On September 27, 1822, 31-year-old Egyptologist and philologist Jean-François Champollion stood before the members of Paris’s Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres and proclaimed that “after 10 years of intensive research … we can finally read the ancient monuments.”

I have … a firm basis on which to assign a grammar and a dictionary for these inscriptions used on a large number of monuments and whose interpretation will shed so much light on the history of Egypt,” Champollion informed his astonished audience.

Among those seated was Champollion’s chief rival and former collaborator, English physician and polymath Thomas Young. Since parting company in 1815, Young and Champollion had engaged in a contentious race to unlock the tantalizing secrets of the hieroglyphs.

Yet the two linguists were competing in a race that had already been run by medieval Arab scholars and scientists. While Champollion’s discoveries were groundbreaking at the Académie, previous European scholars were familiar with a 10th-century Arabic work attributed to an alchemist and historian from what is now Iraq, Ibn Wahshiyya al-Nabati, titled Kitab Shauq al-Mustaham fi Ma‘irfat Rumuz al-Aqlam (Ancient Alphabets and Hieroglyphic Characters Explained). In it, he exhorted, “Learn then, O reader! The secrets, mysteries and treasures of the hieroglyphics, not to be found and not to be discovered anywhere else … now lo! These treasures are laid open for thy enjoyment.”

bridgeman images Discovered in the Nile Delta in the late 18th century near the town of Rosetta, “The Rosetta Stone,” above, is inscribed with a decree issued in the third century bce by Egyptian ruler Ptolemy v . It is written in three scripts: hieroglyphics appear at the top; Demotic in the middle; and Old Greek at the bottom. This allowed French Egyptologist and philologist Jean-François Champollion, depicted below left in an 1831 portrait, to correlate hieroglyphs with the same text in two known languages.

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Egyptologist Okasha El-Daly of the Institute of Archaeology at University College London () points out that Joseph Hammer, an Austrian scholar who in 1806 translated Ibn Wahshiyya into English and published his work in London, mentioned in his introduction that French savants “were aware of the existence of Arabic manuscripts on the subject of decipherment.” Champollion’s own teacher, Baron Silvestre de Sacy, was a famed professor of Arabic who produced several Arabic grammars and was among the earliest French scholars to attempt to translate the hieroglyphs. While Ibn Wahshiyya’s work was familiar to de Sacy, who reprinted an edition in 1810, it is uncertain if its contents were known to his famous student. However, as El-Daly points out: “In his own letters to his brother, Champollion complained about the pain of having to learn Arabic so he must have thought it was of value in his research.”

Though pharaonic Egypt is one of history’s most enduringly popular periods among scholars, study of medieval Arabic texts concerning what we now call “Egyptology”—including the hieroglyphs—remains sparse. This attracted El-Daly’s curiosity.

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“I read at a very young school age an encyclopedic work known as Khitat of the medieval Egyptian author al-Maqrizi, who died in 1440, in which he displayed a great deal of interest and knowledge of ancient Egypt. Yet when I started my formal Egyptology studies at Cairo University in 1975, I didn’t see any reference to medieval Arabic sources,” El-Daly says, “and I began to make my own inquiries.” His pursuit of early Arabic texts on Egyptian history—in both public and private collections, over two decades and across several continents—culminated in his 2005 discourse, Egyptology: The Missing Millennium: Ancient Egypt in Medieval Arabic Writings, published byPress.

El-Daly’s research raises intriguing questions: Were 19th-century Western scholars indeed the first to unveil the “secrets” of the hieroglyphs, and to what extent were hieroglyphs already known to their medieval Arab counterparts?

The earliest hieroglyphs, dating to the end of the fourth millennium bce, appear on pottery and ivory plaques from tombs. The last known inscriptions date from 394 ce, at the Temple of Isis on the island of Philae in southern Egypt. “But the glory of hieroglyphs,” observed the late Michael Rice, author of Egypt’s Legacy: The Archetypes of Western Civilization: 3000 to 30 bce, evolved during the Old Kingdom (2686–2181 bce), achieving their highest level of development in the Middle Kingdom (2055–1650 bce). This was a monumental age when the walls of Egypt’s palaces, temples and tombs were awash in hieroglyphs rendered in the vibrant colors of the natural world: Nile blue, palm-frond green and the dusk-reddened sky of the western desert, where mummified pharaohs awaited their journeys into the afterlife.

“The beauty of the colouring of these intaglios no one can describe,” observed Florence Nightingale on her visit to the richly decorated tomb of Seti i in 1850. “How anyone who has time and liberty, and has once begun the study of hieroglyphics, can leave it til he has made out every symbol … I cannot conceive.”

british library / bridgeman images This page from an 18th-century copy of alchemist Abu al-Qasim al-Iraqi’s 13th-century Kitab al-Aqalim al-Sab`ah (Book of the Seven Climes) reflects Arab interest in hieroglyphics, largely inspired by long-held beliefs that Egypt was a source of lost wisdom—a motive that was later shared by Europeans who sought to translate hieroglyphics.

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Historians and philosophers of the Classical Era were among the first to take up the challenge, including first-century-historian Diodorus Siculus. According to Maurice Pope, author of The Story of Decipherment: From Egyptian Hieroglyphic to Linear B, Diodorus was among the first “to suggest the ideographic nature of the hieroglyphs.” Diodorus’s supposition that hieroglyphs do “not work by putting syllables together … but by drawing objects whose metaphorical meaning is impressed in the memory” was also suggested four centuries later by Egyptian-born Roman philosopher Plotinus, who marveled especially at the creativity and efficiency of Egyptian scribes:

[T]he wise men of Egypt … did not go through the whole business of letters, words, and sentences. Instead, in their sacred writings they drew signs, a separate sign for each idea, so as to express its whole meaning at once.

By this time, there were fewer and fewer native-born Egyptians who could read the hieroglyphs. As Egypt became increasingly Romanized after the fall of Cleopatra in the first century bce, hieroglyphs were gradually replaced by the Roman alphabet.

Still, what Plotinus and his classical predecessors did not grasp was that hieroglyphics are more than simple ideograms, that is, pictures representing concepts or ideas, much as a circle with a red bar across a smoldering cigarette indicates “No Smoking.” Rather, they build their meanings off three elements: logograms, representing words; phonograms, representing sounds or groups of sounds; and determinatives, marks or images placed at the end of a word to clarify its meaning.

The key to Champollion’s understanding was his knowledge of Coptic, which is the linguistic descendent of the spoken Egyptian of the pharaonic era. Coptic uses Greek letters together with a handful of colloquial, or demotic, characters. Associating spoken Coptic with the written hieroglyphic script gave him his missing link. This was how Champollion deciphered the now-famous Rosetta Stone, a fragment of a second-century-bce stele inscribed with a royal decree issued by Ptolemy v. The inscribed decree was written in each of hieroglyphic, Demotic (Coptic’s grammatical cousin) and Greek. Champollion’s breakthrough came by comparing the scripts and realizing that the hieroglyphs were phonetic.

What Ibn Wahshiyya’s classical predecessors did not grasp was that hieroglyphics are more than simple ideograms, that is, pictures representing concepts or ideas.

bridgeman images Ibn Wahshiyya’s contributions were well known among Arab Egyptologists and, in Europe, admired by 17th-century German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, who built upon Ibn Wahshiyya’s findings.

Yet it was not long after Muslim expansion into Egypt in the seventh century that Muslim scholars began connecting many of these same dots. Like most first-time visitors, the Muslims were intrigued with what they saw before them.

“They wandered around, looking at the Pyramids, looking at the monuments, looking inside the beautifully decorated tombs, and if you are a scholarly person, you must have wondered, ‘How did they build them, what was their function?’” says El-Daly.

They also could not help but be intrigued by the hieroglyphs, and they speculated on their meanings. By inference, the first known Muslim scholar to pry into their mysteries was late eighth- and early ninth-century alchemist Jabir ibn Hayyan. Although nothing of his work on hieroglyphs is known to survive, we know of his interest through other, later alchemists who refer to it. Among them was his contemporary, Egyptian-born Dhul-Nun al-Misri. Al-Misri directed those interested in learning more about ancient alphabets to Ibn Hayyan’s book Solution of Secrets and Key of Treasures.

Alamy Hieroglyphics Hieroglyphs are among the most recognizable and familiar cultural symbols of ancient Egypt. Composed of some 700-900 characters in the shapes of objects, animals, people and abstract symbols, they are a form of writing that, according to legend, was a gift from the god Thoth to grant the Egyptians wisdom and strengthen their memory. The word hieroglyph, in fact, means “sacred writing”: hiero, “holy”; glypho, “writing.” As such, the derivative, cursive style of hieroglyphic writing, which emerged around 1100 bce, was called “hieratic” after the Greek hieratikos, meaning “priestly,” and it was used for recording sacred texts. The simpler and more secular “Demotic” comes from demotikos, “of the common people,” and it developed several centuries later. Some historians speculate that the Egyptians may have borrowed the concept of pictographic writing from the Sumerians (in modern Iraq); others argue that Egypt developed the writing system independently.

El-Daly notes another early scholar, Ayub ibn Maslama, also had “knowledge of deciphering the letters of the hieroglyphs.” This we know, he explains, through the writings of the 12th-century geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi, who had a deep interest in Egypt. Al-Idrisi recorded in his book Secrets of the Pyramids that during a visit in 831 to Egypt by Abbasid Caliph al-Mamun, Ibn Maslama “translated for Al-Ma’moun what was written on the Pyramids, the two obelisks of Heliopolis, a stela found in a village stable near Memphis, another stela from Memphis itself, [as well as writings found] in Bu Sir and Sammanud. Everything he translated is in a book called al-Tilasmat al-Kahiniya (Priestly Talismans).”

Sadly this last book, like Ibn Hayyan’s, is now lost. Yet texts attributed to al-Misri have survived, and they offer unique, insider perspectives on the composition of the hieroglyphs. A contemporary of Ibn Maslama, al-Misri spent most of his life living in or beside one of the temples at Akhmim in Upper Egypt, El-Daly points out. There, surrounded by hieroglyphs and Coptic-speaking priests, he would have been perfectly positioned to learn “the language of the walls of the temple, i.e., hieroglyphs,” El-Daly says.