Translating the Hieroglyphica: Better than Indiana Jones

On research rabbit holes, baboon mummies, and time travel

I must apologise to my subscribers and followers for my brief hiatus: I have been in a writing hole for the past few months. I had scheduled a month’s worth of posts to bridge the gap, but I didn’t foresee that I would make some exciting discoveries that would throw my carefully laid plans totally off course. Here’s what happened!

My office while preparing December’s posts.. it got much messier after that!

I had been commissioned to produce a lightly edited translation of Horapollon’s Hieroglyphica: a late antique manuscript that exercised a huge influence on Renaissance and alchemical emblems.

When it was discovered in the Renaissance, it was believed to be a glossary for deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics, and until Champollion successfully learned to read them in the nineteenth century, the manuscript was upheld as the key to the most ancient wisdom (yes, the conversation about Orientalism needs to be had - more on that below).

Athanasius Kircher’s 1652 Oedipus Aegyptiacus was a compendium of “all human knowledge” resting on the “pristine wisdom” of hieroglyphs thought to be contained in the Hieroglyphic and on Egyptian obelisks.

Once the nature of hieroglyphs was more fully understood, the Hieroglyphica was relegated to the dustbin of history as a work of fantasy. In the 1940s and 1950s Egyptological attempts to study it also concluded that it was at best a very poor echo of half-understood memories of the meaning of hieroglyphs, written by some poor chap whose people no longer remembered their own language. The definitive critical edition from 1940 goes so far as to say that he has “abused” and corrupted what is left of the memory of Egyptian writing. I have plenty to say about that in the book.

Many further studies focused on the Renaissance impact of the manuscript, but were roundly derogatory towards the manuscript itself and the misguided translation errors that still managed to spark an efflorescence of creative reinvention and a whole new cultural phenomenon of Renaissance neo-hieroglyphs. In the last decade or so, a few studies have revisited the manuscript itself, proposing various theories as to whether it is even genuine, or a later forgery, and the degree to which the relations between Greek and Egyptian thought in the fraught worlds of late antiquity impacted these apparently misunderstood and misremembered hieroglyphs whose interpretations barely resembled the “genuine ones.” The identity of the author has also been hotly debated.

My brief - and my plan - on accepting this project, was to streamline the translation, add a few notes for the more obscure entries, and write a short introduction summing up the above in a bit more detail. There are only two English translations of the Hieroglyphica. The first dates from 1840, has parts missing, and the translation reflects the Victorian affectations of its time. The second, which most people are familiar with (the Boas translation) is an indirect translation (from the neo-Latin and not from the original Greek), and takes shocking liberties with the text and meanings; yet somehow for 75 years this has been the go-to text for Humanities scholars.

As a native speaker of Greek (and pro translator), this horrified me, especially once I started getting into the text. So rather than a light edit of the 1840 (imperfect but direct translation), my publisher and I agreed that I was to redo the translation from scratch and add proper notes. (For those interested in technicalities, the Greek of this fifth century manuscript is a form of Hellenistic Koine that to a speaker of Modern Greek is roughly equivalent to Shakespearean English vs. Modern Standard English. In short, not terribly challenging). I did consult the actual manuscripts to cross check some inconsistencies, but so far, so straightforward.

The Plutei 69.27 manuscript which is the source of the first Latin translation of the Hieroglyphica. It is housed in Florence, in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana. This script is Palaiologian minuscule, common in 13th-14th century Byzantium.

By October the translation was done and I was revving up to write what I thought would be a fairly simple introduction. Then I noticed something, and it sent me down a research rabbit hole. I confirmed my suspicions, and realised I might just have solved a conundrum that scholars have disagreed about for decades. Excitedly, I decided to write it up and expand my introduction to do a proper scholarly job, but written to be as reader-friendly as possible. While pinning down my evidence, I noticed something else. So I went down another rabbit hole and realised I’d discovered something even bigger.

This one took me to 5th century Alexandria, following the travels of the very last leaders of the Alexandrian and Athenian Schools of philosophy, Horapollon, the possible author of the Hieroglyphica, and Damaskios, the last leader of the School of Athens, who was Horapollon’s student. I dove into their agonised efforts to shore up Paganism against the spread of Christianity, their personal lives, infighting, betrayals, heartbreak, and best hopes. I traced their efforts to preserve legacies, and their all too clever methods for future-proofing their beliefs - which succeeded, if not quite as they had envisioned.

Then I travelled back further, to the last temples of Egypt, watched as trained baboons worshipped the moon and went hunting for their mummies. And then I discovered how many strange things one can do with a mole, while cross-referencing the Hieroglyphica with understudied books of vernacular magic (that are not the Greek Magical Papyri but something else entirely…)

Baboons sacred to Thoth were kept in Egyptian temples and mummified with full honours; in late antiquity “economical” rituals involving these and other sacred animals were still practiced, though outside temples. The odd references to baboons in the Hieroglyphica are a topic of some controversy that I addressed in the book.

By this point I was writing for about 10 hours a day (which I’m not supposed to do for health reasons, but the holidays were fast approaching and I really wanted to enjoy my first family Christmas since 2017 (the last Christmas I celebrated with my parents before illness and both their deaths destroyed any sense of festive cheer with my own family). Yet, cheese platters, family board games, and Dr Who Specials aside, something was gnawing at me. I wrote furiously, trying to meet the December 31st deadline. New Year came and went, and found me cross referencing evidence. I wrote an extensive intellectual context to frame my new discoveries, and realised I needed a proper introduction to address the mishandling of Greek material in (most) Western scholarship: the phenomenon largely responsible for the two discoveries I’d made.

We very nearly lost this little one over New Year’s: he has since made a full recovery, but this was in the background while trying to finish the book.

Limping towards my new Jan. 9th deadline with a sick cat and frustrated family in tow, I thought I was nearly done. Then, I made a third discovery: the biggest of the lot, with important implications for the manuscript and its afterlife. Cue more rabbit holes, cue much (MUCH) more writing, and some chonky footnotes. I had to refute previous scholarship, marshall my evidence, and triple check I wasn’t imagining things. There were 7am Eureka moments after writing all night (my family thought I’d gone quite mad but plied me with caffeine and sandwiches), and wrestling matches with bibliography in several languages and peculiar scripts.

I ended up with a full-length book weighing in at just over 100K words (translation included - but that only accounts for 28K of the total). So then I had to tell my publisher what I’d been up to. Bless them, they were as excited as I was.

In short, I’ve been able to resolve a couple of questions about the identity of the manuscript, refute earlier misconceptions about it, and place it firmly in intellectual traditions neglected by mainstream academia for decades. This will matter not only to scholars concerned with late antiquity (a notoriously thorny period to study), but also anyone interested in Neoplatonism, theurgy, allegory, and the fate of Paganism. There is far more research needed, but it will be up to specialists in other areas to carry this forward.

But what, I hear readers think, did you discover?

That, dear friends, is all in the book. I will share snippets here and there, but I’d like to do this properly, so the full reveal will have to wait while my publishers work their magic. Here’s the table of contents just to give you a flavour; I have also released a section from Chapter 3 here. More on this when I have a firm publication date.

Thyrathen news

I brought back much rich new material from my sojourn in the rabbit holes and will be bringing it to Thyrathen in coming weeks: I’d been planning to write a roundup on the new sources I’ve acquired; I’ll be posting about that next week. Here’s a pic to whet your appetite, but there’s more on the shelves!

The life of St. Cyprian to complement the unpublished grimoire that I’ll be tackling soon, the Greek adaptation of 1001 Nights, the medieval Greek epic vernacular poem Digenes Akritas, and scholarly studies on the iconomachy and folktales. Plenty to be getting on with!

Before I dive down the next writing hole to finish another overdue book project, I will be reorganising Thyrathen a little, and part of that will involve releasing new courses and altering the timing of some postings. It’s taken a while to decide on the best format for these, but I’ll be starting a sister newsletter right here on Substack, and hope this will complement the articles. More on that very soon.

Thank you for reading and sticking with me, do please share and comment below!