KIRCHER, Athanasius.

First edition of the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher’s (c.1600-80) groundbreaking linguistic study on the derivation of the Coptic language from ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, and the first printed grammar of the Coptic language, with the Lord’s Prayer in parallel Coptic and Latin, a typographical tour-de-force comparing Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, Coptic, Ethiopic, Chaldean, Samaritan, Estrangelo and even Chinese scripts, with illustrated examples of the hieroglyphic writing of the ancient Egyptians. It preceded by more than a decade his magnum opus on ancient Egypt, the Oedipus Aegyptiacus, for which Kircher provides a detailed 6-page plan or ‘idea’ at the end of this work. 

Kircher used his study of Coptic to slip in a recent and exciting discovery. In 1625, much excitement had been generated among Jesuit missionaries in China by the excavation of an C8th AD stone tablet, the Xi’An Stele, with a long inscription in Chinese and shorter texts in Syriac, giving a history of the activities of Syriac Christians in China. This extraordinary discovery seemed providential: the Jesuits had been searching for proof of ancient Christianity in China ever since Matteo Ricci’s arrival in 1582, and considered the stele to be divine justification of their mission. Kircher, in the Prodromus, not only illustrated for the first time a small part of the stele, the plaquette at the top with nine Chinese characters, but was the first to bring widespread attention to the text, despite his being unable to read Chinese. He provided a complete translation of the text into Latin, derived from an original translation into Portuguese, and also reproduced, transliterated and translated the Syriac inscriptions, which contain a few Chinese characters reproduced in woodcut. Kircher simply noted that they represent ‘names and offices.’  

Kircher slightly fudged the origins of the ancient Chinese Christians to create a narrative in which Coptic had influenced other early Christian languages and even Chinese, thus tracing the origins of many of these Christian languages to the ancient Egyptians. This was also the basis for Kircher’s interesting comparison between Christian theology, the Jewish Cabbala, and ancient Egyptian symbology, based on his reading of hieroglyphs. He notes for example that the resurrected Christ was like the Egyptian scarab beetle, that ‘most vile, foul and repulsive insect,’ which is in the Egyptian cosmology eternally reborn, as he illustrates in a wonderful woodcut of the Egyptian cosmos. It is unclear from where Kircher derived these hieroglyphs, but his sources for Coptic included biblical texts in the Vatican Library, which he describes here, several Coptic manuscripts given to him by his friend and patron, the French astronomer Nicolas Claude Fabri de Pereisc (1580-1637), and an Arabic-Coptic vocabulary brought from Egypt by the Italian composer and traveller Pietro della Valle (1586-1652).