Hauptwerke

"Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Germany’s leading scholar of early modern philosophy, has supplied the first volume with a deeply learned introduction that readers of German will find quite useful. […] Volume 4 has an extensive annotated index of all of the authors mentioned by Kircher in the course of his work, compiled by Frank Böhling. […] Olms and the series editors are to be applauded for making hard copies of Kircher’s work accessible beyond the confines of rare book rooms." (Daniel Stolzenberg, University of California, Davis, Seventeenth Century News, Vol 74))

Already in Avignon, Kircher had begun to research the then undeciphered hieroglyphs of Egypt. The sum of his linguistic and Egyptological findings, already partially published in smaller writings, is presented by Kircher in the three volumes of OEDIPUS AEGYPTIACUS (Rome 1652-1654). From the documents and examples of Egyptian hieroglyphs accessible to him, he develops a comprehensive reconstruction of Egyptian theology, politics, culture and language. He integrates these into the historical framework of the late antique and early modern Philosophia perennis and thus into the world-historical framework of the Old Testament. By identifying central god figures of ancient Egypt with gods of the Greek pantheon and placing them in the Judeo-Christian genealogy of the proto-fathers, he writes a cultural history of the world as he knows it, which fits into the theoretical and historical system of his universal science.