Since he was "an alchemist, not a linguist", the knowledge about the
ancient Egyptian system of writing was not generally taken up; it was
believed even in the Arab world that these writings were a lost mystery.

But there's more than just that going on here.

Horapollo, a work which led people seeking to decipher ancient Egyptian
astray, still had some valid decipherments: it said, for example, that a
picture of a vulture stood for the word "mother" in ancient Egyptian,
but it did so for the wrong reason.

The Coptic alphabet, while largely based on the Greek alphabet, includes
some signs derived from demotic.

The work by ibn Wahshiyah went far beyond these tiny scraps, but they
show that knowledge of the Egyptian script had not *entirely*
disappeared.

And, _since_ he was an alchemist, not a linguist, and I strongly suspect
he had no Rosetta Stone to work from... just how _did_ he come by his
knowledge of ancient Egyptian?

In the year 800 A.D., I suspect the answer is obvious. He *asked
someone*. There were still people around back then who could read
hieroglyphics, apparently.

His work was *translated into English* in 1806. Those who had tried to
decipher hieroglyphics read Horapollo and studied Coptic, and looked
into every available source of information... thus, I would be very
surprised if John Young and Champollion did not use ibn Wahshiyah's
work, "The Devotee's Yearning to Understand the Symbols of Pens" or
"Kitab Shawq al-Mustaham" as one of their primary sources.

Of course, if, as claimed, it explained the phonetic nature of the
Egyptian script, and explained the function of determinatives, even if
ibn Wahshiyah in no way carried out a *decipherment* of ancient
Egyptian, because it hadn't yet _needed_ to be deciphered, there might
be a question of why he did not receive proper credit from them.
However, his book _only_ described the writing system, (so it did _not_
include a dictionary of the Ancient Egyptian language) and the extant
Coptic language was largely overlaid by Greek loan-words.

So there would still have been a fair amount of reconstruction of the
Egyptian language to perform in any event.

John Savardhttp://www.quadibloc.com/index.html

On May 26, 7:15 am, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma... at (no spam) verizon.net> wrote:

On May 26, 9:09 am, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma... at (no spam) verizon.net> wrote:
? I searched wahshiyah (whole book) and got a page and a half of
references to the 1806 edition but not the 1806 edition.

Never mind: the ways of google book search are unfathomable. I
searched the translator's name and got two copies, one from the
Ashmolean and one from Monier Williams's library.

I had the same problem in my searching as well. It could have been
because of spelling differences, so my second search with the
translator's name and "hieroglyphics" as a term worked.

Your comment on the case of the Sabaean inscriptions sounds about
right to me as well, but I haven't yet reviewed the work closely.
Interestingly enough, the Arabic work is mentioned in David Kahn's
_The Codebreakers_, but the author's name and the title are slightly
different; it is the one from which an illustration of a "Davidian"
alphabet is taken.