The Orus Apollo is a manuscript work by Nostradamus

Nostradamus

Michel de Nostredame , usually Latinised to Nostradamus, was a French apothecary and reputed seer who published collections of prophecies that have since become famous worldwide. He is best known for his book Les Propheties , the first edition of which appeared in 1555...

 written at some point before 1555, and formerly owned by Colbert

Colbert

Colbert is a common surname and rare given name of Old French and Old German origins; it was introduced to Britain by the Normans.Colbert most commonly refers to:*Stephen Colbert , American comedian and television show host...

, Louis XIV's finance minister. It contains two books of 182 verse epigram

Epigram

An epigram is a brief, interesting, usually memorable and sometimes surprising statement. Derived from the epigramma "inscription" from ἐπιγράφειν epigraphein "to write on inscribe", this literary device has been employed for over two millennia....

s. Its full title is ORUS APOLLO FILS DE OSIRIS ROY DE AEGYPTE NILIACQUE. DES NOTES HIEROGLYPHIQUES.

The work is a purported translation of an ancient Greek work on Egyptian hieroglyphs that had been commented on by Ficino, Erasmus and Rabelais and was known to the artists Dürer, Mantegna

Andrea Mantegna

Andrea Mantegna was an Italian painter, a student of Roman archeology, and son in law of Jacopo Bellini. Like other artists of the time, Mantegna experimented with perspective, e.g., by lowering the horizon in order to create a sense of greater monumentality...

 and Raphael

Raphael

Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino , better known simply as Raphael, was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. His work is admired for its clarity of form and ease of composition and for its visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur...

. Although its title implies a connection to Egyptian gods, the French work is actually Nostradamus' extremely free translation of Horapollon of Manuthis' Hieroglyphica

Horapollo

Horapollo is supposed author of a treatise on Egyptian hieroglyphs, extant in a Greek translation by one Philippus, titled Hieroglyphica, dating to about the 5th century.-Horapollo:...

, based on Jean Mercier's Latin-Greek version of 1551. He also added some ten pieces of his own. The manuscript, apparently in Nostradamus's own hand, still exists in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, as French manuscript No. 2594. The paper has been analyzed, and found to date from 1535–1539 and to stem from somewhere in the general area of the Comtat Venaissin

Comtat Venaissin

The Comtat Venaissin, often called the Comtat for short , is the former name of the region around the city of Avignon in what is now the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region of France. It comprised roughly the area between the Rhône, the Durance and Mont Ventoux, with a small exclave located to the...

 and Provence

Provence

Provence ; Provençal: Provença in classical norm or Prouvènço in Mistralian norm) is a region of south eastern France on the Mediterranean adjacent to Italy. It is part of the administrative région of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur...

.

It was dedicated to the Princess, later (from 1555) Queen of Navarre, and is of particular interest to students of Nostradamus's Propheties for its near-total lack of either accents or punctuation (which suggests that their original manuscripts, too, may have lacked both).

It is now housed in the Lyon

Lyon

Lyon , is a city in east-central France in the Rhône-Alpes region, situated between Paris and Marseille. Lyon is located at from Paris, from Marseille, from Geneva, from Turin, and from Barcelona. The residents of the city are called Lyonnais....

municipal library.

Sources

• Allemand, J., Nostradamus et les hiéroglyphes (Maison de Nostradamus, Salon, 1996)
• Lemesurier, P., The Unknown Nostradamus (O Books, 2003)
• Rollet, P. (ed), Interprétation des hiéroglyphes de Horapollo (Marcel Petit, 1993).

External links

• Full text of Prologue in French and English.