Jon
SOLOMON The Rosetta Stone, Ptolemaic Aetos, and
Aida
The nineteenth-century Egyptologist François Auguste
Mariette wrote the original story that inspired Giuseppe
Verdi's Aida. Mariette's "La fiancée du
Nil" (and Antonio Ghislanzoni's subsequent libretto)
employs fictional Egyptian characters whose names Marette
filtered through the Greco-Roman tradition. This paper
identifies the name Aetos found in the fourth
[Greek] line of the Rosetta Stone as the
heretofore unidentified source for the name of the
opera's titular protagonist.
The passage from Strabo [17.1.31-32] describing an
avenue of sphinxes before the Temple of Memphian Serapis
directed Mariette to the necropolis of Memphis, one of
the most important spiritual centers in ancient Egypt,
the chief divinity of which was the powerful creator god
Ptah. Mariette soon excavated the Serapeum and its
semicircular shrine featuring statues of Greek poets and
philosophers. Serapis, too, was not an "ancient" Egyptian
god but a Ptolemaic, i.e. Greek, synthesis. Mariette
located his story in Memphis, and Act I.ii contains a
serene hymn to Ptah. Because the Greeks commonly
associated this Memphian creator god with the Greco-Roman
craftsman god Hephaestus/Vulcan, Mariette located his
final scene in the "Temple of Vulcan."
The names of three of the opera's principals are theophoric
fictions. The roots of their names refer to two other
important gods, Ra [Radames, Ramfis] and Amun
[Amneris], and these divine roots are capped with
typical Hellenized suffixes. The most important
inscription that groups the three gods Ptah, Ra, and Amun
and was very familiar to all Egyptologists of the
mid-nineteenth century was the code-breaking Rosetta
Stone. Far from being an abandoned relic in 1870, the
Rosetta Stone had been revisited, reexamined, re-edited,
and re-published three times just in the twenty year
period preceding the preparation of Aida.
Mariette, whose cousin worked with Champollion, like any
linguistically oriented Egyptologist of his day, was
certainly thoroughly familiar with the text of the
Rosetta Stone.
Issued by the priests of Ptah at Memphis under Ptolemy V
Epiphanes (the father of Ptolemy VI Philometor who
supervised the construction of the aforementioned shrine
of poets and philosophers), the Rosetta Stone offers its
text in hieroglyphic Egyptian, Demotic, and Greek. The
text of the third and fourth lines of Greek consists of
an introductory praise of Ptah, Ra, and Amun, who play
such important spiritual roles in the opera, although in
Greek they are referred to as their Hellenic counterparts
Hephaestus, Helios, and Zeus:
3
...ON O HFAISTOS EDOKIMASEN VI O HLIOS EDVKEN
THN NIKHN, EIKONOS ZVSHS TOU DIOS, UIOU TOU HLIOU,
PTOLEMAIOU
4 AIVNOBIOU, HGAPEMENOU UPO TOU FYA,
ETOUS ENATOU EF IEREVS AETOU TOU AETOU...
The topmost hieroglyphic rendering of
this portion of the text is broken off, but the Demotic
rendering in the middle of the stele is intact, and it
uses the equivalent names Ptah, Ra, and Amun. The rest of
the fourth Greek line praises King Ptolemy IV by listing
the three previous Ptolemaic kings after Alexander the
Great, but before it mentions even Alexander's name it
lists the name of the priest of Ptah [sic], Aetos, and his father, also Aetos. The feminine form
of the Greek name Aetus is Aeta, the feminine form of the
Demotic name is Aiata, and these may have been Mariette's
inspiration for the name Aida.
Mariette
discusses the name only in his letter to Du Locle (April
27, 1870).
Don't be
alarmed by the title. Aida is an Egyptian name.
Normally it would be Aita. But that name would be
too harsh, and the singers would irresistibly soften it
to Aida.
Neither De Locle, nor Verdi, nor anyone
other than an Egyptologist would know if Aita were not an
authentic Egyptian name, but a famous Egyptologist trying
to please his Egyptian employer would hardly not use an
Egyptian name for his titular protagonist. So far as I
have been able to discover, nothing like the name Aita is
attested in any ancient Egyptian texts, and a
contemporary Egyptian Arabic name would hardly qualify.
From Mariette's perspective Aeta/Aiata/Aita was an
Egyptian name, albeit derived from a Ptolemaic, i.e.
Greek-Egyptian name, found on the Rosetta Stone.
In Diodorus Siculus' description of Egypt
[1.19], a source Mariette consulted for its
passages describing the Serapeum, the name Aetus is
equated with the Nile and all of Egypt, which thereby not
only gives Aida an additional imprimatur of authenticity
but also transforms her into a historical symbol for the
entire Nile region. The title of Mariette's original
scenario was not "Aida" but "La fiancée du Nil,"
and the name of the "King of Egypt" was intentionally
left historically unspecified, as were the names of
Radames, Ramfis, and Amneris, rendering the entire tale
without historical specificity and therefore open for a
more allegorical interpretation.
Abstracts
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