Romantic Egypt, monumentality and shifting sands

This essay explores an Egypt that is otherwise and elsewhere as what is always prior, serving as an originary vortex, an abyss that is yet a starting point. The unknowable, unverifiable things that Kant labels "cosmological ideas" are precisely the grounding concepts of an occulted Egypt, where it was believed the power of the Logos could be reconstructed, origin could be determined, divine revelation first occurred, and matter, essence, and freedom were part of esoteric teachings. My underlying argument is that Romantic artists and scholars were drawn to Egyptian monuments as spirit-tombs for the same reason they returned to the problem of decoding the hieroglyph: to make Egypt legible and to find in Egypt's trace the origin - thus translating that which is unlocatable, a vanishing point, into an origination story. To set forth these ideas I use an unorthodox history coupled with a way to come at that subterranean history; I then turn to a late Romantic-period manuscript of amateur hieroglyphic study that plays out this variant history in coded form.