Egyptology as a modern discipline was born with Jean-François Champollion’s decipherment of the Rosetta Stone and the Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic script in 1822. However, Egypt and its ancient culture had evoked fascination in Europe since Classical Greece, and peaked during the Renaissance. However, we rarely hear about the attitude of Egypt’s Medieval Muslim rulers and the Arab scholars who lived there. Although little has been written on this, there was a level of fascination with ancient Egypt that resulted in the first documented attempt to decipher the script.
Ibn Wahshiyya: Background
Ibn Wahshiyya was born in Kufa in modern Iraq and was known as a scholar, polymath, and alchemist. In the latter case, literally, it meant someone who was versed in the arts of (al-)Kame, the indigenous name for Egypt meaning “the black land” (as opposed to the red land, the desert). During his life, he dedicated his work to toxicology, agriculture, and magic, which eventually led to his interest in Egyptian Hieroglyphs, which were widely viewed as a secret, mystical code due to the fact that no one could read them.
The Hieroglyphic Puzzle
Greek writers had believed hieroglyphs to be purely symbolic, while later Gnostic sects and hermetic societies viewed them as containing the keys to hidden (occulted) knowledge that could only be revealed to the properly initiated. Ibn Wahshiyya, despite his interest in magic took a different approach. He interpreted these mysterious signs as phonetic inscriptions that wrote an ancient language. After conversations with Coptic priests he settled on the idea that the language behind the signs was a possible predecessor of the Coptic language, which in the 10th century, was the language of the majority of Egypt’s inhabitants.
Phonetic or Symbolic?
Ibn Wahshiyya then decided that each sign must correspond to a sound, and attempted to match the signs of the Egyptian language with those of his native Arabic where possible. Despite his efforts, he was working with very little material and did not have access to bilingual texts such as the Rosetta Stone like the later European Egyptologists. However, he made two oft-overlooked contributions to Egyptology that laid the basis for the script’s decipherment in 1822. First, he was correct in his assumption that the signs had a phonetic component and were not purely symbolic, even if his phonetic values were incorrect. Champollion and his contemporaries likely picked up on his ideas through an 1806 English translation of his work. Second, his relation of Egyptian to Coptic was picked up by a 17th century monk and eccentric named Athanasius Kircher, who wrote a grammar of the Coptic language that served as a guide for Champollion’s interpretation of Egyptian grammar as he deciphered the script.
For more on this topic, I recommend Okasha el-Daly’s book The Lost Millennium.