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The Strange Question of Abenephius, Athanasius Kircher's Source for Egyptian Lore

6/15/2017

12 Comments

 
​When I discussed Ibn Wahshiyya’s book on hieroglyphics yesterday, I briefly mentioned that there is some evidence that the text might be a forgery, and that evidence came from Athanasius Kircher, the eccentric Renaissance polymath whom you will remember as the man who investigated reports of giant human skeletons, among other oddities. Kircher wrote several books on Egyptology, and in researching his failed attempt to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics I encountered the fascinating but bizarre question of Abenephius, an Arabic-language writer whom Kircher relies upon for information about ancient Egypt but whose very existence is in doubt. What’s infuriating is that his reality would help solve a vexing problem in pyramid mythology related to the question of the origins of Surid, the alleged builder of the Great Pyramid before the Flood in Islamic lore.
​No writer before Kircher makes reference to Abenephius, and no one after him has ever found the book in question. Worse, Abenephius’ identity isn’t even consistent in Kircher’s own work. Originally, he referred to the writer as Rabbi Barachias Nephi of Babylon, and in time he became Abenephius the Arab, a scholar of presumably Egyptian extraction. “Babylon” was the old name for Cairo, suggesting the origin of the connection—an attempt to make the text more Egyptian—and Rabbi Nephi could easily slide into Abba Nephi and Abenephius. Why the change occurred, though, is unclear. What did not change is the allegation that this slippery character wrote a treatise on the hieroglyphs of Egypt explaining what they mean and how to interpret them. The interpretations were, in the fragments Kircher preserved, little more than Neo-Platonic philosophizing with very little connection to anything real, but they are surprisingly similar to those in Ibn Wahshiyya’s book without actually duplicating them. If Ibn Wahshiyya’s book is a forgery based on Kircher, this would be the inspiration. If it is not a fake, then the similarity would suggest Kircher’s source was real.
 
The facts don’t give us much confidence in Kircher. When he announced that he had in possession the manuscript of Barachias on the hieroglyphs, he refused to allow anyone to read it in its entirety, and those who saw the one page he made available noted that it seemed to be a pretty straightforward plagiarism of Horapollon and some Renaissance works on Egypt, such as the Thesaurus Hieroglyphicum.  Yet the fragments Kircher quotes are close enough to known Arabic texts that Daniel Stolzenberg has recently argued that Kircher must have had access to a genuine compendium of Arabic lore on the hieroglyphs, albeit one that might have been incomplete, corrupt, or secondhand. Personally, I did not see much in the excerpts I read that could not be derived from medieval and Renaissance texts circulating in Europe at the time.
 
We are left with a few possibilities, none satisfactory:

  • Kircher fabricated the text in its entirety, even the sections that don’t directly support his thesis.
  • Kircher utilized a genuine text, but chose to misrepresent it or was completely indifferent to facts.
  • Kircher utilized a text he thought genuine, but which was a fabrication or a hoax.
  • Kircher mixed and matched bits and pieces from many different sources under one name, even when they contradicted themselves.
 
In the past, Abenephius was considered a reliable and genuine authority, but more recently he has been consigned to the realm of probable fiction, at least among the couple of scholars (Stolzenberg excepted) who have even deigned to mention him since 1900. The annoying part is that the story told in the fragments of Abenephius does have a vague connection, at least indirectly, to genuine Arabic sources. He identifies, for example, Hermes with Idris, Enoch, and Osiris and ascribes to him the carving of sacred wisdom on obelisks. Swap out pyramids or temples for obelisks, and you have claims that are found in Arabic sources—but aside from the mention of Idris, also claims found in medieval Western sources such as George Syncellus. Yet at the same time Abenephius also identifies Zoroaster with Ham and ascribes the pillars of wisdom to him, a claim found in medieval European scholarship and going back at least to Pseudo-Clement, Recognitions 4.27, where the claim appears nearly verbatim. Kircher was familiar with the Recognitions and cited the text alongside Abenephius.
 
The mixture of the possibly genuine and the possibly forged is very difficult to untangle. That leads us to a quotation from this author that might or might not shed light on the question of where the name of the antediluvian king Surid, the supposed builder of the pyramids in Arab-Islamic lore, came from. One hypothesis is that it was derived from Manetho’s rendering of Khufu as “Suphis,” and Abenephius might support that. You will recall that Manetho, quoted from Julius Africanus by Syncellus, described Suphis this way: “Suphis (reigned) for 63 years. He built the Great Pyramid, which Herodotus says was constructed by Cheops. He became contemptuous toward the gods and also wrote the Sacred Book, which I acquired on my trip to Egypt because of its great renown” (my trans.). A second version, from Eusebius, but also quoted by Syncellus, alters the second sentence to say that Suphis “became contemptuous of the gods and, repenting his impiety, wrote the Sacred Book, which the Egyptians hold in high esteem.” This version is the one Kircher knew.
 
Now here is Abenephius, quoted in Kircher, Historia Obelisci Pamphilii, 1: “Sauthis was the king of Egypt in those days, and he raised many needles of the Pharaohs, that is obelisks. He was a religious king, having been initiated into the divine mysteries. He commanded the priests to write down whatever they found in sacred books, and he was said to be a friend of God” (my trans.). This is more or less a paraphrase of Eusebius.
 
The question is whether Abenephius represents a genuine medieval account of the gradual transformation of Suphis to Sauthis to S(a)urid, or whether the text is a forgery based on Eusebius (whom Kircher quotes before this Abenephius fragment). In favor of the latter hypothesis is the fact that Kircher himself claims that Suphis was really “Sothis,” or the star Sirius, and then proceeds to find proof in the Arabic version of his name. On the other hand, some of the details might vaguely reflect the myth of Surid, particularly having the priests record divine knowledge in sacred books, and the weird phrase “needles of the Pharaohs” is a genuine Arabic expression for obelisks.
 
It’s an interesting possibility that there was an intermediary phase between the Late Antique legends of temples and books of antediluvian wisdom and medieval antediluvian pyramid fantasies that passed through a stage when obelisks stood in for the Pillars of Wisdom. Unfortunately, there is not enough proof for us to claim Abenephius as a genuine author, and it must remain interesting speculation. As much as I’d like to believe Sauthis to be an intermediary form between Suphis and Surid, my impression is that Abenephius contains very little that couldn’t be derived from other sources, and the name “Sauthis” is probably just “Sothis” misspelled by Kircher to forge a mystical connection to the stars.
12 Comments
David Bradbury
6/15/2017 02:13:39 pm

"As much as I’d like to believe Sauthis to be an intermediary form between Suphis and Surid"
Really? It would have to be early in a chain of about ten intermediary forms. Given that we're dealing with a language written using an abjad rather than an alphabet, Idris-Surid directly seems much more plausible.

Reply
Jason Colavito link
6/15/2017 02:24:18 pm

You're assuming a written transmission. If there were oral transmission instead, who know what mangled forms were spoken. That said, while it would be convenient for me to see a gradual corruption of the name, I'm pretty sure Kircher made it up.

Reply
David Bradbury
6/15/2017 03:38:09 pm

Fair point. On the subject of intermediary forms, I note with amusement the 1826 comment on Abenethius' use of a form which transliterates from Arabic as "Zorastir" for Zoroaster.
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=j0QZAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA288
(The British Critic and Quarterly Theological Review, vol. 1)

The writer makes the fair point that the "intermediary form" in this case has to be European, for the name in Arabic or Persian texts is more like Zaradusht or Zartusht.

Americanegro
6/15/2017 03:30:22 pm

I'm detecting a Pose in the Force.

يا حبيبي! هل يمكنك قراءة اللغة العربية؟

"The antagonism of abjad versus alphabet, as it was formulated by Daniels, has been rejected by other scholars because abjad is also used as a term not only for the Arabic numeral system but, which is most important in terms of historical grammatology, also as term for the alphabetic device (i.e. letter order) of ancient Northwest Semitic scripts in opposition to the 'south Arabian' order. This caused fatal effects on terminology in general and especially in (ancient) Semitic philology. Also, it suggests that consonantal alphabets, in opposition to for instance the Greek alphabet, were not yet true alphabets and not yet entirely complete, lacking something important to be a fully working script system. It has also been objected that, as a set of letters, an alphabet is not the mirror of what should be there in a language from a phonemic or even phonological point of view, rather, it is the data stock of what provides maximum efficiency with least effort from a semantic point of view."

Reply
David Bradbury
6/15/2017 04:00:54 pm

You may be missing the point here, which is not about reading Arabic, but about writing Arabic. In the standard west-European alphabet, all letters, both consonants and vowels, occupy at least the space between the top and bottom of a letter like lower-case s, with some extending further up or down. In scripts like Arabic and Hebrew, that is not the case, and some vowels can be missed, making Surid a more direct reversal of Idris.

Personally, I go for Daniel Craig in La Perla.

Americanegro
6/15/2017 05:20:30 pm

Dude. Does your grandmother not know how to suck eggs? Because it sounds like you're trying to teach her.

David Bradbury
6/15/2017 07:05:12 pm

Both my grandmothers are dead.

Americanegro
6/15/2017 07:34:57 pm

Sick burn bro! You own! On the bright side they didn't live to see this.

Only Me
6/15/2017 06:54:42 pm

I'm going for the last option concerning Abenephius. Depending on what Kircher's overall intent was, I wouldn't be surprised he may have cherry-picked from everything he had available.

Reply
David Bradbury
6/16/2017 03:54:41 am

A review in Aries (2014) of a book about Kircher pithily notes that the Abenephius manuscript was his "ticket into the republic of letters".
http://www.academia.edu/4913712/_Review_Egyptian_Oedipus_Athanasius_Kircher_and_the_Secrets_of_Antiquity_by_Daniel_Stolzenberg

Stolzenberg's book apparently shows (among other things) how Kircher used the manuscript to attract the interest of his major patron, Nicolas-Claude de Peiresc and to gain entry to the intellectual centre of Rome. For that purpose, he would probably need a turbo-charged version of Jason's last option:
# bits and pieces from many different sources PLUS a small dose of plausible invention

Reply
Dabid Bradbury
6/16/2017 03:57:26 am

PS: Forgot to mention Stolzenberg's observation that Peiresc "never got to see" the manuscript.

Reply
Darryl Murdoch
12/10/2022 01:24:52 am

I bumped into this while trying to find ways people dealt with growing evidence that the sun was larger than the earth, and can’t penetrate through the ground like a phallus to make the moon red.

It’s very tempting to say Anaxas was related to this transitional phase, where the shadow of the earth and the lunar nodes got caught up in these ideas.

Interesting stuff!

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