Dr. Ilona Regulski

So, of course, you will immediately have scholars and anyone, in fact, who looks at this to have ideas about it, to try to understand what these picture-like signs may say.

And so in the exhibition, we start in the medieval period in Egypt itself.

where objects were sitting on the banks of the Nile and just common people passing by every day had ideas about these objects and attributed mainly magical powers to it because they thought that these hieroglyphs contained some secret knowledge about the nature of everything and legends started to develop around certain objects.

And then of course in the Arab medieval period you have a lot of scholars also who travel to Egypt and who are amazed by the temples and the tombs they visit and they also start writing about hieroglyphs.

Yes, and that was important to show also because scholars like Thomas Young and Jean-François Champollion, they build on the work of previous scholars and of

previous statements that have been made and steps in the right direction.

These scholars didn't have the Rosetta Stone.

They didn't have bilingual texts.

So it's really important to have one language or script that is known to give you access to the unknown language.

But yeah, these publications and these works were very important.

We also have to realize that it's again a matter of distribution.

We didn't have the internet at the time, so it was also a matter of how later scholars could have access to these earlier publications.

They were mostly written in Arabic, of course.

So somebody like Champollion is fluent in Arabic, so thereby has access to these sources of medieval Arab travelers.

But so it required later scholars in Europe during the Renaissance and later to learn Arabic in order to have access to all these other earlier scholars.

Yes.

So, I mean, moving from the Arab medieval period, it takes some time for these manuscripts to arrive in Europe.

That really only happens in the 15th, 16th century when slowly European scholars start to have access to this.

And this increases as more travelers go to Egypt in the 17th century, 18th century.

And it's really a matter of distributing drawings, descriptions, notes and scholars being in contact with each other.