Talk:Ibn Wahshiyya

Kircher
Can anyone tell me where, in which of his works, Kircher mentions having read Ibn Wahshiyya? --Iustinus (talk) 19:01, 3 March 2009 (UTC)
 * He may have not copied him, but Ibn Wahshiyya was the first to try to translate them. See BBC documentary on youtube, at 42:44. — Preceding unsigned comment added by BelalSaid (talk • contribs) 02:42, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Hammer-purgstall
English translation (full view) we need better sources for this page what we have now is mostly wrong J8079s (talk) 21:07, 12 June 2011 (UTC)


 * What exactly is wrong? Which sources taught you it was wrong? --Tom Hulse (talk) 04:50, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Deliberate misinformation
On November 11, 2015 an anonymous user deliberately added misinformation regarding Ibn Wahshiyya's name to make it appear that he was of Chaldean origin: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ibn_Wahshiyya&diff=prev&oldid=690167424. I will correct this.Akhooha (talk) 17:29, 8 June 2016 (UTC)

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Obvious fallacies
A very stupid look. Ibn Wahshiya was an Arab who wrote in Arabic and worked very hard to translate his works. The glorification of ancient civilizations did not mean that he was against Arabs or Islam, because many Western orientalists were trying to show a false nationalism in the 10th century AD directed against Arabs and Muslims. "The book extols Babylonian civilization against that of the conquering Arabs."There is no source this confirms what you wrote, Arab conquest occurred in the 7th century AD and was Persian Iraq and not Babylonian. Rtoo899 (talk) 21:51, 22 January 2021 (UTC)
 * The title of this section is weird, as you did not point out any fallacies but an inconsistency.
 * Your reasoning why the sentence must be false, on the other hand, contains a fallacy: an Arab can still compare older civilizations favorably to his own, which is what "extol against" means. And basing article text on one's own reasoning is not allowed anyway (see WP:OR) - but it can still help find mistakes.
 * The very first version of the article already contains the sentence "The book extols Babylonian-Aramean-Syrian civilization against that of the conquering Arabs", without giving a source for that sentence. Therefore, the sentence is unsourced and can be removed, which I just did. Thank you for pointing it out. --Hob Gadling (talk) 07:47, 23 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I reinstated this, adding clarifications and references. Apaugasma (talk&#124;contribs) 12:39, 23 January 2021 (UTC)

Hieroglyphs, decipherment of (copied from user talk page)
Hi Apaugasma! First off, thanks for the warm welcome and for the balanced edits :-). One request, though: I think "[...] was able to identify the phonetic value of a few Egyptian hieroglyphs" gives the wrong impression. This suggests that Ibn Washiyya was following the correct method like an early Young / Champollion, as per Dr. El Daly's claims. I would be very excited if that were true, but looking e.g. at the picture shown with the article (from Dr. El Daly's presentation), it clearly is not:

Going through the list from the upper right, 𓊰 is not a uniconsonantal sign at all, certainly not "aleph", 𓏌𓏤 is /nw/ + determinative stroke, not "y", 𓏏 𓏥 is /t/ + plural strokes and not "q", 𓉻 is ayn+aleph (the word "great"), not "g", the next character 𓏌 is /nw/ again, now interpreted as "b", 𓊹𓊹 "two gods" (nTr.wy?) is certainly not "k" and so forth ... I could go on for the rest of the chart: it is not just that the phonetic values are misidentified but that word signs are interpreted as phonetics and the author clearly did not even understand which signs belong together. This impression is confirmed by a quick glance through the translation of the work linked to in the article: whole groups of glyphs are given allegorical translations "if a man was poisoned they would write it with XYZ glyphs" with no basis in the actual text displayed. So, if any glyphs were identified correctly I would ascribe that to mere chance (sadly, again - if the work had been done 1,000 years ago, I would be extremely excited).

I think the reason why this never gets called out is because the number of reporters that can read Hieroglyphs and Arabic is vanishingly small if not zero. I would give Ibn Washiyya credit for trying and for his assumption that signs could be read phonetically (rather than just allegorically / as ideographs) - in itself an important step. But "correctly identified some signs" gives the wrong impression IMHO, especially since this has been hyped so much in the media and there has been no critical reporting whatsoever (outside of specialist circles). Can we find a better way to phrase this? I struggled, that's why I took the identification part out completely in the lead section. — Preceding unsigned comment added by MikuChan39 (talk • contribs) 12:35, 30 May 2021 (UTC)


 * Hi Mikuchan39! Thank you for your useful clarifications. I too struggled to represent the sources in a balanced way (consider how the article was before I first edited it a few months ago). The problem is that, on the one hand, we have to report what secondary sources say (even if we know they're highly exaggerated or just plainly wrong), and on the other, criticism of El-Daly 2005 by other scholars (e.g., the review by Cotta 2008) has been very cautious (probably in large part because, as you say, only very few scholars know both Egyptian hieroglyphs and Arabic). That's why your addition of Stephan 2017 is very helpful. However, she too isn't very straightforward. She seems to suggest that pseudo-Ibn Wahshiyya (Stephan incorrectly refers to the anonymous late 10th-century author as "Ibn Wahshiyya") hit upon a few correct decipherments merely by chance (p. 265 [El-Daly] glosses over the fact that the medieval scholar deciphered only a few signs correctly, asserting that he must have studied “genuine Egyptian sources,” even though his evidence of accurate translation includes examples such as Ibn Waḥshiyya interpreting one hieroglyph correctly on a page containing over 50 symbols), but she doesn't expressly say so. But if you with your background knowledge (I don't read hieroglyphs) can confirm that most likely chance was involved, that may be a reason to further tone down the article. What about putting it like this: [...] had a keen interest in ancient scripts, and showed some understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphs as combining both alphabetic and logographic elements? ☿ Apaugasma  ( talk   ☉ ) 18:23, 30 May 2021 (UTC)


 * . "[...] and showed some understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphs as combining both alphabetic and logographic elements" . If only I could say that with a clear conscience :-). I have to go off the English translation linked in the article, as my Arabic is good enough for the alphabet chart but not the full text original. So, here we go:


 * First note that the original author thought he saw several "alphabets" in the hieroglyphs, devised by different kings. The first few of these are ideographic in his view: https://archive.org/details/ancientalphabets00ibnw/page/n178/mode/2up. Ironically, many of the glyphs shown in this section are in fact used primarily phonetically, e.g. the first one (supposedly "life") is the word Hr (face), but also the common preposition Hr (upon), the one identified as "poverty" is the letter /j/, the one identified as "man" is the letter /H/, etc . - there are several other uniconsonantal signs in the chart, but he thinks they are all ideograms.


 * The alphabet chart shown in the article (and El Daly's lecture online) comes here: https://archive.org/details/ancientalphabets00ibnw/page/n154/mode/2up as the "shimshim alphabet". All of these "fall from the sky" with no word as to where any insights were derived from, certainly no sign of careful comparison with e.g. Coptic sources (which could have worked, e.g. the Coptic word for sky "pe" is also spelled with an initial /p/ in hieroglyphs, the Coptic word for life "onh" has an /n/ and a /x/ in the hieroglyphic spelling - it could have been done, but no sign that this WAS done here).


 * And then he goes full ideograph only a few pages later - still part of explaining the "alphabet" (https://archive.org/details/ancientalphabets00ibnw/page/n150/mode/2up); e.g. he gives the hieroglyphs for Hm-nTr J-mn-n "servant of God, Amun" with an erroneous /t/ thrown in the middle ...and claims that this was what you added to indicate that somebody had died by poisoning. No sign of any correct understanding of the working principles of hieroglyphs here. I don't know why Dr. El Daly is saying what he is saying ... but it does not square with anything I see right in front of my eyes.


 * Which leaves the problem of how to represent it, to your point. I can live with your proposal because it does not do much harm - I don't think Ibn Wahshiyya really proposed a combination of phonetic signs and ideograms because he did not even identify them as members of the same writing system (!), but it does less harm than the "hieroglyphs were correctly deciphered 800 years before Champollion" or, more maliciously: "Ibn Wahshiyya did the heavy lifting for Champollion and was not even credited by Western racists" (and yes, I have seen this proposed more than once in certain circles). A fair assessment would be: "Ibn Wahshiyyah (or the author whose work was ascribed to him) tried to decipher the hieroglyphs." That's really all that can be said without going off on tangents or into original research.


 * MikuChan39 (talk) 21:52, 30 May 2021 (UTC)


 * I based my proposal on what you said about giving pseudo-Ibn Wahshiyya credit for his assumption that signs could be read phonetically (rather than just allegorically / as ideographs) - in itself an important step (I think that this was also noted by El-Daly 2005?). Stephan 2017, p. 265 also comments that While Ibn Waḥshiyya’s accuracy may be doubtful, he did understand something of the style and use of hieroglyphs in Ancient Egyptian writing because he comments that they were not arranged like “our” letters but rather used figures of animals, trees, and other pictorial representations, giving as an example the image he believed to be for water. Ibn Waḥshiyya also recognized that other hieroglyphs were not pictures but rather geometric. He explained the diversity in the hieroglyphs by noting that there were different alphabets developed by different “kings” so that the “sons of wisdom” would be the only ones that could read them.


 * Perhaps then "[...] and showed some understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphs as being sometimes alphabetic and sometimes logographic in character"?


 * Would this be factually wrong? We're looking for a bare minimum here of what the author more or less understood, ignoring the many many things he absolutely did not understand. Remember that the common practice among historians of science is to evaluate historical authors according to the scientific standards of their time, not according to modern scientific standards. It's also far from evident to actually understand historical scientific standards, and uninitiated modern readers often make nonsense of what was historically a very reasonable assertion. I'm asking you because while I am familiar with the historical context, I don't read hieroglyphs, am fairly ignorant about general linguistics, and for these reasons can't get a good grip on what would be a minimal but correct statement. Please also feel free to formulate your own proposal. ☿ Apaugasma  ( talk   ☉ ) 22:50, 30 May 2021 (UTC)


 * I would propose: [...] One of these, the Kitāb Shawq al-mustahām fī maʿrifat rumūz al-aqlām (“The Book of the Desire of the Maddened Lover for the Knowledge of Secret Scripts”, c. 985),[5] is notable as an early proposal that some Egyptian hieroglyphs could be read phonetically, rather than only logographically.


 * I shy away from the word "understand" because this seems to have been more of a lucky guess than based on correct understanding (something that was not as clear to me before digging into the material more this afternoon for my earlier post). It's a bit as if an earlier astronomer/alchemist had hypothesized that Jupiter was made out of the "essence of water". A factually correct statement (if we take this to be hydrogen) and a curious coincidence, but I wouldn't call it an understanding of planetary composition. BTW, I am not trying to be too hard on pseudo-Ibn Wahshiyya (regarding standards). The alchemistic interpretation of the hieroglyphs is absolutely par for the course - but that's precisely why it is different from the systematic modern approach taken by Young, Champollion and followers (setting up hypotheses and testing them). Equating them does a real disservice to the history of science, in my mind. As a side note, some older authors held themselves to perfectly modern standards. E.g. Ohthere reports in his (9th century) travels: Fela spella him sǣdon þā Beormas ǣgþer ge of hiera āgnum lande ge of þǣm landum þe ymb hīe ūtan wǣron; ac hē nyste hwæt þæs sōþes wæs, for þǣm hē hit self ne geseah. (The Permians told him many stories both of their own land and of the lands which were outside around them; but he did not know what the truth was, because he did not see it himself.) That's the spirit :-D


 * Hope the proposal above helps, I feel we have spent already far more time on the topic than it really deserves. Which does not mean I didn't enjoy the exchange :-)
 * MikuChan39 (talk) 00:32, 31 May 2021 (UTC)




 * What I meant with standards is not so much methodology (which was of course also vastly different), but rather how medieval texts relate to the framework of knowledge that existed at the time. It's much harder than most people think to learn what the medievals knew, and especially to forget what we know today. It's also much easier than most people think to treat medieval concepts and ideas as foolishness while actually not at all understanding them and remaining completely ignorant about their meaning (the way alchemy is treated in modern literature certainly is a case in point; as Hanegraaff has pointedly observed in his Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture, we're basically ignorant about it). But that's more of a general point; in this specific case, it's good to be extra critical because we know for a fact that it has been the subject of chauvinistic spin by El-Daly and others (including User:Jagged 85, the banned editor who added this to the article in the first place). I also enjoyed the exchange, and hope to meet you again elsewhere on WP! ☿  Apaugasma  ( talk   ☉ ) 01:55, 31 May 2021 (UTC)