Egyptology, the limits of antiquarianism, and the origins of conjectural history, c. 1680–1740: new sources and perspectives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article introduces some previously unknown Egyptological discussions written in Britain between 1680 and 1740. They are significant in their own right: the last of them, a manuscript ‘Essay towards illustrating the History, Chronology, and Mythology of the Ancient Egyptians’ by the Aberdonian antiquary Alexander Gordon, has a claim to being the most important European Egyptological tract of the period, even if its contents are currently entirely unknown to scholarship. But it will also be argued that the treatises permit some broader reconsideration of historiographical culture in the period. First, they suggest that antiquarian rhetoric was not necessarily matched with antiquarian practice, and that, contrary to the famous claims of Arnaldo Momigliano and some of his more recent followers, eighteenth-century ‘antiquarianism’ was not always so different from seventeenth-century historical criticism. Second, they allow us to make some revisionist judgements about the origins of conjectural history: conjectural-developmental accounts often stemmed less from philosophical assumptions and more from developments in seventeenth-century source criticism, as Hellenistic (both pagan and Judaeo-Christian) accounts of ancient history came more and more to be questioned. This finding permits some important revisionist judgements about William Warburton's famous analysis of the hieroglyphs, and about eighteenth-century historiography more generally.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".