About this book

Oedipus Aegyptiacus by the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) is the 17th-century encyclopaedia of Egyptian hieroglyphics - Kircher’s vast attempt to read the hieroglyphs as a sacred symbolic alphabet encoding all ancient wisdom. The complete three folio volumes (Tomus I 1652, II 1653, III 1654, Rome: Mascardi) are hosted as three image-scan PDFs.

Relevance to this project

The early-modern "alphabet from the sky" project in its own idiom: Kircher treats the hieroglyph as a celestial-symbolic script - the closest historical cousin to the thesis that the sky is read as an alphabet; the mage figure (mages: Kircher).

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