Ibnu Wahsyiyyah

Terjemahan Ibnu Wahshiyya tahun 985 dari alfabet hieroglif Mesir Kuno

Ibnu Wahshiyyah Nabatea (bahasa Arab: ابن وحشية النبطي), Juga dikenal sebagai 'Abū Bakar'Aḥmad bin Ali (bahasa Arab: أبو بكر أحمد بن علي) (abad ke-9/10) adalah seorang alkemis, petani, ahli toksikologi pertanian Arab, Egyptologist,dan sejarawan yang lahir di Qusayn dekat Kufa di Irak. Ia adalah sejarawan pertama yang dapat menguraikan sebagian apa yang ditulis dalam hieroglif Mesir kuno, dengan menghubungkannya dengan bahasa Koptik kontemporer.

Ibn Wahshiyya was one of the first historians to be able to at least partly decipher what was written in the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs,^[4] by relating them to the contemporary Coptic language used by Coptic priests in his time. An Arabic manuscript of Ibn Wahshiyya's book Kitab Shawq al-Mustaham, a work that discusses a number of ancient alphabets, in which he deciphered a number of Egyptian hieroglyphs, was later read by Athanasius Kircher in the 17th century, and then translated and published in English by Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall in 1806 as Ancient Alphabets and Hieroglyphic Characters Explained; with an Account of the Egyptian Priests, their Classes, Initiation, and Sacrifices in the Arabic Language by Ahmad Bin Abubekr Bin Wahishih, 16 years before Jean-François Champollion's complete decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs.^[3][9] This book was known to Silvestre de Sacy, a colleague of Champollion. Dr Okasha El Daly, at University College London's Institute of Archaeology, claims that some hieroglyphs had been decoded by Ibn Wahshiyya, eight centuries before Champollion deciphered the Rosetta stone.^[10] A. K. Eyma critiques this idea and think that "there was no such thing as an Arabic decipherment of hieroglyphs". is also of the opinion that books attributed to Ibn Wahshiyya are actually works of an unreliable pupil attributed to him, and of no scientific value, including the claim that he deciphered some hieroglyphs.

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