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The Wisdom of Egypt: Changing Visions Through the Ages
The Wisdom of Egypt examines the sources of evidence about Ancient Egypt available to scholars, and the changing visions of Egypt and of Egypt's role in human history that they produced. Its scope extends from the Classical world, through Europe and the Arabic worlds in the Middle Ages, to writers of the Renaissance, to the work of scholars and scientists of Early Modern Europe.
242 pages, Paperback
First published September 9, 2003
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July 14, 2023
This book is part of the Encounters with Ancient Egypt series, which discusses ancient Egypt's interactions with and effects on other cultures all the way down to the present. This volume covers how ancient Egypt was perceived in medieval and early modern times, after its culture died out and before the decipherment of its writing systems gave rise to modern Egyptology. Thus, it's sort of the middle link between two other books in the series, Ancient Perspectives on Egypt and Views of Ancient Egypt Since Napoleon Bonaparte. It also covers a lot of the same subject matter as the middle chapters of Erik Hornung's The Secret Lore of Egypt, mentioning fewer topics but treating them more coherently and in more depth.
The book's first chapter reviews the classical sources on which so much of the medieval and early modern study of Egypt was based. The next two cover cultures whose interest in ancient Egypt is often underestimated: the Golden Age Islamic world and medieval Europe. Islamic understanding of ancient Egypt was sometimes fairly insightful despite being heavily distorted by folklore (the author of this chapter later wrote a book on the subject, titled Egyptology: The Missing Millennium). European knowledge, derived secondhand from biblical, classical, and Arabic sources, was more confused.
The chapters after that discuss European interest in Egypt in early modern times. In the Renaissance and the early 17th century, from Annio da Viterbo to Athanasius Kircher, there was a wild enthusiasm for Hermeticism and hieroglyphs as sources of profound and ancient wisdom. English antiquarians in the late 17th and 18th centuries were a bit more skeptical than their Renaissance predecessors and were able to draw on more firsthand accounts of Egyptian monuments, but they still produced some pretty far off-base ideas, like the supposition that Egypt was the source of Indian and Chinese civilization. These chapters are somewhat limited in scope, and they say little about the more outlandish, esoteric Egyptomania of the same period. That topic is well covered in other sources, though, such as The Secret History of Hermes Trismegistus and Moses the Egyptian.
The final chapter discusses developments after the emergence of true Egyptology, but rather than looking at Egyptology itself, it examines how information from discoveries in Egypt affected the larger disciplines of archaeology and anthropology.
The book's first chapter reviews the classical sources on which so much of the medieval and early modern study of Egypt was based. The next two cover cultures whose interest in ancient Egypt is often underestimated: the Golden Age Islamic world and medieval Europe. Islamic understanding of ancient Egypt was sometimes fairly insightful despite being heavily distorted by folklore (the author of this chapter later wrote a book on the subject, titled Egyptology: The Missing Millennium). European knowledge, derived secondhand from biblical, classical, and Arabic sources, was more confused.
The chapters after that discuss European interest in Egypt in early modern times. In the Renaissance and the early 17th century, from Annio da Viterbo to Athanasius Kircher, there was a wild enthusiasm for Hermeticism and hieroglyphs as sources of profound and ancient wisdom. English antiquarians in the late 17th and 18th centuries were a bit more skeptical than their Renaissance predecessors and were able to draw on more firsthand accounts of Egyptian monuments, but they still produced some pretty far off-base ideas, like the supposition that Egypt was the source of Indian and Chinese civilization. These chapters are somewhat limited in scope, and they say little about the more outlandish, esoteric Egyptomania of the same period. That topic is well covered in other sources, though, such as The Secret History of Hermes Trismegistus and Moses the Egyptian.
The final chapter discusses developments after the emergence of true Egyptology, but rather than looking at Egyptology itself, it examines how information from discoveries in Egypt affected the larger disciplines of archaeology and anthropology.
Displaying 1 of 1 review