In 1615 Pietro della Valle, roman knight and patrician, found in Cairo an old Coptic-Arabic dictionary. He broght it to Rom.
In Rome, Nicolaus Fabricius, senator in Aquisgrana, asked Athanasius Kircher, his good friend, for translating it into Latin. Kircher accepted and pope Urbano VII called him in Rome to do the work. Kircher’s translations have always considered incorrect by scholars. In 1821 the french scholar Jean-François Champollion would interpret correctly hieroglyphic writing.
Kircher method for interpreting hieroglyphic writing was completely different from what nowadays considered correct: Kircher believed that each symbol had infinite meanings, revealed directly from God to writer.
Nonetheless, in 1665, a fact happened hard to explain:
Dominican monks discovered in their garden, in Santa Maria sopra Minerva, a little obelisk, in excellent condition. Kircher, director of the near Collegio Romano is the top-expert in hieroglyphic writing and they called him. He couldn’t go and examine the obelisk because he was going to have his yearly retreat at Mentorella’s shrine.
Padre Giuseppe Petrucci, a Jesuit and his personal collaborator went, agreeing to inform the director. When he came to the Dominican garden, the obelisk lay still down and only three of its four sides were visible. He drew the three sides of the obelisk and sent the drafts to his director.
When Padre Petrucci, some weeks later, received Kircher’s answer, got astounded: Kircher had sent him a sketch of the forth side of obelisk and was absolutely corresponding to the just unveiled one.
Kircher managed to imagine hieroglyphic symbols of forth side of obelisk after seeing the other three. Is it so granted that Kircher’s magical and strange method to interpret hieroglyphic writing couldn’t permit him to deeply understand the sacred Egyptian writing?