The stated objectives of the book, which straddles the disciplines of Egyptology and medieval Arabic studies, are threefold (p. vii):
(1) “to demonstrate that medieval Arabs were interested in, had
knowledge of and attempted to interpret the culture of Ancient
Egypt” [thus countering the prevailing notion that it was Islam
that cut off the Egyptians from their pharaonic heritage],
(2) “to show the relevance of these materials to the study of Ancient
Egypt by bridging the gap between the works of the Classical writers
and those of later Europeans [of the Renaissance]” [this is the
“missing millennium”, covering the period from the Moslem annexation of Egypt in the
7th century CE until the Ottoman conquest in the 16th century],
(3) “to encourage further study of the medieval Arabic material
available, some of which could help archaeologists with
descriptions and with the excavation and interpretation of
sites, and perhaps even to reconstruct monuments which have
long since disappeared.”
The following is a brief outline of the book's chapters, showing the broad and interesting variety of topics covered, most of them being enriched, in Chapters 3-9, with Arabic source material.
---
Ch. 1 Introduction
Shows how Western scholars past and present have mostly
systematically neglected or undervalued the medieval native
Egyptian interest in pharaonic Egypt. Egyptian Egyptologists
have paid little attention to their medieval heritage, partly because
Western scholars and institutes have dominated Egyptian Egyptology since Napoleonic times. The chapter ends with an
overview of earlier scholarly works that, in contrast to this
general trend, have dealt (be it in an unsystematical way) with
medieval Arabic sources relevant to Egyptology.
Ch. 2 The Making of an Interpretatio Arabica of Ancient Egypt
The Arabic interest in ancient Egypt was not only fed by the mention
of Pharaoh in the Qur'an, but also by a general interest in the universal
history of mankind for its own sake. Sources available to them were the observations by early
Arabic travellers, the Copts, and also Classical and Jewish sources. A survey of
pre-Islamic contacts between Arabia and Egypt is given, as well as the history of the
Moslem annexation of Egypt.
Ch. 3 Treasure Hunting
Stories about the wealth of the Pharaohs led to the establishment of a medieval Arabic industry of
treasure hunting -- sometimes state controlled. Manuals for treasure hunting appeared,
of which examples are given. Some monuments were destroyed by this industry, and others by their
use as stone quarries, to the great sorrow and disappointment of medieval Arabic scholars.
Ch. 4 Medieval Arab Archaeological Methods and Descriptions
Also Arabic scholars and rulers executed excavations, sometimes using surprisingly modern methodology. Travellers gave detailed descriptions of monuments
visited, with special attention for the pyramids, the Sphinx and ancient Egyptian temples.
Ch. 5 Medieval Arab Attempts to Decipher Ancient Egyptian Scripts
Medieval Arabs, notably those from alchemistic and Moslem Sufi circles,
showed a great interest in ancient Egyptian scripts. Decipherments
were attempted, often invoking the help of local Copts.
Ch. 6 Medieval Arabic Concepts of Ancient Egyptian Religion
Arabic scholars also showed a vivid interest in those contemporary Egyptian religious and magical
practices that were rooted in older customs. The Sabaeans
of Haran made pilgrimages to ancient Egyptian sites, notably to the Sphinx (the
story of its disfigurement is recounted in this chapter).
Ch. 7 Egyptian Mummia, Mummification and Burial Practices in Medieval Arabic Sources
Arabic writers differentiated between several forms of mummia, namely natural
products versus the product harvested from Egyptian bodies. The latter became the subject
of an extensive international trade. Arabic descriptions of uncovered mummies are provided.
Ch. 8 Egyptian Science in Medieval Arabic Sources
Medieval Arabic scholars saw Egypt as the source of all sciences, notably of the alchemistic
crafts, a view that was stimulated by the impressive monuments and the
fame of the earlier Alexandrian scholars on the one side, and the tales of Hermes Trismegistus
on the other.
Ch. 9 Egyptian Kingship and State Administration
The image of the Pharaoh in the Qur'an is discussed, as well as medieval Arabic theories on
pharaonic state administration. The Arabic writers
showed a special interest in Queen Cleopatra.
Ch. 10 Conclusions
Summarizes the findings of the previous chapters and suggests
directions for further research.
There are fifteen pages of good quality Figures and Plates, but unfortunately they are numbered in a somewhat impractical manner.
Appendix 1: Biographies of Arab Writers
Appendix 2: Books on Ancient Egypt Used by Al-Idrisi
Appendix 3: Primary Arabic Sources
The appendices provide an overview of the lives and backgrounds
of medieval Arabic scholars (20 pages) and of editions of their
works (10 pages), forming a very worthwhile reference tool for
those unfamiliar with this aspect.
---
The main strength of the book lies in its making available a wealth of medieval Arabic extracts from manuscripts, many of which have never been published before. Hopefully this book will act as an incentive for the publication of more medieval Arabic source material! The inclusion of this material, otherwise difficult or impossible to access, makes reading this book an experience that many readers will definitely enjoy, even if they may not always agree with the interpretations and suggestions offered by the author. And I disagree (often rather strongly) with many of the author's ideas -- notably with the linguistic and etymological theories proffered throughout the book, and also with some of the historical interpretations (for example those on p. 14-17 and p. 168). However, these are mainly side issues or the result of unfortunate phraseology.
I will shortly be focussing on two of the topics in the book which
have received a lot of press coverage -- Cleopatra as scholar and Arab
decipherment of hieroglyphs -- both of which have been represented by the media
in the usual sensational way, but before I do so I would like to comment on
Chapter 1. The suggestion that Egyptian Egyptology was cut off from its medieval
predecessors because it imported European scholarship (scientific mindset, use
of sources) could well be valid. However, I am uncomfortable with the fact that
the term 'Eurocentrism' is invoked a lot in this chapter, a loaded
term that nowadays has all kind of negative associations attached
(creating an divisive atmosphere with overtones of racial or cultural bias).
Whereas it seems to me that the 'missing millennium' is not so
much (or not solely) the result of an European blindness, let alone
a wilful anti-Arab/anti-Islam bias, but of the more 'neutral' phenomena
described below. My discomfort is only confirmed by the two examples of suppposed
'bad' Eurocentric interpretation of ancient Egyptian history given in this
chapter -- Persians in Egypt and Pre-Classical contacts between Egypt and India
(p. 5-6) -- which strike me as very unfortunately chosen, being based on too few, and not always
up-to-date (Petrie) or reliable (Stricker), opinions.
The 'neutral' phenomena to be considered are the following. Firstly, the lack of accessible
sources played (and still plays) an important role. Arabic medieval sources are
scattered, untranslated, unedited and unpublished, in short, a lot less available
than, for example, the Classical sources. So it is hardly surprising that Egyptians,
let alone Europeans, of the distant past have made little use
of these medieval sources -- an outstandingly practical reason, rather than a case of biased choice.
Secondly, the Enlightenment saw itself as
heir of the Classical Age, and everything in between as a Dark Age dominated
by religion and superstition. Thus information from, and scholarship
in, this intermediate period were undervaluated if not neglected. If medieval Christian
Europe itself received such an unfair treatment, then it should not
surprise us that medieval Islamic Arabia would be dealt with in like manner. There is
indeed a bias at work here -- but it is an anti-medieval one rather than an anti-Arabic one. (Question: how much Byzantine or medieval European material dealing with ancient Egypt do you know?)
Thirdly, it cannot be denied that much of the Arabic material about ancient Egypt has a very 'Arabian Nights' flavour. In my opinion, the present book, unwittingly, confirms rather
than disproofs this in many of the cited examples. In these circumstances it is not
surprising, though no less regrettable, that the baby was thrown out with the bath water. That is,
the rational reaction of modern Arabic scholars was to reject all the material as being of doubtful
quality -- just as their European counterparts would have done.
All this said, the author is of course quite right in pointing out that it is a great pity that Egyptophiles and Egyptologists usually completely ignore Egypt's Islamic period -- even though such a strict and artificial separation into 'Classical' and 'post-Classical' disciplines for a country is not exactly exceptional, and hardly can be avoided for practical reasons (contrary to being a matter of "prejudice", p. 12). Overcoming this separation makes for a great topic, and the present book deserves all praise for being an "Opener of the Ways"! However, I think that a work that aims at fulfilling such a bridging function has a lot to benefit from being very critical and from avoiding the danger of 'overshooting' by going from one extreme into the other. I would have preferred a less speculative and possibly a less over enthousiastic approach to that taken by the present author. However, this does not in any way diminish the fact that the book is a treasure trove of possibilities for further, and deeper, research, since the present work, by its very nature of being a pioneer, can provide only the initial impulse to the development of these fresh ideas. To give only two examples that especially appealed to me: in Chapter 2, the account of the strong contacts between South Arabia and Egypt during the Greco-Roman period is intriguing (p. 14-16), and one hopes that this topic will get a more systematic and more critical monograph in the future; the same can be said of the intriguing suggestion by the author in Chapter 9 that the ancient Egyptian institution of the _Xrdw n k3p_ may have survived in a medieval Arabic Egyptian institute called "Children of the Room" (p. 128-129).
It is also in Chapter 9 that we find the case study of how the Arabic sources dealt
with Queen Cleopatra, a topic that has received a lot of attention in the
press, see for example "The Virtuous Scholar" (URL);
"Cleopatra: Scientist, Not Seductress?" (URL);
"Cleopatra seduced the Romans with her irresistible . . . mind" (URL).
The first problem with such reports is that what the press calls "the modern Western perception"
of the Queen is of course coloured by the cinema, rather than by the Classical
Western sources, and even the author lumps together all Western images too succinctly (p. 131).
I could well be wrong but I think that the contrast between
the Arabic image of the Queen and the Greco-Roman image of her is not really
that strong (possibly only a matter of different accentuations). Western sources do have
an eye for her intellectual qualities (they are just less
expounded upon). For example, Plutarch in his 'Life of Anthony' (section 27) says
that her irresistible charm had not much to do with physical beauty
but more with her character and "the persuasiveness of her discourse", so with
her intelligence, which is demonstrated by her multi-lingual abilities (see
the full section online at URL). In
Renaissance Europe, she did apparently have a scientific reputation even if only because of a misunderstanding of Galen's
'Cleopatra' (cp. URL).
The second problem with most of these press reports is that they suggest that the Arabic
image of the Queen is better than (this is 'corrects') the Western image of her. They
confuse the Arabic 'romance' about Cleopatra with how the
Queen really was. This is not the fault of the author, as the book
does signal some causes of that 'romance'. For example, the stories about Cleopatra
writing books for a large part seem to stem from the existence of books written by others but
dedicated to the Queen (p. 134) and by confusing her with famous female scholars (p. 135-136). It
is also noted that Cleopatra was conflated with strong female rulers from
Arabia (p. 133, 136). That the Roman and Arabic images emphasised and exaggerated different aspects should
not surprise us. It is not unusual for people faced with cultures which
they experience as 'exotic', to stereotype these other cultures as either 'dark'
(with barbaric bloodthirsty males and loose ensnaring women) or as
'paradisiacal' (with noble warriors and all-knowing priestesses) -- perhaps
one could even call these the "Colonial model" versus the "New Age model".
Such models say much of the ones who adopt them and hardly anything of the cultures that they are concerned with.
That the Romans, for political reasons, picked a model of the first type (Cleopatra as
a shrewd seductress) should not surprise us, nor that the Arabs, for
esoteric reasons (alchemists wanting to see Egypt as the land of secret
science and hidden wisdom), preferred a model of the second type (Cleopatra as virtuous scholar). Neither
representation says much about the real Cleopatra. I see no reason to think that the Arabic vision of the Queen is
less biased, and more factual, than the Greco-Roman vision; it seems
not based on original Ptolemaic facts but on medieval 'fancies'.
Chapter 5 deals with the interest in Egyptian scripts shown by
the medieval Arabic scholars. This is a topic which has also generated many
press reports, from relatively reasonable ones like "Scholar says: Muslims had insights into hieroglyphs" (URL) to sensationalistic ones such as "Arab scholar 'cracked Rosetta code' 800 years before the West" (URL).
The book is not to be blamed for headlines such as the last one. On the other hand, possibly the author could have
phrased things more carefully in order to avoid such misconceptions. Terms
like "the Egyptian alphabet" and "decipherment" are constantly used as
if either of these two things had a basis in reality, instead of
merely existing in the Arabic mind. (The term "Egyptian alphabet"
does not here refer to the consonant order used in Egypt during the Greco-Roman Period,
nor to the Egyptological transcription 'alphabet' -- although unsuspecting
readers may easily think the latter is meant. What happened is that Arabic
writers paired hieroglyphs with their own alphabet.)
The author clearly believes
that the Arabic writers knew the meanings of some hieroglyphs, due either through
transmitted knowledge or via bilingual texts, though this is not shown convincingly.
Because the book gives the medieval manuscript pages (script tables) without detailed analysis,
many readers will have a hard time judging the author's deductions. And the few cases which are examined fail to impress. (Example: a
clear O9 (Nephthys sign) is identified by Ibn Wahshiyah as _al-'adl_ "justice"
(p. 72), which the modern author counts as correct because "temples (were places) where justice was dispensed"
[sic!].) Further, most 'hieroglyphs' given in the Arabic charts are not
recognizable as such. This leaves one rather sceptical about the press report statement that
"three Arab scholars between them correctly identified about 10 of the several dozen hieroglyphs that they thought made up a
phonetic alphabet" (the book itself says: "several scholars succeeded in deciphering at least half of the Egyptian alphabetic
signs"; p. 57). But even if the number of 10 had been correct, then it still would
leave the reader wondering about the statistical chance of there being a few
possible hits among many misses. Add to this that one Arabic writer seems to employ
more than one alphabet (Abu al-Qasim, Fig. 23 vs. Fig 21 and Fig. 22), a problem
which is not addressed and which only strengthens the impression that those alphabets are just alchemistical Spielerei.
The claim (p. 72, 140), that Ibn Wahshiyah "correctly identified determinatives, which he
distinguishes from alphabetical letters" left me puzzled, as what seems rather
to be the case is that Ibn Wahshiyah suggested that hieroglyphs might represent
sounds as well as ideas, a notion which does not have much to do with
an accurate knowledge of ideograms versus phonograms, let alone determinatives.
All things considered lead me to the conclusion that there was no such thing as an
Arabic decipherment of hieroglyphs. And thus there was no knowledge of the script that could be used
by medieval Arabic writers to gain knowledge of ancient Egyptian concepts, as the author
seems to suggest throughout the work. Nor is there sufficent evidence to convince one in
even the small matters of designing blazons (p. 66; those in Fig. 14 are not really recognizable hieroglyphs)
or the knowledge of titles (p. 134). It is thus difficult to accept that the medieval Arab work on hieroglyphs
has Egyptological value, in the sense that it would not have advanced (genuine) decipherment had it developed further in Egypt or had
it been known in Europe, nor can it help us in any way today. It does, however, deserves credit for
breaking away from the notion that hieroglyphs were just symbolic, and for suggesting that they
had phonetic values. In that way, the work of some medieval Arabic scholars may well have inspired, via Kircher (p. 58), the work of Champollion.
Of course even without decipherment, there is the possibility of oral transmission. But unlike the author, I did not become convinced that the medieval Arabic writers had "knowledge of ancient Egypt" in the form of genuine, independent knowledge that was preserved and transmitted to them ('independent' in the sense of knowledge other than that based on the observation of still-standing monuments and sites or derived from Greco-Roman and Coptic written sources). Future research may well prove that such a continuity of knowledge existed, but the present book does not really succeed in doing this, in my opinion. Of course, there's the -- already known -- exception in the form of material surviving in folk religion, and what medieval writers have to say on that topic may provide an important extra source. And perhaps the author is correct by stating that oral transmission of some lost Demotic stories not otherwise preserved may have occurred (p. 25), but these are not yet attested, and it seems to me that the genuine would be difficult to distinguish from the fictional fantasy tales. For example, most unknown kings with tales attached to them do not bear recognisably Egyptian names (Zalma, Shadat, Qumis, etc) and seem inventions. (The case of Aq, p. 53, is not a valid counterexample, for the Dodson article (ZAeS 108 p. 171) deals with King *BikkA, not really a "similar name"). The cases in which the names are recognizable do not form independent knowledge since they are based on Manetho and known Demotic tales. The material on technologies (Ch. 8) has the same fantastic nature, fitting the exaggerated alchemistic notion of the "wisdom of Egypt", and although also here one could leave room for the hope that one day some of these "mirabilia" will prove to have a grounding in reality (for example in an Alexandrian milieu), until then a firm scepsis is demanded.
To the question whether the author has fulfilled his three stated objectives, I would have to answer "Yes, with flying colours", despite all my criticisms. The book has convinced me that the Arabic writers had a serious historical interest in ancient Egypt, an interest which has been undervalued considerably. It also convinced me that Arabic travel reports, geographical surveys, and perhaps even treasure manuals deserve closer attention in the future, for such medieval material may hold information about monuments and sites that cannot otherwise be gained. And I do not think that anyone who has read this book, would still speak about the 'missing millennium' as if it was a complete void, like an Egyptian professor from Alexandria still did, when telling his audience in June 2005 that "the arrival of Islam in Egypt virtually obliterated all previous pasts, [until] the rediscovery of Egypt in the 19th century by European scholarship changed all that" (URL).
Aayko Eyma
ayma@tip.nl
June 28, 2005