Jean-Luc Fournet - External lectures

Abstract

1. The end of hieroglyphic culture

The end of writing is a phenomenon as moving as it is intellectually instructive. Invented shortly before 3100 BC, hieroglyphics and the scripts derived from them (hieratic and demotic) had to contend with the new linguistic order that came into being with Alexander's conquest of Egypt in 332 BCC.: Greek became the language of the new state, relegating the Egyptian language and its scriptures to second place, a situation accentuated by the Romans when they made Egypt a province of their Empire in 30 BC. We will follow the erosion of the hieroglyphic scripts step by step, until their extinction in the year 394 (for hieroglyphs) and 452 (for demotic), seeking to identify the factors that led to their demise and replacement by the Coptic script, which would henceforth notate Egyptian for many centuries. Behind this graphic substitution lies a cultural and religious revolution triggered by Christianity.

2. The Greeks and hieroglyphics: between fascination and bewilderment

The myth of hieroglyphics as it has developed in modern Europe has its origins in the way the Greeks looked at Egyptian writing. From at least Herodotus (^5th century BC) onwards, the Greeks, once they had settled in Egypt, took a keen interest in Egyptian culture and its modes of graphic expression. But they did so more as philosophers, questioning the otherness of this ideographic script and speculating on its intellectual implications, than as philologists eager to understand how it worked. Accompanying, both as spectators and actors, the decline and disappearance of the ancient Egyptian script, they left numerous written testimonies to their curiosity about hieroglyphics, which spread throughout the rest of the Greco-Latin world and, rediscovered during the Renaissance, had a lasting impact on Moderns' conceptions of ancient Egyptian writing. With the Greeks, we enter the factory of hieroglyphic myth.

3. Horapollon, the author of a Greek treatise on hieroglyphics?

The only Greek work entirely devoted to hieroglyphics to have survived the sinking of Greek literature is Horapollon's treatise Hieroglyphica, the manuscript of which was rediscovered by an Italian priest on the island of Andros in 1419 and deposited in Florence in 1422. This work could have changed the history of hieroglyphic decipherment by anticipating it by four centuries: Horapollon was an Alexandrian intellectual who belonged to a pagan family interested in the culture and religion of the ancient Egyptians, and who was therefore in a position to pass on precise, first-hand information on hieroglyphics in his writings. However, his treatise, which describes some 200 hieroglyphs and their meanings, had no resonance in Antiquity and, despite its resonance from the Renaissance onwards, only led Moderns astray in their quest for the key to hieroglyphics. While all the Greeks' prejudices about hieroglyphics can be found here, the work also raises numerous questions about the date and milieu of its composition, casting doubt on the certainties we had about this treatise. What if the Hieroglyphica had yet to be deciphered?

4. Wandering decipherment: deconstructing the myth

Between the rediscovery of Horapollon's Hieroglyphica and the deciphering of hieroglyphics by Jean-François Champollion from 1822 onwards, hieroglyphic studies stagnated, even though Egypt never ceased to interest and attract the attention of scholars to its writing. This stagnation was not only due to the absence of a Rosetta Stone (which did not appear until 1799), but also to the Greek prejudices that modern Europe inherited with the enthusiastic resurrection of classical literature during the Renaissance. Having hastened the disappearance of hieroglyphics in the last centuries of their history, the ancient Greeks unwillingly contributed to slowing down the moment of deciphering by bequeathing to modernity the fantasies they had developed about this writing, which acted as epistemological blockages. The rediscovery of Neoplatonic works, which coincided with the rediscovery of Horapollon, only served to further undermine the efforts of "antiquarians" (of whom Father Athanasius Kircher is the best-known representative) to restore meaning to hieroglyphic inscriptions. The historical-philological sciences that were to triumph in the 19th century were, in a way, built on the deconstruction of hieroglyphic myth.