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Egyptian Hieroglyphs in the Late Antique Imagination (Hardcover)
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Egyptian Hieroglyphs in the Late Antique Imagination (Hardcover)
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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.
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