The Language of Glyphosophia: Philosophical Concepts in Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic Culture

Abstract

Egypt has laid the foundations of human civilization; everything originated there, including philosophy. As one of the oldest written cultures, Egypt provides the earliest evidence of philosophical thought. However, we lack a definition or introduction to Egyptian philosophy that originates from ancient Egypt itself. Instead, what we have access to are the products of human imagination accumulated over time, offering countless explanations for how the Egyptians might have achieved their remarkable accomplishments. The central issue here concerns epistemology and the problems of (mis)representation and (creative) misreading: How can we gain insight into the “black box” of Egyptian philosophy and epistemology? What about the Egyptians’ own self-representations? In addressing these challenges, the language used for philosophizing becomes crucial.

This lecture will utilize an exceptional epistemic tool: the educational board BM EA 194, which illustrates Egyptian glyphosophy, encompassing the highest forms of knowledge and interactively demonstrating the possibilities of creating concepts, coining new terms, and redefining old ones. In this sense, we are presented with an emic ancient Egyptian philosophical device, which forms the starting point for rereading ancient Egyptian texts philosophically and developing a research strategy for discussing the Egyptian canon—in order to build towards a critical text corpus of the first attested African language of philosophizing.