Athanasius Kircher

Athanasius Kircher was a German Jesuit scholar and polymath of the seventeenth century, born at Geisa near Fulda on 2 May in either 1601 or 1602, a year he himself did not know, and dead on 27 November 1680. He studied at the Jesuit college in Fulda, taught mathematics, Hebrew and Syriac at Heiligenstadt, and held a chair of ethics and mathematics at the University of Würzburg before the Thirty Years' War drove him out. From 1634 he taught mathematics, physics and oriental languages at the Collegio Romano in Rome, where he stayed for the rest of his life and assembled the cabinet of curiosities that became the Museum Kircherianum. He published about forty major works on comparative religion, geology and medicine. His claimed decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs was mostly wrong, although he correctly linked ancient Egyptian with Coptic.