Athanasius Kircher

German Jesuit scholar (1601 or 1602-1680)

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Lived 1602–1680, aged 78Germany

Germany WritersWriter / Author

Wikipedia
52 languages
Cross-language footprint
Era
1602–1680
Aged 78

Summary

Updated 2026-06-08

A Jesuit polymath who published forty major works spanning continents and disciplines, claimed to decode Egyptian hieroglyphs (he was mostly wrong), and filled a Roman museum with mechanical wonders — then watched rationalism sweep past him.

Biography

About

Athanasius Kircher taught for over forty years at the Roman College, where he built a cabinet of curiosities that became the Kircherian Museum and earned the title "Master of a Hundred Arts". His hieroglyphic translations turned out to be incorrect, but he correctly linked ancient Egyptian to Coptic and is considered by some the founder of Egyptology. He wrote an encyclopedia of China revealing early Nestorian Christians, studied volcanoes and fossils, observed microbes through a microscope, and proposed that plague spread through infectious microorganisms. Credited with inventing a magnetic c…

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