New Blog post: "Mysterious Steganography"- a Damning Observation

[davidjackson]

It is fair to say that. Was Kirchner's approach to deciphering ancient Egyptian texts not based on fundamental misconceptions ? It probably never occurred to Kirchner himself that he could be wrong.

Kircher was once humiliated after being presented with a fake text by some students of his as a joke, being told only that it had baffled many other scholars. He confidently produced a translation, only to be left a laughing stock behind his back, a joke which many of his enemies seized upon. It didn't seem to slow him down. (This was long after he wrote the letters under debate, BTW).
Kircher was not a man plagued by self-doubt, and he played upon his reputation. If he said he didn't recognise the alphabet, then it was certainly a strange one.
Remember, this was a man obsessed by languages for more than 30 years of his professional life, especially the esoteric ones. And he was at the centre of a network of professional linguists, in a city which was a cultural superpower. He would have had access to somebody who understood just about any known language, and would know many, many forgotten ones. 
The Jesuits at the time put great emphasis on linguistics. Their mission was to spread the word of God across the world, and that meant speaking every known language. Their missionaries were tasked with sending back texts and dictionaries from across the world to Rome and Kircher sat at the middle of vast, world wide web of information.


In his own Jesuit study, he had friends who spoke Chinese, Japanese, Tartar, Indian (Brahmani , Sanskrit et al), Persian, Chaldean, as well as African and even South American languages. He had easy access to scholars such as Heinrich Roth, Robert Nobili, Giovanni Campori, Bento de Goës....

So, why wasn't he more fascinated by the VM? Well, why should he be. He had a copy of a couple of pages and it didn't fit into his work at the time. It's not as if somebody had discovered a new tribe for which new missionaries had to be trained. 

I've written more on what script did Kircher mean in his 1639 letter here:
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And analysed the original letter under debate here:
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To paraphrase, Kircher admits he doesn't have a clue, excuses himself by saying that he's very busy at the moment and end up saying he's confident he could crack the problem if only he could be bothered. It's the sort of response you'd expect from the man.