I'M SKEPTICAL, but this is a very interesting story and, if the claims are borne out, it would be an extraordinary discovery:

Arab scholar 'cracked Rosetta code' 800 years before the West

Robin McKie, science editor
Sunday October 3, 2004
The Observer

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.'

[...]

Via Bible and Interpretation News. Dr Okasha El Daly is listed as an honorary research assistant at the UCL Institute of Archaeology and you can find an abstract of one of his relevant papers here. More biography here and here.

Also, the Daily Times (Pakistan) has an article today ("Egyptian scholar finds Arab insights into hieroglyphs") with more details. Excerpt:

But Okasha El Daly, who lectures at University College London and holds an outreach post at the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, says that a thousand years earlier, when Arab civilisation was close to its height, Muslim scholars not only took an interest in ancient Egypt but could also correctly interpret at least a few characters in the hieroglyphic script. From libraries in Paris and Istanbul, he has dug up manuscripts, which contain tables showing the phonetic value of hieroglyphs. Three Arab scholars between them correctly identified about 10 of the several dozen hieroglyphs, which they thought made up a phonetic alphabet, he told Reuters.

But more importantly, at a time when medieval Europeans thought that hieroglyphs were just magical symbols, the Arab scholars grasped two of the basic principles - that some signs represented sounds while others were determinatives, signs that conveyed the concept of the word pictorially.

That breakthrough was the work of Ahmad bin Abu Bakr ibn Wahshiyah, a ninth and 10th century polymath who lived in Iraq and wrote about everything from chemistry to the environment to agriculture and pre-Islamic cultures.

There's more and it's a very interesting read. I wonder if any of it has been published in peer-review journals. If any Egyptologists out there have comments, drop me a note.

UPDATE (6 October): See the next post for more.