When Jean-François Champollion announced his decipherment of the hieroglyphic section of the Rosetta Stone, in September 1822, he resolved a doubt which had perplexed the European academies for more than three centuries. The event had its bearing upon wit. For the sixteenth-century dalliance with Egyptian hieroglyphics bred an elaborate system of witty image-making which was sustained by a metaphysical theory of wit. This theory has entered our modern discussions of wit, via Croce. Mario Praz argued that metaphysical wit derived from the same ‘phase of taste’ as the mode of the emblem. J. A. Mazzeo and S. L. Bethell make the still untested claim that seventeenth-century expositions of the impresa offer a key to metaphysical poetry, if not to sacramental truth. What light the theory of the hieroglyph really throws upon metaphysical wit is a question which remains to be resolved.

In 1505 Aldus Manutius published at Venice a little book in Greek whose translated title is The Hieroglyphics of Horapollo of the Nile. Aldus thus brought to European attention an annotated anthology of Egyptian hieroglyphics which had been first gathered together in the fifth century a.d. and translated into Greek some time later. This collection purports to represent an antiquarian attempt to salvage the fast-disappearing sign-language of the old Egyptian priesthood; but it may well strike us now as an inconsiderable little volume in itself, scarcely less dull than quaint. A modern reader might wonder why Aldus bothered to publish it at all.