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The Rosetta Stone is a stele of granodiorite inscribed with three versions of a decree issued in 196 BC during the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt, on behalf of King Ptolemy V Epiphanes. The top and middle texts are in Ancient Egyptian using hieroglyphic and Demotic scripts, respectively, while the bottom is in Ancient Greek. The decree has only minor differences across the three versions, making the Rosetta Stone key to deciphering the Egyptian scripts.
Horus, also known as Hor in Ancient Egyptian, is one of the most significant ancient Egyptian deities who served many functions, most notably as the god of kingship, healing, protection, the sun, and the sky. He was worshipped from at least the late prehistoric Egypt until the Ptolemaic Kingdom and Roman Egypt. Different forms of Horus are recorded in history, and these are treated as distinct gods by Egyptologists. These various forms may be different manifestations of the same multi-layered deity in which certain attributes or syncretic relationships are emphasized, not necessarily in opposition but complementary to one another, consistent with how the Ancient Egyptians viewed the multiple facets of reality. He was most often depicted as a falcon, most likely a lanner falcon or peregrine falcon, or as a man with a falcon head.
Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined ideographic, logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with more than 1,000 distinct characters. Cursive hieroglyphs were used for religious literature on papyrus and wood. The later hieratic and demotic Egyptian scripts were derived from hieroglyphic writing, as was the Proto-Sinaitic script that later evolved into the Phoenician alphabet. Egyptian hieroglyphs are the ultimate ancestor of the Phoenician alphabet, the first widely adopted phonetic writing system. Moreover, owing in large part to the Greek and Aramaic scripts that descended from Phoenician, the majority of the world's living writing systems are descendants of Egyptian hieroglyphs—most prominently the Latin and Cyrillic scripts through Greek, and possibly the Arabic and Brahmic scripts through Aramaic.
Athanasius Kircher was a German Jesuit scholar and polymath who published around 40 major works of comparative religion, geology, and medicine. Kircher has been compared to fellow Jesuit Roger Joseph Boscovich and to Leonardo da Vinci for his vast range of interests, and has been honoured with the title "Master of a Hundred Arts". He taught for more than 40 years at the Roman College, where he set up a wunderkammer or cabinet of curiosities. A resurgence of interest in Kircher has occurred within the scholarly community in recent decades.
Oedipus Aegyptiacus is Athanasius Kircher's supreme work of Egyptology.
Chaeremon of Alexandria was a Stoic philosopher and historian who wrote on Egyptian mythology from a "typically Stoic" perspective.
Egypt has had a legendary image in the Western world through the Greek and Hebrew traditions. Egypt was already ancient to outsiders, and the idea of Egypt has continued to be at least as influential in the history of ideas as the actual historical Egypt itself. All Egyptian culture was transmitted to Roman and post-Roman European culture through the lens of Hellenistic conceptions of it, until the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics by Jean-François Champollion in the 1820s rendered Egyptian texts legible, finally enabling an understanding of Egypt as the Egyptians themselves understood it.
The writing systems used in ancient Egypt were deciphered in the early nineteenth century through the work of several European scholars, especially Jean-François Champollion and Thomas Young. Ancient Egyptian forms of writing, which included the hieroglyphic, hieratic and demotic scripts, ceased to be understood in the fourth and fifth centuries AD, as the Coptic alphabet was increasingly used in their place. Later generations' knowledge of the older scripts was based on the work of Greek and Roman authors whose understanding was faulty. It was thus widely believed that Egyptian scripts were exclusively ideographic, representing ideas rather than sounds. Some attempts at decipherment by Islamic and European scholars in the Middle Ages and early modern times acknowledged the script might have a phonetic component, but perception of hieroglyphs as purely ideographic hampered efforts to understand them as late as the eighteenth century.
The Bembine Tablet, the Bembine Table of Isis or the Mensa Isiaca is an elaborate tablet of bronze with enamel and silver inlay, most probably of Roman origin but imitating the ancient Egyptian style. It was named in the Renaissance after Cardinal Bembo, a celebrated antiquarian who acquired it after the 1527 sack of Rome. Thereafter it was used by antiquarians to penetrate the meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphs, which were not authentically deciphered until the 19th century. Owing to these prior misconceptions, the tablet became of importance to western esoteric traditions.
The salamander is an amphibian of the order Urodela which, as with many real creatures, often has been ascribed fantastic and sometimes occult qualities by pre-modern authors not possessed by the real organism. The legendary salamander is often depicted as a typical salamander in shape with a lizard-like form, but is usually ascribed an affinity with fire, sometimes specifically elemental fire.
Pierio Valeriano (1477–1558), born Giovanni Pietro dalle Fosse, was an Italian Renaissance humanist, specializing in the early study of Egyptian hieroglyphs. His most famous works were On the Ill Fortune of Learned Men and Hieroglyphica, sive, De sacris Aegyptiorvm literis commentarii, a study on hieroglyphics and their use in allegory.
The Orus Apollo is a manuscript work by Nostradamus written before 1555, and formerly owned by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV's finance minister. It contains two books of 182 verse epigrams. Its full title is Orus Apollo Fils de Osiris Roy de Aegypte Niliacque, des Notes Hieroglyphiques.
Akhet is an Egyptian hieroglyph that represents the sun rising over a mountain. It is translated as "horizon" or "the place in the sky where the sun rises". Betrò describes it as "Mountain with the Rising Sun" and an ideogram for "horizon".
The Egyptian hieroglyph representing gold, phonetic value nb, is important due to its use in the Horus-of-Gold name, one of the Fivefold Titulary names of the Egyptian pharaoh.
In ancient Egyptian art, the Set animal, or sha, is the totemic animal of the god Set. Because Set was identified with the Greek monster Typhon, the animal is also commonly known as the Typhonian animal or Typhonic beast.
The ancient Egyptian Pick hieroglyph, Gardiner sign listed nos. U17, U18 is a portrayal of a 'pick upon the side view of a block'; it is in the Gardiner subset for agriculture, crafts, and professions.
Samuel Sharpe (1799–1881) was an English Unitarian banker who, in his leisure hours, made substantial contributions to Egyptology and Biblical translation.
China Illustrata is a book published in 1667 by the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680). Principally drawn from accounts of the Jesuit China Mission, it compiles 17th-century European knowledge on the Ming-era Chinese Empire and its neighboring countries.
Prodromus Coptus sive Aegyptiacus was a 1636 work by the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher. It was published in Rome by the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith and dedicated to the Prefect of the Congregation, Cardinal Francesco Barberini. The book was Kircher's first venture into the field of Egyptology, and it also contained the first ever published grammar of the Coptic language.
Obeliscus Pamphilius is a 1650 work by the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher. It was published in Rome by Ludovico Grignani and dedicated to Pope Innocent X in his jubilee year. The subject of the work was Kircher's attempt to translate the hieroglyphs on the sides of an obelisk erected in the Piazza Navona.
References
- 1 2 3 Beylage, Peter (2018). Middle Egyptian. Penn State Press. p. 6. ISBN 9781646022021.
- 1 2 3 4 5 " *(wrapo/llwn [῾ωραπόλλων]", Suda On Line", tr. David Whitehead. 5 September 2003
- 1 2 Anthony T. Grafton, foreword , Horapollo (1993) , p. xiv
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain : Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Horapollon". Encyclopædia Britannica . Vol. 13 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 691.
- ↑ Johnson, Scott Fitzgerald (15 May 2017). Languages and Cultures of Eastern Christianity: Greek. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-351-92323-1 . Retrieved 7 January 2024.
- ↑ Eco U., (1993) La Ricerca della Lingua Perfetta nella Cultura Europea (The Search for the Perfect Language, Fontana Press (1997), ISBN 0-00-686378-7), chapter 7: The Perfect language of Images
- ↑ Wildish (2017), Preface, p. xiii?
- Bibliography
- Horapollo (1993) [1950]. The Hieroglyphics of Horapollo. Translated by Boas, George. Foreword by Anthony T. Grafton. Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691000923.
- Jan Assmann. Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism. ISBN 978-0-674-58739-7.
- Wildish, Mark (2017). The Hieroglyphics of Horapollo Nilous: Hieroglyphic Semantics in Late Antiquity. Routledge. ISBN 9781351376532.
