Prodromus Coptus sive Aegyptiacus (The Coptic or Egyptian Forerunner) was a 1636 work by the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher. [1] 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. [2] [3] 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. [4] :4
Scholars in the Catholic Church were interested in ancient Near Eastern languages because they wanted to demonstrate that the Church represented a continuation of the beliefs and practices of the early Christian community. Likewise, the discovery of Nestorian texts in China suggested that Christianity was not a recent introduction to the country, and that there was a connection between the ancient civilisations of the world. [5] :158 Two printed versions of Prodromus are known to exist; on one the title page (illustrated) carried the emblem of its patron Cardinal Barberini, while the other replaced the crest with an image of Jesus speaking to his disciples with the motto from the Gospel of St. Mark: “Go through the whole world and preach the Gospel to all mankind.” [6] :530
Kircher, along with other scholars of his age, was actively looking for links to connect China with the civilisations of the ancient world. In Prodromus he theorised that there had been ancient "Egyptian or Coptic expeditions into India, China and other parts of Asia", and Coptic colonies in Africa and Asia. [6] :78 He was particularly interested in the Xi'an Stele, which had both Chinese and Syriac inscriptions and was evidence of an early historic Christian presence in China. [7] :37–40
Kircher believed that Coptic was a vestige of the ancient Egyptian language, recorded in hieroglyphs, that he had first encountered during his tertianship. He was shown several Coptic manuscripts by Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc in Avignon, and later also obtained an Arabic-Coptic vocabulary brought from Egypt by Pietro della Valle. [4] :5
The Vatican Library already owned a large collection of Coptic manuscripts, but hardly anyone was able to read them. In Rome Kircher had acquired an Arabic manuscript with a basic grammar, which he translated into Latin in one of the sections of Prodromus. [3]
Prodromus sought to connect Coptic with many different languages - Arabic, Armenian, Ethiopic, Samaritan and Syriac. While this was a challenge both to conceive and to print, the frequent mistakes in Kircher's Arabic suggest that many of the connections he claimed to find were of questionable reliability. With Coptic texts, he did not actually translate them, but merely placed them side by side - often inaccurately - with their equivalent passages from the Vulgate. [5] :209
The book opened with a series of endorsements from religious leaders of the various communities using the languages described by Kircher: the archbishop of Tripoli (Syriac), a Maronite scholar working in Rome (Arabic, Samaritan), an Armenian priest, four Ethiopian priests, a priest who spoke Chaldaic and various European scholars of Hebrew. [6] :530–31 [7] :33
The book then discussed the relationships between a number of ancient Near-Eastern languages - Kircher mistakenly believed that Coptic was related to Greek. [6] :79 It then went on to discuss the Nestorian script on the Xi’an stele (although Kircher could not read Chinese). [7] :31 There was then a long and entirely speculative section on the meaning of hieroglyphs. [7] :32 As an appendix there was a grammar of the Coptic language and finally an advertisement for Kircher's promised major work on these matters, Oedipus Aegyptiacus, including an outline of the sections of the proposed book. [2] [6] :530
Kircher returned to this field of study in his later works Lingua Aegyptiaca Restituta (1643), Obeliscus Pamphylius (1650) and Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1652-4). [6] :79–80
The presses of the Propaganda Fide already had typesets for Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, and Ethiopian at the time Prodromus was published, [3] but there was no typeset for Chinese characters. [7] :33 A new typeset for the Coptic alphabet had to be created specially in order to print the work, [8] :14 which has been described as “a tour de force of seventeenth-century typography.” [4] :4
Prodromus achieved immediate popularity and established Kircher's reputation as a scholar. [4] :5 The first enthusiastic response to the work came from Kircher's fellow Jesuit, Melchior Inchofer, who had been appointed as its censor. Normally censors wrote succinct reports with an opinion as to whether a work posed any doctrinal problems, but Inchofer was expansive in his praise, hailing the book as "a worthy beginning from which we may anticipate what will follow." [3] A more critical note was sounded by Kircher's former mentor Peiresc, who complained of his inaccurate transliterations and warned him that presenting theories and conjectures as established fact would damage his reputation. [9] :139–140
The book had a wide circulation and appears to have had at least two printings. Cardinal Barberini took 220 copies from the first printing and 500 were circulated in Spain, Portugal, Germany and Poland. [6] :531
Jean-François Champollion, a later Coptic scholar who deciphered the Rosetta Stone, said that "L'Europe savante doit en quelque sorte a Kircher la connaissance de la langue copte; et il merite, sous ce rapport, d'autant plus d'indulgence pour ses erreurs nombreuses, que les monuments litteraires des Coptes etaient plus rares de son temps”. (European scholarship more or less owes its understanding of the Coptic language to Kircher and in this regard he merits all the greater forgiveness of his mistakes given that Coptic literary materials were rarer during his period.) [6] :79
Coptic or Coptic Egyptian is the latest stage of the Egyptian language, a northern Afro-Asiatic language that was developed during the Greco-Roman Egypt and was spoken until at least the 17th century. In the 2nd century BC, Egyptian began to be written in the Coptic alphabet, which is an adaptation of the Greek alphabet with the addition of six or seven signs from Demotic Egyptian to represent Afro-Asiatic sounds that the Greek language did not have.
Athanasius Kircher was a German Jesuit scholar and polymath who published around 40 major works, most notably in the fields of comparative religion, geology, and medicine. Kircher has been compared to fellow Jesuit Roger Boscovich and to Leonardo da Vinci for his enormous 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. 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.
The Xi'an Stele also known as the Nestorian Stele, Nestorian Stone, Nestorian Monument, or Nestorian Tablet, is a Tang Chinese stele erected in 781 that documents 150 years of early Christianity in China. It is a 279 cm tall limestone block with text in both Chinese and Syriac describing the existence of Christian communities in several cities in northern China. It reveals that the initial Church of the East had met recognition by the Tang Emperor Taizong, due to efforts of the Christian missionary Alopen in 635. According to the Stele, Alopen and his fellow Syriac missionaries came to China from Daqin in the ninth year of Emperor Taizong (635), bringing sacred books and images. Buried in 845, probably during religious suppression, the stele was not rediscovered until 1625.
Ibn Wahshiyyah the Nabataean, also known as ʾAbū Bakr ʾAḥmad bin ʿAlī was a Nabataean alchemist, agriculturalist, farm toxicologist, Egyptologist, and historian born at Qusayn near Kufa in Iraq. He was the first historian to be able to at least partly decipher what was written in the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, by relating them to the contemporary Coptic language.
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, and even that hieroglyphs were an esoteric, mystical script rather than a means of recording a spoken language. 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 ideographic hampered efforts to understand them as late as the eighteenth century.
Athanasius or Athanasios, also transliterated as Athnasious, Athanase or Atanacio, is a Greek male name which means immortal. In modern Greek everyday use, it is commonly shortened to Thanasis (Θανάσης), Thanos (Θάνος), Sakis (Σάκης), Nasos (Νάσος), Athan (Αθαν) or Athos (Aθως). Athanasios is commonly Anglicized as Tommy or Arthur.
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.
Thomas Obicini of Novara was a Franciscan friar, originally from Novara, Italy. As an early orientalist, Arabist and linguist, he translated Arabic texts into Latin and took possession of the Grotto of Nazareth for the Franciscan order in 1620.
Musurgia Universalis, sive Ars Magna Consoni et Dissoni is a 1650 work by the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher. It was printed in Rome by Ludovico Grignani and dedicated to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria. It was a compendium of ancient and contemporary thinking about music, its production and its effects. It explored, in particular, the relationship between the mathematical properties of music with health and rhetoric. The work complements two of Kircher's other books: Magnes sive de Arte Magnetica had set out the secret underlying coherence of the universe and Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae had explored the ways of knowledge and enlightenment. What Musurgia Universalis contained, through its exploration of dissonance within harmony, was an explanation of the presence of evil in the world.
Hans Jakob Polotsky was an Israeli orientalist, linguist, and professor of Semitic languages and Egyptology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Georg Baresch, Czech: Jiří Bareš (1585–1662) was a Czech antique collector and alchemist from Prague known for his connection to the Voynich manuscript.
Ibn Kabar was a Coptic Christian author of an ecclesiastical encyclopedia known as Mișbâḥ al-ẓulma.
China Illustrata is the 1667 published book written by the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680) that compiles the 17th century European knowledge on the Chinese Empire and its neighboring countries. The original Latin title was: ”Athanasii Kircheri e Soc. Jesu China monumentis, qua sacris qua profanis, nec non variis Naturae et artis spectaculis, aliarumque rerum memorabilium argumentis illustrata, auspiciis Leopoldi primi, Roman. Imper. Semper augusti Munificentissimi Mecaenatis“.
Turris Babel was a 1679 work by the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher. It was the last of his books published during his lifetime. Together with his earlier work Arca Noë, it represents Kircher's endeavour to show how modern science supported the Biblical narrative in the Book of Genesis. The work was also a broad synthesis of many of Kircher's ideas on architecture, language and religion. The book was dedicated to the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I and printed in Amsterdam by the cartographer and bookseller Johannes van Waesbergen.
Ars Magnesia was a book on magnetism by the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher in 1631. It was his first published work, written while he was professor of ethics and mathematics, Hebrew and Syriac at the University of Würzburg. It was published in Würzburg by Elias Michael Zink.
Polygraphia nova et universalis ex combinatoria arte directa is a 1663 work by the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher. It was one of Kircher's most highly regarded works and his only complete work on the subject of cryptography, although he made passing references to the topic elsewhere. The book was distributed as a private gift to selected European rulers, some of who also received an arca steganographica, a presentation chest containing wooden tallies used to encrypt and decrypt codes.
Lingua Aegyptiaca Restituta was a 1643 work about the Coptic language by the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher. It followed his 1636 volume Prodromus Coptus sive Aegyptiacus, the first ever published grammar of Coptic. Lingua Aegyptiaca Restituta was dedicated to the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand III and published in Rome by Herman Scheuss.
Obeliscus Pamphilius is a 1659 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.
Arithmologia, sive De Abditis Numerorum Mysteriis is a 1665 work by the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher. It was published by Varese, the main printing house for the Jesuit order in Rome in the mid-17th century. It was dedicated to Franz III. Nádasdy, a convert to Catholicism to whom Kircher had previously co-dedicated Oedipus Aegyptiacus. Arithmologia is the only one of Kircher's works devoted entirely to different aspects of number symbolism.