The Myth of Egypt and Its Hieroglyphs in European Tradition

by Erik Iverson

Erik Iversen describes the powerful effect of the "myth of Egypt," particularly Egyptian hieroglyphs, on European literature, art, religion, and philosophy. This is the story of a creative an erroneous interpretation of the traditions of ancient Egypt became a rich source of inspiration for Europeans from ancient times through the medieval and Renaissance periods to the Baroque era. The misguided notion that hieroglyphs were allegorical, and that they constituted a sacred writing of ideas, exerted a dynamic influence in almost all fields of intellectual and artistic endeavor, as did conceptions of Egypt as the venerable home of true wisdom and of occult and mystic knowledge. The Baroque Piazza Navona in Rome, for instance, is only one of the many great public spaces that center on an Egyptian obelisk and an attempt to read its mysterious signs.


Iversen begins by discussing the nature of Egyptian writing. Then he explains, in detail and with apposite illustrations and quotations, the ways in which Europeans tried to understand and use the hieroglyphs. A final chapter sets Jean François Champollion's decipherment of the hieroglyphs into a vividly reconstructed historical context.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Egypt, Egyptology, Language

178 pages, Paperback

First published October 4, 1993

Reviews

[Samuel Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great and fascinating treatment of ideas about hieroglyphs over the centuries. Both erudite and readable, the book closes with an intriguing account of Champollion's methodology for deciphering hieroglyphs.

[DAJ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Iversen wrote the original edition of this book in 1961. Aside from the brief 1993 preface, this edition seems to be unchanged, but with good reason: it still holds up today.

Iversen begins with a surprisingly extensive description of how hieroglyphs work. It explains their basic functions (ideograms, determinatives, and signs that represent one, two, or three sounds) as well as some weird, specialized adaptations of the system: syllabic writing for Semitic words and enigmatic writing for cryptic religious texts. He then describes the state of knowledge of the system in Greek and Roman times. Hieroglyphic texts were still being written, but all the Greek and Roman authors whose works have survived were convinced that hieroglyphs represented words or whole phrases. Horapollo's Hieroglyphica is often held up as the book that misled Europeans about hieroglyphs, but all those classical authors were responsible for the misunderstanding, and Iversen examines what each of them said on the subject.

The third chapter, on the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, may be what make Iversen's book most useful, because its topic isn't well covered elsewhere. Iversen relates European beliefs about hieroglyphs to European attitudes toward ancient Egypt in general, showing how both sets of beliefs developed through the centuries. The rediscovery of Horapollo's book spurred a mania for use of "hieroglyphic" symbols in Renaissance art that drew upon Horapollo's text and a handful of Egyptian, pseudo-Egyptian, and even purely Roman artifacts found in Rome. There's a lot to study in the Renaissance use of symbolic motifs that were dubbed hieroglyphs, and Iversen emphasizes that he only scratches the surface in this book. Iversen's work is thus a resource for understanding Renaissance art, and the most recent translation of Horapollo's book, the one by George Boas, would also be helpful in that regard. If you're reading to understand the history of Egyptology, however, or even the history of false notions about ancient Egypt, only the broad strokes will be useful to you.

The fourth chapter discusses scholars like Athanasius Kircher and George Zoëga, who made the first stumbling steps toward deciphering the glyphs, alongside the wildly varying attitudes toward ancient Egypt among people of the 17th and 18th centuries. The final chapter is a concise but solid description of the decipherment of hieroglyphs that gives credit to just about everyone who made an important step before Jean-François Champollion. It also acknowledges that true understanding of the script was still only partial when Champollion died.

Much of Iversen's subject matter is covered in more recent books, especially in The Wisdom of Egypt and The Secret Lore of Egypt. Yet nobody else discusses the wide-ranging effects of misconceptions about hieroglyphs as thoroughly as he does.

[Raymonds009 · Rating 5 out of 5]

I call this astonishing. The amount of detail in finding the threads of the history covered here just makes you want to learn as much as you can about the original documents cited.

The sheer amount of ink spilled by scholars as well as charlatans trying to be the first to discover the meaning of the hieroglyphs is numbing. It is hard to imagine something so off the tracks happening to day, but, I guess that anything is possible.

Fantastic illustrations along with a strong adherence to telling this story are to be commended.

[Rix · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think some of this stuff is above my paygrade to say if it has a point or not? Neat little history of hieroglyphics thoug