I am aware that my hypothesis is only a hypothesis, and I can at most encourage further exploration in that no-man’s land that was, in the era of Dante, the borderline between two traditions that remained officially separated. I can only testify that, if one studies different theories about the Adamic language, one comes upon curious analogies that are either produced by a common Agent Intellect or by some historical contacts.
Perhaps, on his way to Paradise, Dante met, even if indirectly, Abulafia. I hope both men reached the same destination, where they are now talking to each other, making fun of our desperate efforts to ascertain if they had something in common. If by chance Adam has joined the party, only God knows what kind of language those three characters are speaking together. Perhaps the angels are providing an excellent service of simultaneous translation.
3 FROM MARCO POLO TO LEIBNIZ
Stories of Intellectual Misunderstandings
The first essay of this book showed how misunderstandings can take place inside a given culture. They can also take place between different cultures, when people are unable to understand that these cultures have different languages and world visions. The fact that—through serendipity—those mistakes have led to new discoveries means only that even errors can produce interesting side effects.
When two different cultures meet, there is a shock, a result of their reciprocal diversity. At this point, there are three possibilities:
Conquest: The members of culture A cannot recognize the members of culture B as normal human beings (and vice versa) and define them as “barbarians,” that is, etymologically stuttering and nonspeaking beings and therefore nonhuman or subhuman beings. There are only two further possibilities: to civilize them (that is, to transform people B into acceptable copies of people A) or to destroy them. This, for instance, is how European civilization subjugated African and Amerindian cultures.
Cultural pillage: The members of culture A recognize the members of culture B as the bearers of an unknown wisdom. Culture A may try to subjugate the members of culture B politically and militarily, but at the same time they respect their exotic culture and try to understand it and translate its elements into their own. Greek civilization succeeded in transforming Egypt into a Hellenistic kingdom, but Greek culture had admired Egyptian wisdorn since the times of Pythagoras and tried to steal, so to speak, the secret of Egyptian mathematics, alchemy, magic, and religion. A similar curiosity about and admiration and respect for Egyptian wisdom reappeared in modern European culture, from the Renaissance down to our own day.
Exchange: This two-way process of reciprocal influence and respect is certainly reflected in the early contacts between Europe and China. At the time of Marco Polo and certainly at the time of Father Matteo Ricci, these two cultures were exchanging their secrets, the Chinese accepted from the Jesuit missionaries many aspects of European science, and the Jesuits brought to Europe many aspects of Chinese civilization (to such an extent that Italians and Chinese are still debating the question of who invented spaghetti).
Conquest, cultural pillage, and exchange are abstract models, and in reality there are a variety of cases in which these three attitudes are merged. There are also two other ways for cultures to interact. I am not interested in the first, exoticism, by which a given culture, through misinterpretation and aesthetic bricolage, invents an ideal image of a distant culture, such as the chinoisieries of the past, or Gauguin’s Polynesia, or the Siddhartha syndrome of the hippies, or the Paris of Vincente Minelli.
The second phenomenon is more difficult to label, but let me essay for the moment a tentative definition. We (in the sense of human beings) travel and explore the world, carrying with us some “background books.” These need not accompany us physically; the point is that we travel with preconceived notions of the world, derived from our cultural tradition. In a very curious sense we travel knowing in advance what we are on the verge of discovering, because past reading has told us what we are supposed to discover. In other words, the influence of these background books is such that, irrespective of what travelers discover and see, they will interpret and explain everything in terms of these books.
For example, all medieval tradition convinced Europeans of the existence of the unicorn, an animal that looked like a gentle and slender white horse with a horn on its muzzle. Because it was increasingly difficult to come upon unicorns in Europe (indeed, according to analytic philosophers, they do not exist, although I am not sure I agree), tradition decided that unicorns were living in exotic countries, such as the kingdom of Prester John in Ethiopia.
When Marco Polo traveled to China, he was obviously looking for unicorns. Marco Polo was a merchant, not an intellectual, and moreover, when he started traveling, he was too young to have read many books. But he certainly knew all the legends current in his time about exotic countries, so he was prepared to encounter unicorns, and he looked for them. On his way home, in Java, he saw some animals that resembled unicorns, because they had a single horn on their muzzles, and because an entire tradition had prepared him to see unicorns, he identified these animals as unicorns. But because he was naive and honest, he could not refrain from telling the truth. And the truth was that the unicorns he saw were very different from those represented by a millennial tradition. They were not white but black. They had pelts like buffalo, and their hooves were as big as elephants.’ Their horns, too, were not white but black, their tongues were spiky, and their heads looked like wild boars.’ In fact, what Marco Polo saw was the rhinoceros.
We cannot say Marco Polo lied. He told the simple truth, namely, that unicorns were not the gentle beasts people believed them to be. But he was unable to say he had found new and uncommon animals; instinctively, he tried to identify them with a well-known image. Cognitive science would say that he was determined by a cognitive model. He was unable to speak about the unknown but could only refer to what he already knew and expected to meet. He was a victim of his background books.
Let me consider now another story. As I discussed in the preceding chapter, for a long time European theologians, grammarians, and philosophers dreamed of rediscovering the language of the first man, Adam, lost since, according to the Bible, God confused the languages of mankind to punish the pride of those who wanted to build the Tower of Babel. The Adamic language had to be perfect because its names showed a direct analogy with the nature of things, and for a long time it was universally maintained that this perfect language corresponded to the original Hebrew.
Two hundred years after Marco Polo, at the beginning of the fifteenth century, European culture rediscovered Egyptian hieroglyphs. Their code was irremediably lost (rediscovered only in the nineteenth century by Champollion), but at that time a Greek manuscript, the Hieroglyphica of Horapollus (or Horus Apollon), that purported to decipher that code, was introduced into Italy, in Florence.
Today we know that sometimes hieroglyphs stand for the things of which they are the images, but more frequently they possess a phonetic value. Following the fabulous interpretation of Horapollus, however, the scholars of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries believed that they signified mysterious and mystical truths, understandable only by initiates. They were divine symbols, able to communicate not merely the names or forms of things but their very essences, their true and deeply mysterious meanings. They were thus considered the first instance of perfect language.
Horapollus’s booklet seems to be a Greek translation of more ancient Egyptian texts. It is divided into short chapters that explain, for example, that the Egyptians represented age by depicting the sun and the moon or the month by a palm branch. In each case, there follows a brief description of the symbolic meaning of the figure and in many cases its polysemic value: for example, the vulture is said to signify mother, sight, the end of a thing, knowledge of the future, year, sky, mercy, Minerva, Juno, or two drachmas. Sometimes the hieroglyphic sign is a number: pleasure, for example, is denoted by the number 16, because (allegedly) sexual activity begins at the age of sixteen. Because it takes two to have intercourse, however, intercourse is denoted by a double 16.
We now know that Horapollus’s text was a Hellenistic compilation dating from as late as the fifth century A.D., and although certain passages indicate that the author did possess exact information about Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Hieroglyphica seem to be based on some texts written a few centuries earlier. Horapollus was describing a written system whose last example is on the Theodosius temple (394 A.D.). Even if these inscriptions were still similar to those elaborated three thousand years before, the Egyptian language in the fifth century had radically changed. Thus, when Horapollus wrote his text, the key to understanding hieroglyphs had long been lost.
Hieroglyphic writing is undoubtedly composed, in part, of iconic signs. Some are easily recognizable, such as eagle, owl, bull, snake, eye, foot, man seated with cup in hand. Others are stylized: the hoisted sail, the almondlike shape for a mouth, the serrated line for water. Other signs, at least
