Egyptology: The Missing Millennium: Ancient Egypt in Medieval Arabic Writings (UCL Institute of Archaeology Publications)

Who first deciphered hieroglyphics?  Google (and anyone else) will tell you it was Champollion in the early 1800's.  That's wrong.The first books on hieroglyphic decipherment were published in the 8th and 9th century during the golden age of the Islamic empire.  There was a tremendous enthusiasm in unlocking the secrets of Egyptian science and mathematics.  As Okasha el-Daly explains, there were still speakers of Coptic-2 (a vanishing language at the time of the empire), which was closely related to Coptic-1, the language ancient Egyptian's spoke and wrote in demotic and hieratic.​The take-away is a completely different perspective on Egyptian history.  Strabo was Greek and visited Alexandria about 10 years after the death of Cleopatra: two paragraphs are his entire coverage of the period.  Roman authors 200 years after her death outcompeted each other to see who could trash the "sexy, whore queen", instead of discussing the civil war that actually took place.  Arabs translated histories of the Egyptians themselves.​This isn't a dry textbook, it's entertaining reading and I can't recommend it more highly ... I go back to it just for fun. El-Daly covers the scholarship of Arabic Egyptology, as well as tomb robbing, Egyptian science, and ... yes ... Cleopatra. Extremely well annotated.

I think it is worth it. It kills the myth that ancient Egypt suddenly died with the advent of Islam.

A new and welcomed scope.

Egyptology as we know it was created by Europeans in the early 19th century, and Egyptians were largely shut out of it for far too long. Partly for that reason, and partly because pre-modern Arabic texts are often very hard to obtain, Arabic writers' works on ancient Egypt are largely ignored. At the same time, the efforts of Europeans like Athanasius Kircher to understand ancient Egypt are treated as precursors to true Egyptology, albeit very awkward ones. El-Daly rightly tries to remedy the lack of attention given to Arabic authors, but he ends up overstating his case and crediting those authors with more success than they actually had.El-Daly does prove that Arab scholars' interest in ancient Egypt has been underestimated, and he has laid the groundwork for future study of their work. His appendices, with a catalogue of Arabic authors and short biographies of the most important ones, will no doubt be useful for that purpose. His general treatment of Arab attitudes toward Egypt is also helpful. He corrects the notion that Muslims were necessarily prejudiced against ancient Egypt because of the mentions of the pharaoh of the Exodus in the Quran. They recognized that the pharaoh of the Exodus was one ruler among many, and the Quran's negative portrayal of him did not prevent Muslim authors from saying complimentary things about other Egyptian kings.El-Daly also shows that Arab writers had some awareness of Egyptian history, but it was mostly limited to the Late and Ptolemaic periods—the eras that they could draw upon classical authors to understand. In his chapter on Arab understanding of Egyptian science, he devotes a lot of attention to the perception of Cleopatra as a wise scholar, instead of the seductress that modern Western culture often treats her as. But that perception was largely created by alchemical works that used her name, and it bore no more relation to the real Cleopatra than the Western caricature does. Overall, El-Daly cannot avoid showing that the Arab image of ancient Egypt was heavily colored by alchemical and Hermetic folklore, even if there were large elements of truth in it.Possibly the most slanted section of the book is about efforts to decipher hieroglyphs. Several of the plates at the end of the book show pages from Arabic texts containing hieroglyphs, and some of those pages are tables that attempt to relate hieroglyphs to Arabic letters or to specific meanings. It's difficult to compare the plates to the chapter on hieroglyphs when one must flip back and forth between them, but in the text he seems to be straining to find correct interpretations of glyphs. It's an inescapable conclusion that the Arabic authors were fumbling in the dark, and they were little closer to deciphering hieroglyphs than Athanasius Kircher was. However, they did realize that the language of the hieroglyphs was related to Coptic and that some glyphs had phonetic values.For now, this is the best single source for Arabic perceptions of ancient Egypt, but readers should evaluate its conclusions carefully.

I think this is an excellent book. Very well written, extremely informative. You can tell the author has had to do some painstaking research to get this book to us. A must read for anyone who appreciates preserving history and giving credit where it's due.

great

This is the best book I have read in my life, it is expensive for me as a student which not taking any degree relate to this. But I am always fascinate to learn about Egypt, and it pretty much cover everything I want to know! Definitely worth the money I threw for this book, and the Author deserve more appreciation!