Ibn Wahshiyya and the book of ancient alphabets

Long before European scholars collected exotic alphabets, an Arabic work had already attempted a similar undertaking. It is entitled Kitab shawq al-mustaham fi ma'rifat rumuz al-aqlam, the Book of the Frenzied Devotee's Desire to Learn the Riddles of Ancient Scripts, and it is attributed to Abu Bakr Ahmad ibn Wahshiyya, an Iraqi author who lived between the ninth and tenth centuries. The text gathers dozens of alphabets, some historical, others legendary, linked to sages, planets and ancient peoples.

An enigmatic author

Ibn Wahshiyya is known above all for the Nabataean Agriculture, a vast treatise that presents itself as a translation of ancient Mesopotamian texts and contains information on agriculture, religion and magic. His figure is a matter of debate: some scholars believe that part of the works attributed to him was composed or reworked by other authors, and the precise dating remains uncertain.

The book on alphabets also raises problems of attribution, and the manuscripts that preserve it are not numerous. What is certain is that it represents one of the oldest systematic collections of rare and secret scripts in the medieval world, the fruit of the learned curiosity of Islamic civilisation for the languages and cultures that had preceded it.

Alphabets of sages and planets

The treatise presents alphabets attributed to figures such as Hermes, regarded in Islamic tradition as an ancient prophet and sage, and to Greek philosophers, kings and peoples of the past. It also contains scripts associated with the seven planets and the zodiac signs, beside characters used, according to the author, by priests and alchemists. Many of these alphabets do not correspond to known real scripts and should be regarded as symbolic or legendary constructions.

Particularly debated is the chapter devoted to Egyptian hieroglyphs. The author assigns a sound value to various signs, and some modern scholars have argued that in certain cases his identifications are correct. The question is controversial: one cannot say that Ibn Wahshiyya had deciphered the hieroglyphs, but his text shows an interest in ancient Egyptian writing that came very early compared with Europe.

The translation of 1806

In Europe the book became known at the beginning of the nineteenth century thanks to the Austrian orientalist Joseph von Hammer, later known as Hammer-Purgstall. In 1806 he published in London the Arabic text with an English translation, entitled Ancient Alphabets and Hieroglyphic Characters Explained. Its appearance came a few years before Jean-François Champollion announced, in 1822, his decipherment of the hieroglyphs.

The volume aroused the interest of antiquarians and the curious, and some of the alphabets it contains entered the European repertories of magical scripts. Even today certain tables of planetary or Hermetic characters circulating in books on occultism derive, often without anyone knowing it, from this translation. Hammer himself, moreover, was not an occultist but a philologist, and presented the work as a learned curiosity, useful to the history of writing and of relations between East and West.

The book of ancient alphabets reminds us that fascination with secret scripts is not exclusive to Renaissance Europe. In the medieval Arab world, between Baghdad and Cairo, scholars and copyists cultivated the same passion for forgotten signs, and their work influenced, by various routes, the Western tradition as well. Rediscovering this genealogy helps us see the history of esoteric alphabets as a dialogue between cultures, rather than as the heritage of a single tradition.