The Hieroglyphenkunde by Karl Giehlow published in 1915, described variously by critics as “a masterpiece”, “magnificent”, “monumental” and “incomparable”, is here translated into English for the first time. Giehlow’s work with an initial focus on the Hieroglyphica of Horapollo, the manuscript of which was discovered by Giehlow, was a pioneering attempt to introduce the thesis that Egyptian hieroglyphics had a fundamental influence on the Italian literature of allegory and symbolism and beyond that on the evolution of all Renaissance art. The present edition includes the illustrations of Albrecht Dürer from the Pirckheimer translation of the Horapollo from the early fifteenth century.
Western literary, philosophical, and religious traditions from Plato and Paul to Augustine and Avicenna have utilized, exploited, or been subjected to allegorical interpretation. Naturally developing a composite picture of interpretive allegory from such a large landscape faces numerous difficulties. As the editor puts it, “to imagine a ‘definitive’ account of the theory and practice of allegorical interpretation in the West would require something of an allegorical vision in its own right.” With that caveat in mind, however, the international team of contributors—from a variety of disciplines—offers a “historical and conceptual framework” for understanding interpretive allegory in the West, from antiquity through the early and late medieval and renaissance periods, and from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. This publication has also been published in hardback, please click here for details.
The first English translation of Volkmann's Bilderschriften der Renaissance, the pioneering review of the influence of the hieroglyph on Renaissance culture, focused on the literature of emblem and device in Germany and France.
Fascination with ancient Egypt is a recurring theme in Western culture, and here Brian Curran uncovers its deep roots in the Italian Renaissance, which embraced not only classical art and literature but also a variety of other cultures that modern readers don't tend to associate with early modern Italy. Patrons, artists, and spectators of the period were particularly drawn, Curran shows, to Egyptian antiquity and its artifacts, many of which found their way to Italy in Roman times and exerted an influence every bit as powerful as that of their more familiar Greek and Roman counterparts. Curran vividly recreates this first wave of European Egyptomania with insightful interpretations of the period's artistic and literary works. In doing so, he paints a colorful picture of a time in which early moderns made the first efforts to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs, and popes and princes erected pyramids and other Egyptianate marvels to commemorate their own authority. Demonstrating that the emergence of ancient Egypt as a distinct category of historical knowledge was one of Renaissance humanism's great accomplishments, Curran's peerless study will be required reading for Renaissance scholars and anyone interested in the treasures and legacy of ancient Egypt.
How the discovery of the Rosetta Stone led to new ways of thinking about language: “A brilliant new interpretation of major 19th-century American writers.” —J. Hillis Miller The discovery of the Rosetta Stone and the subsequent decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics captured the imaginations of nineteenth-century American writers and provided a focal point for their speculations on the relationships between sign, symbol, language, and meaning. Through fresh readings of classic works by Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville, John T. Irwin’s American Hieroglyphics examines the symbolic mode associated with the pictographs. Irwin demonstrates how American Symbolist literature of the period was motivated by what he calls “hieroglyphic doubling,” the use of pictographic expression as a medium of both expression and interpretation. Along the way, he touches upon a wide range of topics that fascinated people of the day, including the journey to the source of the Nile and ideas about the origin of language.
The discovery of ancient Egypt and the development of Egyptology are momentous events in intellectual and cultural history. The history of Egyptology is the story of the people, famous and obscure, who constructed the picture of ancient Egypt that we have today, recovered the Egyptian past while inventing it anew, and made a lost civilization comprehensible to generations of enchanted readers and viewers thousands of years later.
Throughout the pharaonic period, hieroglyphs served both practical and aesthetic purposes. Carved on stelae, statues, and temple walls, hieroglyphic inscriptions were one of the most prominent and distinctive features of ancient Egyptian visual culture. For both the literate minority of Egyptians and the vast illiterate majority of the population, hieroglyphs possessed a potent symbolic value that went beyond their capacity to render language visible. For nearly three thousand years, the hieroglyphic script remained closely bound to indigenous notions of religious and cultural identity. By the late antique period, literacy in hieroglyphs had been almost entirely lost. However, the monumental temples and tombs that marked the Egyptian landscape, together with the hieroglyphic inscriptions that adorned them, still stood as inescapable reminders that Christianity was a relatively new arrival to the ancient land of the pharaohs. In Egyptian Hieroglyphs in the Late Antique Imagination, Jennifer Westerfeld argues that depictions of hieroglyphic inscriptions in late antique Christian texts reflect the authors' attitudes toward Egypt's pharaonic past. Whether hieroglyphs were condemned as idolatrous images or valued as a source of mystical knowledge, control over the representation and interpretation of hieroglyphic texts constituted an important source of Christian authority. Westerfeld examines the ways in which hieroglyphs are deployed in the works of Eusebius and Augustine, to debate biblical chronology; in Greek, Roman, and patristic sources, to claim that hieroglyphs encoded the mysteries of the Egyptian priesthood; and in a polemical sermon by the fifth-century monastic leader Shenoute of Atripe, to argue that hieroglyphs should be destroyed lest they promote a return to idolatry. She argues that, in the absence of any genuine understanding of hieroglyphic writing, late antique Christian authors were able to take this powerful symbol of Egyptian identity and manipulate it to serve their particular theological and ideological ends.
The goal of the Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions is to document in photographs and detailed line drawings all known Maya inscriptions and their associated figurative art. When complete, the Corpus will have published the inscriptions from over 200 sites and 2,000 monuments. The series has been instrumental in the remarkable success of the ongoing process of deciphering Maya writing, making available hundreds of texts to epigraphers working around the world. Volume 1 includes a Spanish translation of the Introduction text and six appendices: sources of sculpture and their codes; list of abbreviations and symbols used in the Corpus series; table of tun-endings between 8.1.15.0.0 and 10.9.3.0.0; a complete Calendar Round in tabular form, giving the position of tun-endings between 8.1.15.0.0 and 10.9.3.0.0; a method for the quick computation of Calendar Round position, by John S. Justeson; and Moon Age tables, by Lawrence Roys.
Unites the disciplines of epigraphy and palaeography to describe the challenges and solutions in making and deciphering ancient text and art, Features valuable perspectives from an international team of experts, Discusses current theories with regard to the cultural setting and material realities of Egyptian remains, Clearly presents traditional and emerging techniques and challenges as a guide for future research Book jacket.
Stolzenberg presents a new interpretation of Kircher's hieroglyphic studies, placing them in the context of seventeenth-century scholarship on paganism and Oriental languages. Situating Kircher in the social world of baroque Rome, with its scholars, artists, patrons, and censors, he shows how Kircher's study of ancient paganism depended on the circulation of texts, artifacts, and people between Christian and Islamic civilisations.
