Athanasius Kircher was born on 2 May 1602 (some sources give 1601) near Fulda, in the Holy Roman Empire, and entered the Jesuit order as a young man, receiving the broad classical, philosophical and scientific training the Society of Jesus gave its scholars. He fled the turmoil of the Thirty Years' War across several relocations before settling permanently in Rome in 1634, where he taught mathematics and Oriental languages at the Collegio Romano for more than forty years, becoming one of the most famous scholars in Europe and earning the later epithet "Master of a Hundred Arts" for the sheer breadth of subjects he wrote on.
At the Collegio Romano he assembled the Museum Kircherianum, a celebrated cabinet of curiosities combining antiquities, natural specimens and mechanical devices that became a required stop for educated visitors to Rome. He corresponded constantly with an international network of scholars, missionaries and patrons, using Jesuit missionary contacts as far afield as China to gather material for his books. He died in Rome on 28 November 1680, having published around forty major works across an unusually wide range of fields.
Kircher's output ranged far beyond Egyptology: he published early serious studies of geology and volcanism after descending into the crater of Vesuvius, an influential treatise on music theory, an ambitious if speculative universal polygraphy for translating between languages, and some of the first published European descriptions of Chinese language and culture drawn from Jesuit missionary reports. That range, more than any single correct conclusion, is why historians of science still treat him as a central, if frequently mistaken, figure of seventeenth century learning.