Book Note | Egyptian Hieroglyphs in the Late Antique Imagination

Jennifer Taylor Westerfeld, Egyptian Hieroglyphs in the Late Antique Imagination. Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.

In 394 CE, someone inscribed a hieroglyphic graffito written on the temple of Isis at Philae––the latest known inscription of Egyptian language in hieroglyphic script. Only after the French removal of the Rosetta Stone from Fort Julian at Rashid in 1799 have scholars been able to read hieroglyphic script. This temporal gap in which understanding hieroglyphic script was lost was not devoid of speculation, though. In Egyptian Hieroglyphs in the Late Antique Imagination, Jennifer Westerfeld demonstrates that despite the inability to read hieroglyphs, substantial interest in the Egyptian language and hieroglyphic script was not dampened among late ancient writers, and particularly not among Christians who felt the need to make sense of the script. Just as tourists visit museums today and wonder at an Egyptian script inaccessible to most people, ancient Mediterranean writers imbued hieroglyphs with religious and political potency and understood the writing to contain esoteric, ancient knowledge.

In Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Westerfeld explores how late ancient Christians interacted with hieroglyphic script. Westerfeld frames her intervention as a “mnemohistory,” written to understand how hieroglyphic script and its associations with knowledge, power, and Egyptian institutions were memorialized (168). Previous historiography has often emphasized Christian suspicion of hieroglyphs as problematic or dangerous “pagan” phenomena. In contrast to scholars were less attuned to the complex landscape of late ancient religious practices and too quick to take heresiological claims at face value, Westerfeld considers the variety of Christian viewpoints on hieroglyphs. Instead of starting from the perspective that late ancient Christians were superstitious about, or ignorant, of pharaonic Egypt, Westerfeld investigates various Christian literary sources for their wide range of responses to hieroglyphic script.

In Chapter 1, Westerfeld summarizes current Egyptological understanding of hieroglyphic script and positions the role of hieroglyphs in the ancient Egyptian landscape for her readers. She traces the history of hieroglyphs, both their use and their perception, from the early dynastic periods through the Roman era. While perhaps originating as a means to inventory objects, Westerfeld demonstrates that hieroglyphs became understood as the “words of the god” (mdw nṯr) bestowed to humanity by Thoth. She surveys the development of distinct logograms, phonograms, and determinatives in Middle Egyptian and explores how hieratic and demotic scripts emerged in later periods for everyday administrative purposes. By the Roman imperial period, hieroglyphs had fossilized as a classical language known primarily to Egyptian priests associated by Ptolemaic and Roman leaders with Egyptian religious institutions.

Chapter 2 surveys ancient accounts of the origin and function of hieroglyphs. Here, Westerfeld sets up a clear distinction between how Christian and non-Christian writers dealt with hieroglyphs, arguing that Christians attempted “to debunk or at least problematized the classical authors’ claims about Egypt’s great antiquity and esoteric wisdom” (35). Throughout her examination of writers like Herodotus, Plato, Diodorus Siculus, and more, Westerfeld notes how classical authors viewed Egypt as the inventor of temple cults and associated Thoth-Hermes with the localized invention of writing. Later Christian writers like Eusebius, Lactantius, and Augustine mirrored some of these traditions. They associated the invention of writing with Hermes Trismegistus, occasionally imagined as a priest who learned from Moses, and thus folded him into biblical chronology. Westerfeld also demonstrates how both Christian and non-Christian authors associated hieroglyphic script with its use for historical and royal record-keeping. Christians took advantage of this tradition in order to claim that Egyptian and Chaldean record-keepers could be co-opted to prove––particularly through records of the antediluvian period––that biblical history predates the Greek philosophical tradition.

In chapter 3, Westerfeld explores how both Christian and non-Christian writers understood hieroglyphic script to conceal esoteric knowledge. They differed, however, on whether such knowledge was heretical or wisdom worth acquiring. In his Stromateis, for example, Clement of Alexandria demonstrated some knowledge of how Egyptian scripts functioned while arguing for distinctions between pictographic, metaphorical, and allegorizing scripts. Writers like Apuleius, Lucan, and Cassius Dio associated the depiction of animals within hieroglyphic script with concealed ancient wisdom, a common concern among Hermetic and Neoplatonic writers. Here, Westerfeld notes how Christians were not only concerned with the primacy of Moses over Egyptian and broader Greek philosophies, but also with the association of Egypt with idolatry and animal worship that might be inferred from hieroglyphic script.

Westerfeld then conducts a case study of Shenoute and his condemnation of hieroglyphic script in chapter 4, focusing primarily on his untitled diatribe A6. Shenoute associated the heresy of idol worship––often symbolized through the “likeness” (eine) of animals––with hieroglyphic script. In doing so, Shenoute called for the destruction of hieroglyphs and their replacement with Christian scripture and images. Westerfeld demonstrates how Shenoute’s A6 is emblematic of his ongoing battle with Panopolitan temples and the “crypto-pagan” governor of the Thebaid, Gesios, whom Shenoute blamed for the proliferation of idolatrous images. In contrast to modern readers who might classify hieroglyphs and relief carvings as two-dimensional and cultic images or statues as three-dimensional, Westerfeld points out that Shenoute does not hold this distinction, but rather condemns them all as evidence of idolatry (112-13).

Finally, Westerfeld examines Hermetic and Neoplatonic approaches to the seemingly-untranslatable script alongside various accounts of Theophilus’s destruction of the Serapeion in the Ecclesiastical History of Rufinus, Socrates, and Sozomen. While some Hermetic texts (e.g. Corpus Hermeticum 16) argued that hieroglyphs should not be translated because their power comes from their ineffability, Westerfeld contends that many late ancient writers tried their hand at translation nonetheless. Ammianus Marcellinus’s Res Gestae serves as a key example since in that text he attempted to translate into Greek the inscription on the obelisk still standing in the Piazza del Popolo today. Ammianus depends upon the interpretive skills of a certain Hermapion, whose translation likely bolstered Ammianus’s narrative of Christian imperial power and his own erudition (135-41). By contrast, Westerfeld shows that the narratives of the Serapeum’s destruction and subsequent discovery of hieroglyphs nearby served to demonstrate the inevitability of Christian imperialism through the conversion of the priests who translate the script. The narrative of a convenient “discovery” of hieroglyphs like the cross-shaped ankh (Ꜥnḫ) under the temple of Serapis allowed Christian historiographers to foretell the end of indigenous Egyptian temple practices, including hieroglyphic writing itself.

Egyptian Hieroglyphs in the Late Antique Imagination is a broad-ranging and accessible treatment of how late ancient writers engaged with pharaonic history and culture in the midst of the Christianization of Egypt. Westerfeld pulls together a wealth of resources to show how Christian and non-Christian writers debated who had the authority to decipher and deploy “pagan” wisdom presumed inherent in a god-given script. Her work challenges us to look past religious boundaries of Jew, Christian, and Hellene to recognize the variety of approaches that late ancient writers took to explain both the form and function of hieroglyphic script. In particular, Westerfeld points us to ongoing debates around the origin of language, script, and history itself. Late ancient Christian writers, like many of their contemporaries, correlated antiquity, originality, and truth. Thus, hieroglyphic script was a threat to the truth of biblical history and God’s monopoly on esoteric knowledge, and simultaneously was an aspect of the “wisdom of Egypt” that could be incorporated into biblical history. This practice can perhaps be compared to Todd Berzon’s work on Christian heresiology and ethnography, as hieroglyphic script became a medium by which Christian writers could categorize Egypt and absorb it into the Christian story.[1] Hieroglyphs, then, could be portrayed as ambivalently potent––a tool given by the divine, whose records could prove the antiquity of the Christian philosophical tradition but whose esoteric knowledge could lead to idolatry. Westerfeld opens up a space for us to consider more deeply how late ancient Christians made sense of the biblical history they inherited and the narrative of Christian imperial expansion they developed in light of contemporaneous claims to antiquity, knowledge, and institutional power.

[1] Todd S. Berzon, Classifying Christians: Ethnography, Heresiology, and the Limits of Knowledge in Late Antiquity (Oakland, CA: University of California, 2016).

Chance Bonar is a PhD candidate at Harvard University in the Committee on the Study of Religion, specializing in the New Testament and Early Christianity.