorities.
Late antique authors also had some sense of the different ways in which hieroglyphs might be employed. The existence of multiple scripts was sometimes acknowledged, most notably by Clement and Porphyry, although the independent existence of hieratic was often ignored in favor of a broad bipartite division between “sacred” and “common” scripts. Hieroglyphs were known to have been used for historical record keeping, notably in the maintenance of royal annals and chronicles, but more pervasive and arguably more significant was the perceived link between hieroglyphic writing and Egyptian religion and magic. Priests were recognized as the quintessential Egyptian literati and temples as the principal locus of hieroglyphic writing. In this context, hieroglyphs were viewed as the preeminent means of both revealing and concealing the teachings of the Egyptian priesthood. Christian discussions of Moses’ education in the “wisdom of Egypt” indicate a certain discomfort with this aspect of the hieroglyphic tradition, however, and the wisdom conveyed in hieroglyphic texts is often problematized or even said to have been supplanted by true Christian wisdom, conveyed by the Holy Spirit.
With the exception of Clement and, later, Horapollo, relatively few late antique authors attempted to delve very deeply into the question of how the hieroglyphic script actually functioned. Most commentators adhered to a well-established line of thinking that represented hieroglyphic signs as purely symbolic; the existence of phonetic signs in the hieroglyphic repertoire was typically elided, and hieroglyphs were generally thought to function allegorically, the meaning of each individual sign tied to the nature of the object it depicted. There are various possible explanations for this. As many modern commentators have stressed, in the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, the hieroglyphic script did develop in such a way as to foreground the symbolic quality of individual hieroglyphs, and the classical and late antique authors’ focus on this aspect of the writing system to some extent reflects the way the script was being used in the later periods. Access to accurate information would also have been a limiting factor—Smet of Philae may have had some degree of hieroglyphic literacy, but would he have been able to explain the nature and function of the signs he carved into the stone of Hadrian’s Gate? Probably not. Late antique authors also had to contend with the weight of received tradition, which since at least the time of Diodorus had promoted the symbolic interpretation of hieroglyphs.
In thinking about what late antique Christian authors knew about hieroglyphic writing, it is also necessary to consider where those writers obtained their information. Relatively few of the late antique authors discussed in these pages would have ever seen hieroglyphic inscriptions at first hand; fewer still would have had the opportunity to examine such inscriptions with the assistance of a native interlocutor, as some of the earlier classical visitors to Egypt might have done. There are some exceptions, of course, notably in the case of those authors with Egyptian backgrounds; Shenoute was certainly familiar with the appearance of hieroglyphs, and the authors of the Coptic homilies dealing with Theophilus and Cyril would probably have had some exposure to them as well. But for the most part, late antique Christian authors were heavily reliant on the accounts of Egyptian writing provided by earlier classical sources. Indeed, the case studies examined in the previous chapters have shown that it is difficult, if not altogether impossible, to isolate a specifically Christian discourse on hieroglyphs in late antiquity. The Christian authors who discuss Egyptian writing were the direct heirs to the classical discourse on Egypt, and that legacy both enriched and constrained them. Certain ideas about Egyptian writing, first articulated by Herodotus, Plato, and Diodorus, among others, proved nearly impossible to dislodge, even half a millennium later.
This was the case, for example, of the traditions surveyed in Chapters 2 and 3, concerning the divine origins and great antiquity of hieroglyphic writing and its use to record Egyptian history and to transmit the arcane knowledge of the Egyptian priesthood. Consequently, we see authors like Eusebius and Augustine, Ambrose and Origen, working within the parameters of this received discourse, adopting and adapting it to suit their theological objectives. Thus, in Augustine’s work, for example, the inventor of hieroglyphs becomes, not Thoth-Hermes, the thrice-great god, but Isis-Io, the human queen of Egypt, a transformation that allows Augustine to call into question the Egyptians’ much-vaunted claims to an extraordinarily ancient tradition of historical record keeping. Similarly, Origen and Ambrose both challenge the long-standing tradition of respect for the “wisdom of Egypt” as encoded in hieroglyphic texts by focusing on the figure of Moses, who repudiated his Egyptian education, which Origen specifies he acquired from ancient and inaccessible writings, but nonetheless managed to best the enchanters of Pharaoh. The themes discussed in Chapters 4 and 5 also reflect the Christian reworking of existing ideas about Egyptian hieroglyphs. In his tirade against hieroglyphic writing, Shenoute draws on both the classical discourse, with its emphasis on animal hieroglyphs, and on the tradition of Judeo-Christian polemic against Egyptian animal cults in order to make the argument that the inscriptions in the temple he seeks to transform are functionally the same as cult images, and therefore must be destroyed. And the ecclesiastical historians and homilists who tell the story of the discovery of hieroglyphic inscriptions in Alexandria during the episcopate of Theophilus utilize contemporary ideas about the nature of language and the process of translation to make the argument that translating hieroglyphs can, under the right circumstances, produce miraculous results.
In addition to informing us about the contemporary state of hieroglyphic knowledge, late antique Christian authors’ comments on hieroglyphs also tell us something about their attitudes toward the pharaonic Egyptian culture that produced that unique mode of written expression. In an article on the connection between monuments, travel, and writing in the ancient world, John (Jaś) Elsner has argued that monuments operate simultaneously as artifacts and as objects of discourse. He writes, “monuments as ideas or ideological constructs always have the added dimension of having been real things. They authorise discourse, and thus act to persuade the reader, by referring with apparent simplicity to artefacts outside language.… They exist (as artefacts), and so what they mean (as signs in language) must therefore be true.”1 For the late antique Christian writers surveyed in the previous chapters, hieroglyphic inscriptions from Egypt’s pharaonic past served just such a discursive function. As one of the most highly visible markers of Egyptian cultural and religious identity, monumental hieroglyphs were physically present in a variety of late antique contexts—in Egypt itself, of course, but also in imperial centers like Rome and Constantinople in the form of artifacts taken as trophies of empire. As such, they were indisputably “real things,” like the monuments Elsner discusses in his article, but they also served to “authorise discourse” on a variety of different subjects. Talking about hieroglyphs, in many of these late antique sources, becomes a way of talking about other things altogether: imperialism, history, identity, and spiritual authority, to name only a few possibilities.
One of the places where we can see this discursive process most clearly is in the late antique Christian approach to “reading” hieroglyphs. For classical authors like Diodorus, the ability to read the hieroglyphic script required long and arduous study; once attained, it afforded membership in an elite intellectual class with unique access to the accumulated wisdom of the ages. This view is echoed by Ammianus, who calls on the outside authority of the translator Hermapion to provide the hieroglyphic translation he interpolates into the Res Gestae. In the works of many of the Christian authors surveyed in these pages, however, the act of “reading” hieroglyphs becomes an exercise in spiritually guided hermeneusis, and Christian ascetics like Shenoute and ecclesiastical leaders like Theophilus claim the right to interpret monumental inscriptions despite lacking the traditional educational formation. Translation blends into appropriation, while at the same time, the translations that emerge from this practice of interpretatio Christiana are ever more consequential, insofar as they are used to shape arguments over access to and control of the monumental legacy of Egypt’s pharaonic past.
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For a variety of reasons, histories of the hieroglyphic tradition and of decipherment have, as discussed above in the Introduction, tended to give short shrift to late antique Christian sources. References to hieroglyphs and Egyptian writing more generally are scattered throughout the enormous corpus of patristic literature, and, with few exceptions, the sources fail to show the level of sustained interest in hieroglyphs that characterizes the classical discourse on Egypt. However, as a chapter in the history of Egyptology, these late antique sources play a key role. Not only do they preserve certain very ancient ideas and traditions about hieroglyphs, but their insistence on the symbolic nature of hieroglyphs, which is consistent across religious and cultural divides, from Horapollo and Ammianus to Clement and Socrates Scholasticus, heavily influenced the hieroglyphic speculation of the Renaissance and early modern periods. Late antique Christian comments on hieroglyphs also fit well within the emerging scholarly consensus that late antique Christian responses to pharaonic monuments (and “pagan” monuments more generally) were not exclusively negative. Far from monolithic in their perspective, the sources examined in these pages exhibit a broad range of responses to hieroglyphs and hieroglyphic inscriptions, which can be seen as anything from tools of the Devil to prophecies of the coming of Christ.
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The case studies explored in this book have begun the process of writing late antique commentators, particularly Christian ones, back into the history of Egyptological speculation, but the story does not end here. Focusing on the late antique sources raises some new and important questions, and two avenues of future exploration are, I think, particularly deserving of attention. I have tried, where possible, to signal links between the late antique Christian texts dealing with hieroglyphs and the rich corpus of early medieval Islamic sources on the same subject, but a truly comparative study would require fluency in premodern Arabic and goes well beyond the scope of this project. Okasha El Daly has argued eloquently for the rehabilitation of what he calls the “missing millennium” of medieval Arabic Egyptological inquiry. Nowhere is the importance and promise of this work more clearly indicated than in his discussion of hieroglyphs as they appear in the work of early medieval Islamic historians and geographers.2 If Ibn Waḥshiyah’s late ninth-/early tenth-century treatise on ancient scripts does indeed demonstrate knowledge of the existence of phonograms and determinatives in the hieroglyphic repertoire, as El Daly has proposed, what additional information about the early medieval understanding of hieroglyphs may be awaiting discovery in as-yet unedited Arabic manuscripts in museums and libraries worldwide? Just as late antique theories about hieroglyphic writing developed in conversation with the classical discourse on the subject, early medieval Islamic discussions of hieroglyphs were in dialogue with both their classical and late antique precursors, and reconstructing that dialogue and the role of hieroglyphs in the medieval Islamic imagination remains a major desideratum.
A second axis of inquiry that would reward future investigation revolves around the materiality of hieroglyphic texts and their treatment in late antiquity. My analysis in this study has focused primarily on hieroglyphs as objects of late antique discourse, but this is only part of the story, as hieroglyphic inscriptions also had an independent existence as physical artifacts and can be considered on that basis as well. One might look, for example, at the treatment of hieroglyphic texts at pharaonic sites that were occupied in late antiquity. Prior discussions of this issue have often been based on the false premise that late antique Christians were necessarily frightened or disgusted by the sight of hieroglyphs, as in the example of John Ray’s “nervous” monk Jacob. As a result, damage to inscriptions and reliefs has commonly been attributed to Christian agency on a rather uncritical basis. For this reason, a reexamination of the subject that takes into account the plurality of possible Christian responses to hieroglyphs on a site-by-site basis is still needed. Among the questions that could be posed are the following: Under what circumstances were hieroglyphic inscriptions defaced? Plastered over? Obscured with new construction? What evidence is there for interaction between secondary epigraphic activity and existing hieroglyphic inscriptions and relief carvings? David Frankfurter’s recent Christianizing Egypt demonstrates the rich rewards of examining religious activity and religious change—even the nature of “religion” itself—by means of the material record.3 Hieroglyphic inscriptions, as artifacts and as a prominent feature of the physical and visual landscape of late antique Egypt, could profitably be examined in this same light.
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In the quotation that serves as an epigraph to this book, Serge Sauneron suggests the following: “one could write a most agreeable book,” he says, “about the legends of Egypt born of men’s reanimation of the images of a past they no longer comprehended.”4 Whether this book succeeds in being agreeable, let alone “most agreeable,” is for the individual reader to decide. I do hope, however, that I have managed to shed some light on the way that certain late antique authors, confronted with “the images of a past they no longer comprehended” in the form of hieroglyphic inscriptions, reanimated those images with new meanings and, in so doing, added their own chapter to the mnemohistory of pharaonic Egypt.