ABSTRACT
The single most striking difficulty for contemporary readers of Horapollo's text is that the standards of correctness to which the explanations of the meaning of the glyphs might be supposed to have adhered appears to have been irredeemably lost, at least to Egyptologists subsequent to the publication of Champollion's system. It is clear that the Hieroglyphica owes its survival in the modern period to Renaissance antiquarians imperfectly acquainted with the details of the antiquity of the tradition to which it belonged. Developments towards the provision of explanatory information beyond simple lexical glosses, including semantic, grammatical, or etymological, as well as factual material, represent intermediate cases between the simple glossaries of lexicography proper and the broader philological and exegetical tradition. The subjects of Egyptian theosophy, which included 'Egyptian animal worship, theology, iconography, symbolism and hieroglyphics', had been subjects addressed in a broad Greek tradition of hieroglyphic exegesis.
