Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.
Concept
Oedipus Aegyptiacus
Summary
Oedipus Aegyptiacus is Athanasius Kircher's supreme work of Egyptology.
The three full folio tomes of ornate illustrations and diagrams were published in Rome over the period 1652–54. Kircher cited as his sources Chaldean astrology, Hebrew kabbalah, Greek mythology, Pythagorean mathematics, Arabian alchemy and Latin philology.
The third volume of Oedipus Aegyptiacus deals exclusively with Kircher's attempts to translate Egyptian hieroglyphs. The primary source for Kircher's study of hieroglyphs was the Bembine Tablet, so named after its acquisition by Cardinal Bembo, shortly after the sack of Rome in 1527. The Bembine Tablet is a bronze and silver tablet depicting various Egyptian gods and goddesses. In its centre sits Isis representing "the polymorphic all-containing Universal Idea."
Kircher's Oedipus Aegyptiacus is an example of syncretic and eclectic scholarship in the late Renaissance and representative of antiquarian scholarship before the modern scientific era. His renditions of hieroglyphic texts tended to be wordy and portentous; for example, he translated a frequently occurring phrase in Egyptian, dd Wsr, "Osiris says," as "The treachery of Typhon ends at the throne of Isis, the moisture of nature is guarded by the vigilance of Anubis."
Kircher was respected in the seventeenth century for his study of Egyptian hieroglyphs; his contemporary Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682) who owned several books by Kircher, including Oedipus Aegyptiacus, paid tribute to him as an Egyptologist and his study of hieroglyphs:
But no man is likely to profound the ocean of that doctrine beyond that eminent example of industrious learning, Kircherus.
On the other hand, modern experts on hieroglyphic writing have found Kircher's work to be of little value. According to E. A. Wallis Budge:
Many writers pretended to have found the key to the hieroglyphics, and many more professed, with a shameless impudence which is hard to understand in these days, to translate the contents of the texts into a modern tongue.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.