In a seminal history of writing in early Japan D. Lurie made an observation that holds true cross-culturally: ‘Knowing that writing is writing does not necessarily involve “reading” it’ (Realms of Literacy [2011], p. 31). Lurie understands observers of writing as ‘witnesses’, regardless of their capacity to extract linguistic content. Ancient texts inscribed on temple walls or carved into cliff-faces have often incited speculation among later ‘witnesses’, who have wondered about the origins and meaning of previously made graphs. In this lucid book W. tackles the interactions between a well-defined set of such ‘witnesses’ and writing that they could not read. The very idea of Egyptian hieroglyphs – and not only specific instantiations of that script – has repeatedly intrigued and prompted reflection. Reasons for such recurrent interest range from the markedly pictorial shape of hieroglyphic characters to the salience of pharaonic Egypt in the classical and Christian historical imagination. W. asks: what did late antique Christian intellectuals know about Egyptian hieroglyphs? Why did they care about an obsolescent or obsolete writing system? How do their speculations illuminate late antique attitudes towards hieroglyphic writing and, more generally, pharaonic Egypt?
Chapter 1 presents basic information about Egyptian hieroglyphs, including an overview of the origins of the writing system and of the types of signs used (i.e. logograms, phonograms and determinatives). W. also introduces the languages spoken in ancient Egypt as well as the various scripts that encoded the Egyptian language specifically; she discusses the extent and cultural value of hieroglyphic and other literacies; and she considers the eventual obsolescence of hieroglyphs. This chapter will be of particular use to those readers unfamiliar with the complex script ecology of ancient Egypt.
In Chapter 2 W. focuses on how some church fathers manipulated tropes about Egyptian hieroglyphs attested in classical sources. Eusebius and Augustine did not care about how hieroglyphs worked as a writing system. Rather, they were exercised by questions about the hieroglyphs’ antiquity, the divine or human source of their authority and whether hieroglyphic records could be used to write a universal history. Early Christian intellectuals were especially interested in explaining hieroglyphic texts in relation to other cultural and historical traditions, chiefly those of Greeks and Jews. W. shows that, even among patristic authors, solutions to the problem of how to reconcile conflicting narratives and chronologies differed: Eusebius tweaked ancient timelines, Augustine ignored pagan chronologies and euhemerised the alleged origins of the writing system.
Chapter 3 treats Christian discourses about what specific information hieroglyphs encode and how they encode it. Classical sources had already suggested that hieroglyphs recorded wisdom without the intermediation of language. According to some, the characters served nearly antithetical functions: concealing esoteric information (from most) even as they revealed it (to select others). As W. explains, independently of fanciful classical or Christian speculations, there were scribes in Roman Egypt propelled by a cryptographic impulse. The bizarre inscriptions in the temple of Khnum in Esna – one composed entirely of ram-glyphs and another of crocodile-glyphs – attest not only to that impulse, but also to the fact that the hieroglyphs were becoming culturally endangered. The scribes’ retreat into graphic opacity was an ultimately futile claim to relevance. Some church fathers, including Clement and Origen, discussed Egyptian priestly knowledge as part of broader reflections concerning shifts in the location of cultural and religious authority. If wisdom was attained by the grace of God, as they claimed, Greek philosophers and Egyptian priests should yield to unschooled mystics and ascetics. Paideia was as pointless as esoteric initiation: the word of God was not cyphered in anthropogenic scratches.
In Chapter 4 W. turns to a Coptic sermon authored by the fourth/fifth-century ce monk, Shenoute of Atripe, a hostile ‘witness’, as it were. He claimed that Egyptian hieroglyphs contained ‘laws for murdering men's souls’ and that they were ‘written in blood’. The monk was preoccupied with the animal shapes of many of the script's characters and implied that zoolatry underlay their conspicuous zoomorphism. By deriding the hieroglyphs, he aimed to rhetorically neutralise their spiritual threat. What W. characterises as Shenoute's ‘refusal to engage with hieroglyphs as readable text’ (p. 123) was provoked by religious fanaticism. Fascinating as Shenoute's invective is, the sermon is an unicum: no other Coptic text is as explicitly hostile. If the monk's denial that hieroglyphs have linguistic value seems extreme, it is worth remembering that racism has led to even more surprising efforts to deny that writing is, in fact, writing. In the eighteenth century ce the theologian Samuel Simon Witte argued that the cuneiform inscriptions of Persepolis were not anthropogenic, but rather the remains left by volcanic scoriae on rock (Über den Ursprung der Pyramiden in Egypten und der Ruinen von Persepolis [1789], pp. 21–7).
Chapter 5 deals with how some late antique Christian and non-Christian intellectuals confronted challenges of translation. W. treats three very different cases. On the one hand, Ammianus Marcellinus’ famous account of the Egyptian obelisks in the Circus Maximus and the translation of one of their hieroglyphic inscriptions – a translation Ammianus ascribes to a certain Hermapion. On the other, she analyses, first, the interpretation of fragments of pagan visual and material culture (including hieroglyphs) following the destruction of the Serapeum in Alexandria as including Christian symbols; and then, a seventh/eighth-century Coptic homily, in which the patriarch Theophilus of Alexandria explains hieroglyphic characters on an ancient Egyptian temple as prefiguring not just a Christian interpretation, but in fact his own presence at the site. According to Theophilus three ‘thetas’ amidst the ancient hieroglyphs indexed the word theos as well as the names Theodosius (the emperor) and Theophilus. This case of ‘spiritually guided hermeneusis’ (p. 172) continues tendencies analysed by W. in earlier chapters, especially Chapter 3. Perhaps the name of God was encoded, after all, in anthropogenic scratches; if so, Theophilus did not need specialised training to read it.
W. has illuminated a vibrant period in the history of the reception of Egyptian hieroglyphs. For too long Egyptologists as well as historians of antiquarianism, archaeology and epigraphy had assumed that, after the end of antiquity and before the European Renaissance, hieroglyphs deserved mostly apathy or hostility – so too, allegedly, did cuneiform and other scripts of the ancient world. That diagnosis rested partly on cultural myopia. Grand histories of those disciplines have tended to ignore or undervalue relevant pre-modern sources in non-European languages, Arabic in the case of Egypt, but also Syriac, Persian and Armenian, which are relevant for analogous investigations involving ancient writing systems elsewhere. Even when aware of such sources, disciplinary and intellectual historians have often missed or dismissed the incontrovertible interest that ancient writing systems had incited among people before early modern Europeans.
Cultural myopia regarding hieroglyphs is made more acute by the fact that the history of interaction and reflection about ancient inscriptions has had a forceful teleological drive, as if all ancient observers unknowingly wanted – or should have wanted – to decipher the texts in the way that a modern epigrapher now would. Whatever one makes of the intellectual value of a book such as (Pseudo-)Ibn Waḥshiyya's The Long-Desired Fulfilled Knowledge of Occult Alphabets, that medieval manuscript includes drawings of Egyptian hieroglyphs with their purported phonetic values (on Ibn Waḥshiyya's book, see I. Toral-Niehoff and A. Sundermeyer, ‘Going Egyptian in Medieval Arabic’, in N. El-Bizri and E. Orthmann [edd.], The Occult Sciences in Pre-modern Islamic Cultures [2018], pp. 249–63). As W. points out, much remains to be explored about how early medieval Islamic intellectuals engaged with the speculations of their predecessors, not least the early Christian authors she has expertly analysed (p. 173).
Though W.'s attention is primarily philological, she is sensitive to archaeological evidence and alludes to it judiciously. As she recounts, at some point after the sixth century ce, someone standing outside a tomb in Egyptian Thebes took an amphora shard and incised a series of hieroglyphic characters on it. At the very least, those scratches attest to the magnetic fascination of writing that looks like drawing, but also to the fact that among pre-modern ‘witnesses’ of ancient hieroglyphs there was a very wide spectrum of emotions between apathy and hostility. Between 394 ce, when the scribe Smet carved the latest dated hieroglyphs on a wall in the temple of Isis in Philae, and 1652, when the Jesuit priest Athanasius Kircher finished publishing his Oedipus Aegyptiacus, many people interacted with Egyptian hieroglyphs – for all sorts of reasons. W.'s excellent book will be of profit not only to Egyptologists, but also to any scholar who has wondered how people in antiquity made sense of even more ancient writing.
