Did A 9th Century Arab First Decode Egyptian Hieroglyphics?

[JamesWhitehead]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/science/story/0,12996,1318460,00.html

Arab scholar 'cracked Rosetta code' 800 years before the West

Robin McKie, science editor
Sunday October 3, 2004
The Observer

It is famed as a critical moment in code-breaking history. Using a piece of basalt carved with runes and words, scholars broke the secret of hieroglyphs, the written 'language' of the ancient Egyptians.

A baffling, opaque language had been made comprehensible, and the secrets of one of the world's greatest civilisations revealed - thanks to the Rosetta Stone and the analytic prowess of 18th and 19th century European scholars.

But now the supremacy of Western thinking has been challenged by a London researcher who claims that hieroglyphs had been decoded hundreds of years earlier - by an Arabic alchemist, Abu Bakr Ahmad Ibn Wahshiyah.

'It has taken years of painstaking research to prove this,' said Dr Okasha El Daly, at UCL's Institute of Archaeology. 'I was convinced that Western scholars were not the first, and I have found evidence that shows Arabian scholars broke the code a thousand years ago.'

The Rosetta Stone was found embedded in a fort wall by French engineers during Napoleon's campaign in Egypt. The stone - now displayed in the British Museum - contains a text in Greek, Coptic and hieroglyph, but still required another 23 years' work to be decoded, a task achieved by Jean-François Champollion, a student of ancient languages.

Champollion's breakthrough came in 1822 when he realised hieroglyphs should be read, not as symbols of ideas or objects, but as a phonetic script. The sound associated with each symbol was crucial to deciphering it. It was a 'eureka' moment. 'Je tiens mons affaire (I've done it),' Champollion shouted, before falling into a dead faint for five days. He awoke to continue his work, but died 10 years later of exhaustion and is buried in Paris's Père Lachaise cemetery. Pieces of papyrus are still placed on his grave in recognition of his great work.

But now it is claimed that Champollion had been beaten by Arabian scholars who, eight centuries earlier, had twigged that sounds were crucial to their decoding. 'For two and half centuries, the study of ancient Egypt has been dominated by a Euro-centric view that virtually ignored Arabic scholarship,' said El Daly. 'I felt that was quite unjustified.'

An expert in both ancient Egypt and ancient Arabic scripts, El Daly spent seven years chasing down Arabic manuscripts in private collections around the world in a bid to find evidence that Arab scholars had unlocked the secrets of the hieroglyph. He eventually found it in the work of the ninth-century alchemist, Ibn Wahshiyah. 'I compared his studies with those of modern scholars and realised that he understood completely what hieroglyphs were saying.'

El Daly stressed that Muslim scholars had not simply been handed the secrets of hieroglyphs after Egypt was taken over by Islam.

'The secret of the hieroglyph was lost and then rediscovered by Arab scholars, who used diligent work to break their code, eight centuries before Champollion,' he said. 'These were people who possessed great astronomical and mathematical knowledge. Decoding hieroglyphs was just the kind of thing they would have been good at.'

 

[Anonymous]

Thanks. The Guardian's story overstates El Daly's position, however.

Reuters' report is less sensational.

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_24-2-2004_pg9_14

Egyptian scholar finds Arab insights into hieroglyphs


An Egyptian scholar based in London has been delighting Arab audiences with his inquiries into the recondite world of medieval Muslims who wrote about ancient Egypt and had some insights into hieroglyphic writing.

Among Western scholars, who have led the field in Egyptology since Napoleon’s campaign of 1798 and Jean-Francois Champollion’s groundbreaking work on hieroglyphics in the 1820s, the conventional wisdom has been that Arabs and Muslims dismissed ancient Egypt as an irrelevant pagan civilisation.

But Okasha El Daly, who lectures at University College London and holds an outreach post at the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, says that a thousand years earlier, when Arab civilisation was close to its height, Muslim scholars not only took an interest in ancient Egypt but could also correctly interpret at least a few characters in the hieroglyphic script. From libraries in Paris and Istanbul, he has dug up manuscripts, which contain tables showing the phonetic value of hieroglyphs. Three Arab scholars between them correctly identified about 10 of the several dozen hieroglyphs, which they thought made up a phonetic alphabet, he told Reuters.

But more importantly, at a time when medieval Europeans thought that hieroglyphs were just magical symbols, the Arab scholars grasped two of the basic principles - that some signs represented sounds while others were determinatives, signs that conveyed the concept of the word pictorially.

That breakthrough was the work of Ahmad bin Abu Bakr ibn Wahshiyah, a ninth and 10th century polymath who lived in Iraq and wrote about everything from chemistry to the environment to agriculture and pre-Islamic cultures.

Ibn Wahshiyah’s work on ancient writing systems, entitled the Devotee’s Yearning to Understand the Symbols of Pens, was translated into English and published in London in 1806, before Champollion began his work on the Rosetta Stone, the parallel text which enabled him to break the hieroglyphic code.

“The important thing is they realised that these hieroglyphs were not pictures, which was the prevailing view among classical writers,” El Daly said in an interview.

“Ibn Wahshiya was the first scholar ever to talk about determinatives, describing them in a paragraph which any modern scholar would be proud of,” he added.

Another of the scholars was the Muslim mystic Dhu al-Nun al-Misri, who grew up in the Upper Egyptian town of Akhmim in the early ninth century when most of the local inhabitants still spoke Coptic, the direct descendant of ancient Egyptian.

Champollion would not have been able to decipher hieroglyphics without his own knowledge of Coptic, which died out in daily life in Egypt in medieval times but survives in some of the liturgy of the Egyptian Church.

“The manuscript I have shows him (al-Misri) getting the Coptic all correct. The demotic is some of it correct and the hieroglyphic is some of it correct too,” El Daly said. Demotic was a late shorthand form of hieroglyphs, used by scribes who did not have time to write letters in full.

While hieroglyphics are thought to have died out after the Roman invasion of 30 BC, demotic lingered on longer. On the island of Philae in the far south of Egypt, a piece of demotic graffiti has been dated to about AD 450. El Daly says the Muslim scholars give no indication of where they obtained their knowledge but he does not rule out the possibility that some residual knowledge of the old writing systems survived in remote parts of Upper Egypt.

“What is wrong in Egyptology is that we assume that knowledge of the ancient Egyptian language completely died with the arrival of Islam,” he added. “I give two specific examples to show that the knowledge... was still alive when Muslims came to Egypt. The Muslims assumed that Egypt was a land of science and magic and wisdom and as such they wanted to learn hieroglyphics to have access to such vast knowledge,” he added.

El Daly agreed with the widespread view that in early modern times most Arabs and Muslims took little interest in ancient cultures but noted that scholars continued to copy the early Muslim manuscripts on ancient Egypt well into the 18th century. -Reuters

 

[ramonmercado]

Hieroglyphics Cracked 1,000 Years Earlier Than Thought

Hieroglyphics Cracked 1,000 Years Earlier Than Thought

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Western scholars were not the first to decipher the ancient language of the pharaohs, according to a new book that will be published later this year by a UCL researcher.


Dr Okasha El Daly of UCL’s Institute of Archaeology will reveal that Arabic scholars not only took a keen interest in ancient Egypt but also correctly interpreted hieroglyphics in the ninth century AD – almost 1,000 years earlier than previously thought.

It has long been thought that Jean-Francois Champollion was the first person to crack hieroglyphics in 1822 using newly discovered Egyptian antiquities such as the Rosetta stone. But fresh analysis of manuscripts tucked away in long forgotten collections scattered across the globe prove that Arabic scholars got there first.

Dr Okasha El Daly, of UCL’s Institute of Archaeology, explains:

“For two and a half centuries the study of Egyptology has been dominated by a Euro-centric view, which has virtually ignored over a thousand years of Arabic scholarship and enquiry encouraged by Islam.

“Prior to Napoleonic times little was known in the West about the ancient civilisation of Egypt except what had been recorded in the Bible. It was assumed that the world of the pharaohs had long since been forgotten by Egyptians, who were thought to have been incorporated into the expanding Islamic world by the seventh century.

“But this overhasty conclusion ignores the vast contribution of medieval Arabic scholars and others between the seventh and 16th centuries. In reality a huge corpus of medieval writing by both scholars and ordinary people exists that dates from long before the earliest European Renaissance. Analysis reveals that not only did Moslems have a deep interest in the study of Ancient Egypt, they could also correctly decipher hieroglyphic script.”

Following the Roman invasion of Egypt in 30 BC the use of hieroglyphics began to die out with the last known writing in the fifth century AD.

While Western medieval commentators believed that hieroglyphics were symbols each representing a single concept Dr El Daly has shown that Arab scholars grasped the fundamental principle that hieroglyphics could represent sounds as well as ideas.

Using his unique expertise in both Egyptology and medieval Arabic writers, Dr El Daly began a seven year investigation of Arabic writing on ancient Egypt.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/10/041007085716.htm