SOAS, University of London (The School of Oriental and African Studies)

The Dictionary of the Ancient Egyptian Language: from Rosellini and Champollion to Erman and the Berlin School, under the Eye of Vladimir Propp

Four wooden boxes containing more than 6.500 cards are kept in the Biblioteca Universitaria of Pisa, and there they are lying still unpublished and only little known in the scientific community. These cards represent the draft of the Dizionario Geroglifico, conceived by Ippolito Rosellini and left unfinished because of his premature death at age of 43. As part of the project “The Franco-Tuscan Expedition to Egypt (1828-29) on the web. The study of the unpublished Hieroglyphic Dictionary of Ippolito Rosellini”, the aim of this talk is to present the contents of the Dizionario Geroglifico, and insert its drafting more accurately into its historical context, a time when the need for a hieroglyph dictionary was widely felt, but the means and ways to pursue it were still in fieri. The ultimate purpose is to trace the cryptohistory of Rosellini’s dictionary and restore it to its right place in the history of modern egyptology. In behavioral archaeology, the term cryptohistory has been used to indicate a history not immediately knowable because partially hidden by widely accepted assumptions, not necessarily false but tendentious and inaccurate. The purpose of Rosellini and Champollion was an active collaboration, and, as shown later by Adolf Erman in 1897, cooperation would have been the only way to succeed in the accomplishment of a hieroglyphic dictionary. The course of history, with good reason, gave a name and a face to modern egyptology, in the acclaimed Jean-François Champollion - fulfilling the need for a hero-, as suggested by Vladimir Propp’s models, but for specific reasons Ippolito Rosellini and his Dictionary were veiled and set aside in the global history of the discipline.

Dr. Gianluca Miniaci is Marie Curie Research Fellow at the Institute of Archaeology - University College London (UCL), where he is director of a project called EPOCHS – “Egyptian Periodisation – Object Categories as Historical Signatures”, which aims to provide a basis for new interpretative models of material cultural transmission and social transformation in stratified societies during the Middle to Late
Bronze Age (MBA-LBA) in Egypt (1850-1550 BC). He is Associate Director of University of Pisa archaeological mission at Dra Abu el-Naga (Thebes/Luxor), where he has been taking part regularly since 2004. He is cooperating with the Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France-Palais du Louvre (Paris), with the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) and with the University of Pisa, where he had been post-doc researcher in Egyptology from 2008 to 2011. He is author of many scientific articles and two monographs, Rishi Coffins and the funerary culture of Second Intermediate Period Egypt and (co-author) Seven Seasons at Dra Abu el-Naga. The tomb of Huy (TT14):preliminary results.