Tracing a line to modern Egyptology : Ippolito Rosellini, Vladimir Propp and the cryptohistory of the "Dizionario Geroglifico"

Four wooden boxes containing more than 6.500 cards are preserved in the Biblioteca Universitaria of Pisa, and there they are lying still unpublished and only little known in the scientific community. These cards represent the draft of the Dizionario Geroglifico, conceived by Ippolito Rosellini and left unfinished because of his premature death at age of 43. The drafting of the dictionary is accurately placed into its historical context, a time when the need for a hieroglyph dictionary was widely felt, but the means and ways to pursue it were still in fieri. The ultimate purpose is to trace the cryptohistory of Rosellini’s dictionary and restore it to its right place in the history of modern egyptology. In behavioral archaeology, the term cryptohistory has been used to indicate a history not immediately knowable because partially hidden by widely accepted assumptions, not necessarily false but tendentious and inaccurate. The purpose of Rosellini and Champollion was an active collaboration, and, as shown later by Adolf Erman in 1897, cooperation would have been the only way to succeed in the accomplishment of a hieroglyphic dictionary. The course of history, with good reason, gave a name and a face to modern egyptology, in the acclaimed Jean-François Champollion - fulfilling the need for a hero-, as suggested by Vladimir Propp’s models, but for specific reasons Ippolito Rosellini and his Dictionary were veiled and set aside in the global history of the discipline.