When and How Did Modern Westerners Learn about Egyptian Myth?

In the western world today, Egyptian mythology is roughly as well-known as Greek or Norse mythology. This, however, was not always the case. Two hundred years ago, even the foremost western experts on ancient Egypt knew relatively little about Egyptian myth and the vast majority of non-academic westerners knew nothing at all about the subject. It has only been over the past couple hundred years that academic knowledge on the subject has grown and become widely disseminated. In this post, I will discuss the fascinating history of how westerners became aware of Egyptian myth.

Ancient Greek and Latin authors

Some ancient Greek and Latin authors wrote about Egyptian myth in works that were transmitted through the manuscript tradition through the Middle Ages and were well known to most western scholars from at least the Renaissance onward. The Greek historian Herodotos of Halikarnassos (lived c. 484 – c. 425 BCE) wrote extensively about the geography, history, and ethnography of Egypt in the second book of his Histories, which he most likely finished and published in some form in the first half of the 420s BCE. In this description, he covers some aspects of Egyptian religion and myth.

In the early third century BCE, the Egyptian priest Manethon wrote an account of the history and culture of Egypt in the Greek language titled Aigyptiaka, which included significant information about Egyptian myth. Although the Aigyptiaka itself has not survived, substantial fragments of it have been preserved through quotation by later writers whose works do survive.

The Greek biographer and Middle Platonist philosopher Ploutarchos of Chaironeia (lived c. 46 – after c. 119 CE) wrote about the Egyptian myth of Isis and Osiris in his Greek-language essay On Isis and Osiris, which, even to this day, gives the most complete surviving account of the myth.

The North African writer Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis (lived c. 124 – after c. 170 CE) wrote a novel in the Latin language titled The Golden Ass, which ends with the protagonist becoming an initiate into the Greco-Roman mystery cult of Isis. Although the novel has relatively little to do with native Egyptian myths surrounding Isis, it provides extensive information about how she was worshipped in the Greco-Roman world.

ABOVE: Photo from Wikimedia Commons of a second-century CE Roman bust of the Greek historian Herodotos of Halikarnassos based on an early fourth-century BCE Greek original (left), photo I took myself of a portrait of a philosopher from Delphoi often identified with little evidence as Ploutarchos of Chaironeia (center), and fourth-century CE medallion portrait of the Latin novelist Apuleius (right), all of whom wrote about aspects of Egyptian religion and myth

The loss and rediscovery of how to read hieroglyphs

During the Roman period, the main people who knew how to read hieroglyphs and transmitted knowledge of them were native Egyptian priests who served the traditional Egyptian deities. Partly as a result of this, the hieroglyphic writing system was very strongly associated with Egyptian polytheism. Egyptian Christians who spoke Coptic, the latest form of the Egyptian language, wrote using the Coptic script, which was based on the Greek alphabet, rather than in traditional hieroglyphs.

As a result of this, as Christianity became the dominant religion of Egypt over the course of the fourth and fifth centuries CE, the ability to read hieroglyphs died out and was lost. The last known dated inscription in hieroglyphs was written by a scribe named Esmet-Akhom at Philae, an island in the Nile that held an important temple to Isis, and is dated precisely to August 24th, 394 CE.

In the fifth century CE, a writer named Horapollon, who was supposedly one of the very last priests of the old Egyptian gods, wrote a treatise titled Hieroglyphika, which purports to explain how to read Egyptian hieroglyphs. Although he originally wrote the treatise in Coptic, it survives only through a later Greek translation made by a man named Philippos. The treatise contains enough correct information to indicate that its author had some real knowledge of hieroglyphs, but most of it is very confused and much of it is entirely wrong.

For over a thousand years, no one could read Egyptian hieroglyphs and all knowledge of Egyptian mythology was based on Greek and Roman texts like those I have mentioned above and interpretations of the Egyptian artworks that were known at the time.

Then, in July 1799, during Napoleon Bonaparte’s campaigns in Egypt, the French military officer and engineer Pierre-François Bouchard discovered the Rosetta Stone, a trilingual inscription issued in 196 BCE on behalf of Ptolemaios V Epiphanes, the Greek king of Egypt at the time, bearing the same decree written in Egyptian hieroglyphs, Demotic script, and Ancient Greek. Copies and transcriptions of the inscription soon became widely circulated among western scholars.

In the early 1820s, using the Rosetta Stone inscription, the French philologist Jean-François Champollion, who relied without acknowledgement on the work of the earlier English scholar Thomas Young, managed to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs. He discovered that the glyphs were mostly phonetic and recorded an older form of Coptic, which he had learned from Raphaël de Monachis, a former Coptic Orthodox monk. Champollion demonstrated his decipherment of hieroglyphs in his monograph Précis du système hiéroglyphique des anciens Égyptiens, published in 1824.

ABOVE: Portrait of the French scholar Jean-François Champollion, painted in 1831 by Léon Cogniet

The growth of modern Egyptological understanding of Egyptian myth

The decipherment of hieroglyphic writing contributed significantly to a wave of western fascination with all things ancient Egyptian, termed “Egyptomania,” that lasted through the mid-1800s. Nonetheless, throughout most of this period, actual knowledge of Egyptian myth remained quite limited.

Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the academic field of Egyptology burgeoned. Looters, treasure hunters, and eventually professional archaeologists uncovered more and more artifacts and texts that revealed more information about Egyptian religion and myth. Meanwhile, scholarly understanding of the Egyptian language and the scripts the Egyptians used to write it, including hieroglyphs as well as hieratic and Demotic, gradually improved.

The Prussian Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius published the first complete translation of a manuscript of a so-called “Book of the Dead” into a modern language (German) in 1842 and the British scholar Samuel Birch published the first substantial English translation a quarter of a century later in 1867. The French scholar Gaston Maspero published the first compilation of the Pyramid Texts in French in 1894 under the title Les inscriptions des pyramides de Saqqarah.

Meanwhile, from the 1880s onward, the British Egyptologist Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie (lived 1853 – 1942) conducted extensive excavations throughout Egypt. Petrie had many negative qualities; he was an avowed and vocal white supremacist, elitist, and eugenicist, he subjected the native Egyptian workers he employed on his digs to appalling labor conditions, and even many of his white colleagues found him a difficult man to work with.

Nonetheless, Petrie was an extraordinarily prolific excavator and displayed an unprecedented degree of commitment to the careful documentation and scientific analysis of evidence. He played a major role in transforming Egyptian archaeology from mere greedy treasure-hunting into a respected and scientific academic field and uncovered much evidence that shapes scholarly understanding of ancient Egypt and Egyptian myth to this day.

The second wave of Egyptomania and growing popular awareness of Egyptian myth

By the early 1920s, western academics had a fairly firm understanding of the most basic elements of Egyptian myth and beliefs. With the second wave of Egyptomania, this knowledge began to filter from academia into popular awareness, albeit colored by significant modern embellishments.

In 1922, a team of excavators led by the English Egyptologist Howard Carter discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings. As I previously wrote about in this blog post from five years ago, Tutankhamun’s tomb remains to this day the only tomb of an Egyptian pharaoh from the period when Egypt was at the height of its power that modern archaeologists have ever discovered more-or-less intact. Although archaeologists have found many other royal tombs, all the other tombs they have found were already extensively looted, many of them in antiquity.

The news of this exciting discovery and the legend that quickly grew up claiming that the tomb was cursed set off the second wave of Egyptomania. Egypt became a cultural phenomenon and topic of widespread interest even for people who were not otherwise interested in the ancient world. This fascination eventually resulted in products such as the original 1932 Universal film The Mummy starring Boris Karloff and the 1934 film Cleopatra directed by Cecil B. DeMille and starring Claudette Colbert in the titular role.

Western popular interest in Egypt remained strong throughout the mid-twentieth century, waned in the 1970s and ’80s, and then burgeoned again in the 1990s with films such as the 1998 animated musical drama film The Prince of Egypt and the 1999 remake of The Mummy and its sequels. More recently, Rick Riordan’s popular children’s fantasy adventure book series The Kane Chronicles (published between 2010 and 2012) contributed significantly to awareness of Egyptian myth among members of my own generation.

Meanwhile, scholarly understanding of Egyptian myths and beliefs has continued to improve significantly as more artifacts have been discovered, more texts have been translated, and scholarly articles have refined our understanding.