EMINESCU'S EGIPTOMANIA: CULTURAL TREND AND HISTORIOGRAPHICAL TRADITION

Recent research has shown that Mihai Eminescu's passion for ancient Egypt is more than a poetic infatuation with obscure episodes of human history. Ilina Gregori, for instance, proves that the story of pharaoh Tla and the adjacent narratives, included in short prose such as Archaeus or Sarmanul Dionis, belong to a wider cultural field that is furrowed by the Egyptologist trend. It is after Champollion's discoveries that the 19th century Egyptomania occurs among the artists' legions as well as among scientists. For Eminescu's creativity and knowledge thirst, the visits to the Island of Museums from Berlin (where the famous Egyptian Museum used to display a series of original artefacts) and the attendance to Richard Lepsius's lectures function as a wake-up appeal to uncover the civilisation turns and the origins of humankind. A statistic of Egyptian signs (whether proper or common names) will show that Eminescu's own representation of ancient "Egipet" does not ground on cultural outspoken indexes. On the contrary, the "pyramid", the "pharaoh", the "sphinx", the "hieroglyph", and the like are permanently replaced by local lexemes that are expected to be closer to the Romanian readers. Closer to his project to write a Dacian mythology - coextensively, an epic of national accomplishment - the poet prefers to frame the Egyptian picture by linking it with archetypal images such as the river (the Nile) or the desert (Sahara), both of them viewed as fluid realities.