Dissertation project of Daniel Arpagaus

The dissertation aims at investigating Ptolemaic period hieroglyphic writings - mainly from the Edfu and Dendera temples - that convey a surplus of meaning via the spelling of individual words. While research so far referred to such writings mainly under the label of ‹cryptography›, a current approach has not only coined the new term ‹visual poetry› (Ludwig D. Morenz), but focuses on the strategies of ‹Schriftbildlichkeit› that are involved. As hieroglyps formed a pictoral script from the outset, this is all the more true for Ptolemaic with its thousands of newly developed signs and sign variants. Thus, the vast text corpora of Edfu and Dendera provide an ideal field for investigation.