Egyptian Hieroglyphs in the Late Antique Imagination by Jennifer Taylor Westerfeld

Jennifer Westerfeld has produced a "most agreeable" study of how, whether as sources of wisdom by classical authors to be interpreted or idolatrous images by Christian commentators to be supplanted, the discourse on hieroglyphs in the late antique "imagination" reflects the appraisal of hieroglyphs as a source of authority, manipulated accordingly for the intellectual, theological, and ideological ends of those authors/commentators. In Chapter Five, Westerfeld interprets sources describing the translation of hieroglyphs as revealing that this translation constructed authority for the translators in different ways: from Ammianus Marcellinus's enlisting of (Herm)Apion to translate the Flaminian obelisk in Rome as a further means of expressing Rome's hegemony over Egypt, to three accounts of the destruction of the Serapeum in Alexandria where the reading of a "cross-shaped" hieroglyph leads to mass conversions to Christianity, or Theophilus's reading of three thetas on the temple of Alexander unlocking that temple's wealth for church-building. [...]although she concedes in the conclusion that it is at best "difficult" to isolate a specifically Christian discourse on hieroglyphs in the Late Antique (170), Westerfeld's book, while—admirably—highlighting limitations and thereby routes of future inquiry (173–74), goes about as far as the limited, diverse, and dispersed extant sources allow for understanding the conceptualisation of hieroglyphs in the late antique "imagination." While appraising Westerfeld's book as "most agreeable," I nevertheless must address our principal disagreements: the absence of a clear understanding of (i) the diversity of domains of script use and their shift, specifically in Graeco-Roman Egypt, and of (ii) what exactly constitutes a term for "hieroglyphs" (or not) in Greek, Egyptian, and Coptic, along with (iii) the assumption that certain authors are describing specifically hieroglyphs, introduces various problems