The Great Art of Knowing by Daniel Stolzenberg

Yet Kircher’s vast learning, boundless imagination, and personal familiarity with authentic Egyptian monuments led him down more speculative avenues of inquiry.

The latter half of this book is a sober and remarkably astute outline of the language which, together with its companion dictionary (Lingua aegyptiaca restituta, 1643), long served as a standard reference work for Coptic studies. In the Prodromus coptus (1636), Kircher presented the preliminary results of this study-nothing less than the first grammar of Coptic published in Europe. These documents were first entrusted to Nicolas-Claude de Peiresc for analysis, but they ultimately passed into the hands of Kircher, then professor of Mathematics and Oriental Languages in Rome. The Italian traveler and collector Pietro della Valle acquired various Coptic manuscripts while visiting Egypt in the early seventeenth century.

Through his connections to the expansive network of international Jesuit missionaries and involvement in contemporaneous excavations of ancient artifacts in Rome, Kircher amassed a renowned museum of antiquities and exotic curios in his personal study, the Musaeum Kircherianum.Ĭoptic was the liturgical language of the Christian church in Egypt, used primarily in the middle of the first millennium BCE, before being eclipsed by Arabic. Athanasius Kircher was a prodigious Jesuit scholar who authored over forty books on a vast array of subjects, including volcanoes, musical theory, magnetism, botany, philology, and the ancient world.

The Great Art of Knowing by Daniel Stolzenberg