ABSTRACT
The terms 'interpretation' and 'explanation' crucially refer to genres of interpretative endeavour. An inventory of the hieroglyphic signs explained in the text, arranged according to thematic relationships, provides an index rerum in parallel with the index signorum. The text is certainly very unlikely to have been originally written in Egyptian, or to have appeared in Egyptian at any subsequent point, and the manuscript text itself is in fact in Greek. The younger Horapollo continued to maintain the school in Alexandria with which his family had long been associated. Insofar as the testimonia are concerned, it is known that Heraiscus addressed one of his books to Proclus, who, according to Damascius, apparently had considerable respect for the former's work. Even if the evidence for the original text having been composed in an earlier form in Egyptian is ultimately unconvincing, there is, nonetheless, a two-fold prima facie case for exploring specifically Coptic corpora, both as material resource and as possible compositional environment.
