Because not everything can be represented ideographically, ancient Egyptians turned their ideograms into simple phonograms. Thus to represent a certain sound they put the image of a thing whose name sounded similar. To take an example from Champollion’s first decipherment a, the mouth—in Egyptian, ro—was chosen to represent the Greek consonant ro. The eagle represented a, the jagged line for water represented n, and so on.1
The necessary premise for decipherment of hieroglyphs was supplied by a stroke of pure fortune, when one of Napoleon’s soldiers discovered a trilingual text, the famous Rosetta stone, which bore an inscription in hieroglyphic, in demotic (a cursive, administrative script elaborated about 1000 B.C.), and in Greek. But the Rosetta stone was unknown both at the time of Horapollus and when his book was read by the Western World.
Horapollus, however, was not totally wrong in attributing mystic significance to the images. By the early Christian ages Egypt had already abandoned many of its ancient traditions, but knowledge of sacred writing was still preserved by priests living within the sacred enclosures of the ancient temples. Because the sacred writing no longer served any practical purpose but was used only for initiatory purposes, these last priests began to introduce complexities into it, playing with the ambiguities inherent in a form of writing that could be read either phonetically or ideographically.
The discovery that by combining different hieroglyphs evocative visual emblems might be created inspired these last scribes to experiment with increasingly complicated and abstruse combinations, and they began to formulate a sort of cabalistic game, based, however, on images rather than letters. Thus was formed a halo of visual connotations and secondary meanings around the terms represented by phonetic signs, a basso ostinato of associated meanings that served to amplify the original semantic range of the terms. Horapollus, unable to read the hieroglyphs, received only imprecise information about their symbolical interpretation and transmitted it to the West. The West, in its turn, regarded the hieroglyphs as the work of the great Hermes Trismegistus himself and therefore as a source of inexhaustible wisdom.
While this mistake was fully comprehensible, the truth was not that simple.
The second part of Hieroglyphica is probably the work of the Greek translator Philippos, and it is there that appear a number of clear references to the late Hellenistic tradition of the Physiologus and other bestiaries, herbariums, and lapidaries that derive from it. Consider, for example, the case of the stork. When the Hieroglyphica reaches the stork, it says:
How [do you represent] one who loves the father?
If they wish to denote he who loves the father, they depict a stork. In fact, this animal, nourished by its parents, never separates itself from them but remains with them until their old age, repaying them with piety and deference.
The Hieroglyphica was certainly one of the sources of the Emblemata of Andrea Alciati in 1531. Thus it is not surprising to find there a reference to the stork, which, as the text explains, nourishes its offspring by bringing them pleasing gifts while bearing on its back the worn-out bodies of its parents, offering them food from its own mouth. The image that accompanies this description in the 1531 edition shows a bird that flies bearing another on its back. In subsequent editions, such as the one of 1621, this is replaced by the image of a bird flying with a worm in its beak for its offspring waiting, mouths agape, in the nest.
Alciati’s commentary refers to the passage in the Hieroglyphica that describes the stork. Yet that text includes no reference to the feeding of the young or the transport of the parents. These features are mentioned, however, in a text from the fourth century A.D., the Hexaemeron of Basil (VIII, 5). In other words, the information contained in the Hieroglyphica was already at the disposal of European culture.
A search for pre-Renaissance traces of the stork is rewarded with pleasant surprises. The Cambridge Bestiary (twelfth century) notes that storks nourish their young with exemplary affection, “incubat[ing] their nests so tirelessly that they lose their own feathers. What is more, when they have moulted in this way, they in turn are looked after by the babies, for a time corresponding in length to the time which they themselves have spent in bringing up and cherishing their offspring.”2 The accompanying image shows a stork carrying in its beak a frog, obviously a dainty morsel for its young.
The Cambridge Bestiary took this idea from Isidore of Seville, who, in the Etymologiarum (XII, vii), tells more or less the same story. Who then are Isidore’s sources? Saint Basil we have already seen; other influences were Saint Ambrose (Hexaemeron V, 16, 53) and possibly Celsus (cited in Origen, Contra Celsum IV, 98), and Porphyry (De abstinentia III, 23, 1). These, in their turn, used Pliny’s Naturalis Historia (X, 32) as their source.
Pliny, of course, could have been drawing on an Egyptian tradition, if Aelian, in the second or third century A.D., could claim (though without citing Pliny by name) that “storks are venerated among the Egyptians because they nourish and honor their parents when they grow old” (De animalium natura X, 16). But the idea can be traced back even further, to Plutarch (De solertia animalium 4), Cicero (De finibus bonorum et malorum II, 110), Aristotle (Historia animalium, IX, 7, 612b, 35), Plato (Alcibiades 135 E), Aristophanes (The Birds 1355), and finally Sophocles (Electra 1058). There is nothing to prevent us from imagining that Sophocles himself was drawing on ancient Egyptian tradition, but, even if he were, it is evident that the story of the stork has been part of occidental culture for as long as we might care to investigate.
It follows, then, that Horapollus did not reveal anything hot. To any reader familiar with medieval and classical culture, his booklet differs little from the bestiaries current in the preceding centuries. It merely adds some information about specifically Egyptian animals, such as the ibis and the scarab, and neglects to make some of the standard moralizing comments or biblical references. This was clear even to the Renaissance. In his Hieroglyphica sive de sacris Aegyptorum aliarumque gentium literis of 1556, Pierio Valeriano never tired of employing his vast stock of knowledge of classical and Christian sources to note the occasions where the assertions of Horapollus might be confirmed. Yet instead of reading Horapollus in the light of a previous tradition, he reexamines this whole tradition in the light of Horapollus.
I am speaking of the rereading of a text (or of a network of texts) that had not been changed during the centuries, a semiotic incident that, as paradoxical as some of its effects may have been, was, in terms of it own dynamic, quite easy to explain. Horapollus’s text (qua text) differs little from other similar writings, which were previously known, yet the humanists read it as a series of unprecedented statements. The reason is simply that fifteenth-century readers saw it as coming from a different author. The text had not changed, but the voice supposed to utter it was endowed with a different charisma. This changed the way in which the text was received and the way in which it was consequently interpreted.
I have mentioned old background books that led people to see the unknown in the light of the already known. This is an example of the opposite phenomenon: a case in which something already known is reconsidered in a new and uncanny way in the light of an as-yet-unknown book. Thus, old and familiar as these images were, the moment they appeared as if transmitted not by the familiar Christian and pagan sources but by the ancient Egyptian divinities themselves, they took on a fresh and radically different meaning. The missing scriptural commentaries were replaced by allusions to vague religious mysteries. The success of the book was due to its vagueness. Hieroglyphs were regarded as initiatory symbols.
This is the way ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs were considered by one of the most learned man of the seventeenth century, the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, mainly in his monumental Oedypus Aegyptiacus (1652–54). Kircher firmly believed that ancient Egyptian was the perfect, Adamic language, and, according to the “hermetic” tradition, he identified the Egyptian Hermes Trismegistus with Moses and said that hieroglyphs were Symbols, that is, expressions that referred to an occult, unknown, and ambivalent content. Kircher defined a symbol as “a nota significativa of mysteries, that is to say, that it is the nature of a symbol to lead our minds, by means of certain similarities, to the understanding of things vastly different from the things that are offered to our external senses, and whose property it is to appear hidden under the veil of an obscure expression. … Symbols cannot be translated by words, but expressed only be marks, characters, and figures.”3 The symbols were initiatory because they were wrapped in an impenetrable and indecipherable enigma, to protect them from the idle curiosity of the vulgar multitudes.
When Kircher set out to decipher hieroglyphs in the seventeenth century, there was no Rosetta stone to guide him. This explains his double mistake, namely, believing that hieroglyphs had only symbolic meaning and the absolutely fanciful way in which he identified their meaning. He did not
