| Title | Before and after Greece and Egypt in the Eighteenth Century |
|---|---|
| Contributor | Daniel Orrells(author) |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.53288/0446.1.14 |
| Landing page | https://punctumbooks.com/titles/the-before-and-the-after-critical-asynchrony-now/ |
| License | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ |
| Copyright | Daniel Orrells |
| Publisher | punctum books |
| Published on | 2025-01-29 |
| Long abstract | This chapter examines the question of the historical relationship—the before and the after—of ancient Greece and Egypt in the eighteenth century, to complicate our narratives about the rise of philhellenism during the Enlightenment. While the eighteenth-century antiquarian turn to material culture has indeed been seen as foundational—the “before”—for the development and institutionalization of the discipline of classics, we will see that the emerging narrative about Europe’s ancient Greek origins was constructed in dialogue with eighteenth-century debates about the Egyptian hieroglyph, the history of writing, and the relationship between image and text. This chapter explores these issues by focussing on an exemplary set of Enlightenment intellectuals and antiquarians: Giambattista Vico, Winckelmann, and d'Hancarville. This chapter shows that the reception of ancient Egypt in the Enlightenment was fundamental to the emergence of the European narrative about its Hellenic origins. |
| Page range | pp. 285–316 |
| Print length | 32 pages |
| Language | English (Original) |
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Daniel Orrells is Professor of Classics at King’s College London. He is author of the monographs Classical Culture and Modern Masculinity (2011), Sex: Antiquity and Its Legacy (2015), and Antiquity in Print: Visualizing Greece in the Eighteenth Century (2024).