Arab Scholar'Cracked Rosetta Code'800 Yrs Before West

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Arab Scholar 'Cracked Rosetta

Code' 800 Years Before West

Robin McKie

Science Editor

The Observer - UK

10-3-4

 

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-Francois 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 PËre 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.'

 

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