KIRCHER, Athanasius.
£7,950 · Offered by Sokol Books
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 be
- Binding: Hardcover
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