Charles S. Peirce’s Egyptological Studies

The paper gives a survey and presents a critical analysis of Peirce’s studies in Egyptology from 1885 to 1904, as documented mainly in MSS 1227, 1228, 1244, and 1294. It examines Peirce’s studies and advances in the language and script of Pharaonic Egypt as well as his assessments of the scientific achievements of the Ancient Egyptians. Among the linguistic topics in focus are Peirce’s assumptions concerning the iconicity of hieroglyphic writing, his conjectures on the origins of indexical words from nouns, and his hypotheses concerning the proximity of Ancient Egyptian to the ursprache of humans. The paper traces some of Peirce’s hypotheses concerning the structure of Egyptian to his fundamental assumptions about iconicity and indexicality in language. Altogether, Peirce was not only very familiar with the state of the art of contemporary Egyptology, but he also achieved a remarkable competence of the Egyptian language and its hieroglyphic writing. While some of Peirce’s insights into the language and civilization of the Ancient Egyptians are still tenable, others reflect certain misinterpretations of the scholarship of his time, which call for correction in light of the state of the art of today’s Egyptology.