The Papyrus of Ani

Charles S. Peirce's Egyptological Studies

483

TRANSACTIONS OF THE CHARLES S. PEIRCE SOCIETY

Vol. 52, No. 4 (2016) • doi: 10.2979/trancharpeirsoc.52.4.01


Abstract

The paper gives a survey and presents a

critical analysis of Peirce’s studies in Egyp-

tology from 1885 to 1904, as documented

mainly in MSS 1227, 1228, 1244, and

1294. It examines Peirce’s studies and

advances in the language and script of Phar-

aonic Egypt as well as his assessments of

the scientific achievements of the Ancient

Egyptians. Among the linguistic topics in

focus are Peirce’s assumptions concern-

ing the iconicity of hieroglyphic writing,

his conjectures on the origins of indexi-

cal words from nouns, and his hypotheses

concerning the proximity of Ancient Egyp-

tian to the ursprache of humans. The paper

traces some of Peirce’s hypotheses concern-

ing the structure of Egyptian to his fun-

damental assumptions about iconicity and

indexicality in language. Altogether, Peirce

was not only very familiar with the state

of the art of contemporary Egyptology, but

he also achieved a remarkable competence

of the Egyptian language and its hiero-

glyphic writing. While some of Peirce’s

insights into the language and civilization

of the Ancient Egyptians are still tenable,

others reflect certain misinterpretations of

the scholarship of his time, which call for

correction in light of the state of the art of

today’s Egyptology.

Keywords: Charles S. Peirce, Ancient Egypt,

Egyptology, history of science, hieroglyphs,

iconicity in language, origins of indexical

words, ursprache.

1. Introduction

In his Lowell Lectures on “Some Topics of

Logic,” Lecture VIII of 1903, Charles S.

T R A N S A C T I O N S Volume 52 Number 4484

Peirce, looking back at his career as a historian of science, declared the

following:

On five occasions in my life, and on five occasions only, I have had an

opportunity of testing my Abductions about historical facts, by the

fulfillment of my predictions in subsequent archeological or other

discoveries; and on each one of those five occasions my conclusions,

which in every case ran counter to that of the highest authorities,

turned out to be correct. The last two cases were these. Prof. Petrie

published a history of Egypt in which he treated the first three dynas-

ties as mythical. I was just about writing a history of science and in

the first chapter I showed why those Dynasties including the name of

Menes and other facts ought to be considered historical. Before my

book was near completion, Petrie himself found the tomb of Menes.

(CP 7.182, fn. 7)

This remarkable retrospect shows that Egyptology was not simply a

hobbyhorse within Peirce’s extraordinarily broad spectrum of inter-

est but also a research field in which he made some discoveries that

anticipated later findings of Egyptology and outlasted his time. Peirce’s

approach to Egyptology was semiotic in the sense in which he charac-

terized his life’s work on 23 December 1908 in a letter to Lady Victoria

Welby. As he put it there, “it has never been in my power to study any-

thing, – mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynam-

ics, optics, chemistry, comparative anatomy, astronomy, psychology,

phonetics, economic, the history of science, whist, men and women,

wine, metrology, except as a study of semeiotic” (SS 1977: 85–6).

None of Peirce’s manuscripts on Egyptological topics appeared in

print during the author’s lifetime, but some have become published since

1985, when Carolyn Eisele first included selected pages from them in

her two-volume edition Historical Perspectives on Peirce’s Logic of Science.

The subtitle of her edition, A History of Science, is indicative of one of

the reasons why Peirce began to study Egyptian Antiquity. The history

of science since Egyptian and Babylonian Antiquity was a research field

in which Peirce was “one of America’s most eminent scholars” of his

time (Eisele 1979: 143). However, Peirce’s Egyptological studies did

not remain restricted to inquiries into the role of the Egyptians in the

history of science for long. In 1892, he also began to study the lan-

guage and the hieroglyphic writing system of Ancient Egypt, and in

1904, he felt himself competent enough to pass a general judgment on

the “important advances” of Egyptology since the 1870s (Peirce 1904:

957). The importance that Peirce attributed to Egyptological studies in

general and to the rediscovery of the Ancient Egyptian language and

hieroglyphic script in particular can be gauged from the fact that Jean-

François Champollion, the decipherer of the Egyptian hieroglyphs and

founding figure of Egyptology, is included in Peirce’s list of the 300

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Charles S. Peirce’s Egyptological Studies • Kammerzell, Lapčić & Nöth

“Great Men of History” of 1892 (see vol. 5 of his Writings) as the only

“linguist” or as one of only four linguists, if we count the three “philol-

ogists” in this list, F. C. Dietz, J. Grimm, and Sir W. Jones, among the

linguists, too.

Research in Peirce’s Egyptological studies has so far remained restricted

to editorial work. As a result, some of the papers dealing with the role of

Ancient Egypt in the history of science have become available in print.

However, Peirce’s manuscripts on the Egyptian language and its writing

have remained unpublished. They can only be consulted in their origi-

nal MS form or in the form of its microfilm edition. A research project

conducted at the Department of Northeast African Archaeology and

Cultural Studies of the Humboldt-University of Berlin, a successor to

the Berlin Egyptologists whose writings Peirce consulted in his time,

aims at a critical assessment of the results of Peirce’s studies on Pharaonic

Egypt.1 Its purpose is to offer a perspective on Peirce’s Egyptological

studies with a special focus on Peirce’s studies in the language and script

of Pharaonic Egypt, especially in MSS 1227, 1228, 1244, and 1294.

2. Chronology of unpublished manuscripts and published

papers

Robin’s Annotated Catalogue of the Papers of Charles S. Peirce of 1967

is a first point of reference for a survey of Peirce’s Egyptological writ-

ings. It offers brief synopses and gives dates for manuscripts in which

Peirce deals with topics concerning Ancient Egypt, but its summary

descriptions and dates are not always reliable and up to date. The best

bibliographical information on Peirce’s unpublished manuscripts can

be found in the volumes of Peirce’s Writings edited so far, but these

cover only the time until the summer of 1893, if advance information

on contents of vol. 9 is included.2 From the fall of 1893 onwards,

Robin’s catalogue is still the only available source of bibliographical

reference.

In the following chronological list of Peirce’s published and unpub-

lished Egyptological writings, some of the inaccuracies of Robin’s dates

and descriptions are corrected in light of a study of the microfilm edi-

tion of Peirce’s manuscripts (MS) and of the editorial studies published

or prepared for publication by the Peirce Edition Project until 2017

(W1-W9). A chronological survey suggests that Peirce’s writings on

Ancient Egypt may be divided into a prelude and four research phases.

1885–86 (date according to W5, p. 498)

The unpublished MS 1089 is the first of Peirce’s MSS dealing with an

Egyptological topic, although only marginally so. Only the second of

its 12 pages contains a brief reference to the Egyptian “great Artab,”

a dry measure of Ancient Egypt, whose capacity Peirce describes as

amounting to 36.176 liters. The 1901 edition of the Century Dictionary

T R A N S A C T I O N S Volume 52 Number 4486

(http://www.global-language.com/century/) contains an article by

Peirce on this measure under the entry artaba.

1892–93 (research phases I and II)

The papers of 1892–93 are mainly notes, drafts, and manuscripts for

the Lowell Lectures on the History of Science, which took place from

November 28, 1892, to January 5, 1893, on Monday and Thursday

evenings. Five of them have been included in the still unpublished

vol. 9 of Peirce’s Writings (W9), whose Table of Contents has been

made available to the authors of this article in its manuscript form.

For the other unpublished papers, the contents are summarized in

accordance with Robin’s Catalogue.

• August 1892 (MS 1287), pp. 43–52, publ. in W9 as item 22,

“Lecture II, Part 3, Section 3: Pyramid Measurements and the

Fabric of Theory] (R[obin] 1287: 43–52), August 1892.”

• Fall 1892 (MS 1297), pp. 2–3, 6–7, and 8–9, publ. in W9 as item

20, “[Lecture II, Part 3, Section 1: The Egyptian Mind] (R 1297:

2–3, 8–9, 6–7), fall 1892.”

• Fall 1892 (MS 1303), pp. 2–5, publ. in W9 as item 21, “[Lecture

II, Part 3, Section 2: The Character of Egyptian Intellect] (R 1303:

2–5), fall 1892.”

• December 3–5, 1892 (MS 1276), pp. 2–29, publ. in W9 as item

24, “[Lowell Lecture III: Egyptian Science] (R 1276: 2–29), 3–5

December 1892.”

• December 1892 (MS 1277), publ. in Eisele, ed. (1985: 201–215)

as “‘Further Ancient Science – Chaldean and Greek Astronomy’

(with remarks on the Chaldees’ scientific superiority over the

Egyptians) Lowell Lecture V.” Included in W9 as item 28, “[Lowell

Lecture V: Chaldean Science and Early Greek Science] (R 1277:

2–36, 38–53; R 1275: 45, 44, 46–56), 12 December 1892.”

• c. Dec 1892/Jan 1893 (MS 1298), unpublished: “Egyptian

History; Chaldean Astronomy,” 4 pp.

• c. Dec 1892/Jan 1893 (MS 1228), unpublished: “Notes on

Egyptian Hieroglyphs.” Written in parallel with MS 1294.

• January 1893 (MS 1294), pp. 2–6, 15–20, 24 publ. in W9 as item

41, “Egyptian Science (R 1294: 2–6, 15–20, 24), January 1893.”

• not before Jan. 1893 (MS 1296), unpublished: “Thothiana,” 7 pp.

This MS contains the beginning of a paper for the Bulletin of the

American Mathematical Society on “Aahmes” and Egyptian math-

ematics. “Aahmes” is a 19th century transcription of the name of

the copyist of the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus (pBM EA 10058),

JoH-msj.w /ˌjaʕħə-ˈmasjəw/, ‘The-moon-is-born.’

• c.1893 (MS 595), pp. 16–17, unpublished section of the “Short

Logic,” partially published as CP 2.286–291, 2.295–296, 2.435–

443, 7.555–558.3

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Charles S. Peirce’s Egyptological Studies • Kammerzell, Lapčić & Nöth

1898–99 (research phase III)

The manuscripts of 1898–99 were mainly written in the context of

Peirce’s plan to write a History of Science in one volume (MSS 1269–

1273), as first announced in a letter of 1898 (cf. Eisele, ed. 1985:

297–411). At that time, Peirce intensified his studies in the language

and writing system of Ancient Egypt, begun in January 1893. Robin’s

estimate for MSS 1269–1271 is “c.1892,” but since MS 1227 is dated

“March 22, 1898” and contains notes for MSS 1269–1271, and MS

1269 contains a reference to Budge (1898), Robin’s date must be

corrected to 1898. Only two of these MSS have been published so

far. The corrected chronological order of these MSS from 1898–99

is the following:

1. MS 1227, “Notes on Egyptian Hieroglyphs,” dated “March 22,

1898,” a notebook.

2. MS 1271, “A Sketch of the General History of Science,” 6 pp.

3. MS 1270 is a partial copy of MS 1271. “Egyptian Science and the

Typical Egyptian,” 3 pp.

4. MS 1272 of is an earlier draft of MS 1269. Among its topics are

“Egyptian science: the Great Pyramid; the lack of theoretical inter-

est among the Egyptians reflected in their failure to advance scien-

tific knowledge, and the ‘irrefragable’ proof of Egyptian stupidity.”

5. MS 1269 is the first chapter of Peirce’s unfinished “History of

Science.” It has been published in Eisele, ed. (1985: 310–47)

under the title “Egypt and Science.”

6. MS 1292, of 1899, is the draft of an article on “How Did Science

Originate?” in which Peirce argues that science originated in

Babylon, not Egypt, and that there was a lack of scientific interest

in Ancient Egypt.

1902–1904 (research phase IV)

• L 75. Peirce’s 1902 application to the Carnegie Institution con-

tains, in the alternative version edited by J. Ransdell as Version 2,

Part 3 (L 75, Draft C, pp. A46–47), two pages with remarks on

the morphology and iconicity of the Egyptian Language.

• MS 1244, related to MS 1263, is “On Egyptian and other ancient

languages and other topics.”

• MS 1263 has been published in Eisele, ed. (1985: 956–961)

under the title “Chronology of Arithmetic with references to the

collection of Mr. George A. Plimpton, to the Astor Library, and to

other available collections.”

This bibliographical survey shows that Peirce’s Egyptological stud-

ies, after the first rather marginal note on a topic of metrology in

1885, began in 1892 with his notes for the Lowell Lectures on “The

History of Science.” With respect to their contents, roughly but not

T R A N S A C T I O N S Volume 52 Number 4488

Jean-Claude Golvin

 https://jeanclaudegolvin.com/en/