In 1419 the Florentine Cristoforo Buondelmonti acquired a manuscript on the Greek island of Andros, which he brought to Florence three years later and which met with enthusiastic interest in the local humanist world.
It was a copy of the "Hieroglyphics" by the Egyptian philosopher Horapollon - a kind of dictionary of hieroglyphs - in the Greek version expanded by an otherwise unknown Philippos.
It was kept today in the Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence under the shelfmark Plut.
69.27 preserved book for a codex from antiquity - today we know that it can be dated to the fourteenth century.
Horapollon wrote the "Hieroglyphics" in fifth-century AD Egypt at a time when fanatical Christian fundamentalists were seeking to destroy anything of pagan origin.
Back then, hieroglyphs had long since become cryptoglyphs – signs that hardly anyone could read anymore.
Texts written in hieroglyphs were no longer carved in stone or written on papyrus, but knowledge of their meaning was not entirely lost.
We do not know Horapollon's sources;
in his depiction, hieroglyphs became symbols and served to capture the world in images.
He also enriched the comments on the signs with more general information.
A total of 189 hieroglyphs were described in the extended version of Horapollon's "Hieroglyphics".
The humanists of the fifteenth century believed that with the work of Horapollon they finally had a tool to read the texts carved on the obelisks brought to Rome in antiquity.
Understanding hieroglyphs seemed so important to them because most of them were convinced that there had to be a universal, perfect language that was valid at all times and could be understood in the form of symbols.
These were believed to come close to the sacred signs of the Egyptians.
The decoding avant-garde
A small codex in the British Library is a particular testament to the enduring enthusiasm of scholars for hieroglyphics at the beginning of the sixteenth century - its majestic signature is Royal MS C 12 III.
At the beginning one learns what the magnificent manuscript, which comprises only 25 leaves, is about: "Index rerum, quae ab Egy[p]tiis quondam hierogliphis scribebantur", which means "index of things that were once written by the Egyptians in hieroglyphs".