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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.
The speaker
Jean-Luc Fournet was a member of the Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale in Cairo (1992-1996), then a research fellow at the CNRS (1996-2004). In 2004, he was elected director of studies in Greek papyrology at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, before becoming professor at the Collège de France in 2015 in the “Written Culture of Late Antiquity and Byzantine Papyrology” chair. He is a member of the “Byzantine World” team at UMR 8167 “Orient et Méditerranée”. As a papyrus editor, he has developed a holistic approach to documentation, focusing on the interactions between literary and documentary texts. More generally, he works on the culture of Late Antiquity – in particular, multilingualism and the modalities of written culture. Among other recent works, he is the author of The Rise of Coptic: Egyptian versus Greek in Late Antiquity (Princeton-Oxford 2020) and the editor of Horapollon’s Hieroglyphica de l’Égypte antique à l’Europe moderne: histoire, fiction et réappropriation (Studia Papyrologica et Aegyptiaca Parisina 2, Paris 2021).
Practical information
Monday, May 27, 2024 6 to 7:30 pm Historic areas of Villa Medici Free (reservation required) In French and Italian
As part of Jean-Luc Fournet’s lecture series for the eighth edition of Lectures méditerranéennes.
In collaboration with
