Egyptian Oedipus: Athanasius Kircher and the Secrets of Antiquity by Daniel Stolzenberg (review)
- Egyptian Oedipus: Athanasius Kircher and the Secrets of Antiquity by Daniel Stolzenberg
In 1636, a century and a half before the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, the German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher claimed to have deciphered ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic script, a Baroque Oedipus successfully solving the riddle of the Sphinx. He hadn’t quite, but his fanciful readings of obelisks and statues attracted the attention of popes, scholars, and the great sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini for reasons that Daniel Stoltzenberg examines with wit and admirable objectivity. Kircher lived most of his life in Rome, where he taught mathematics at the Jesuit College and studied Egyptian artifacts at first hand. In 1651, he set up a remarkable museum within the Jesuit College that became one of the city’s chief tourist attractions; the most important visitors, such as two popes and Queen Christina of Sweden, were greeted by a talking statue and wooden obelisks with their names painted in hieroglyphs.
Ingrid Rowland, professor at the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture in Rome, is the author of Giordano Bruno, Philosopher/Heretic; The Scarith of Scornello: A Tale of Renaissance Forgery; From Heaven to Arcadia; and The Culture of the High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth-Century Rome, along with translations of Bruno’s dialogue On the Heroic Frenzies and Vitruvius’s Ten Books of Architecture.
