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{
    "pk": 4339,
    "title": "Medieval Arabic Reception of Egyptian Hieroglyphs",
    "subtitle": null,
    "abstract": "<p><em>Contrary to the prevailing view that the conversion of Egyptians to, first, Christianity, then Islam, put an end to any interest in their own heritage, there is ample evidence that Egyptians continued to study their own past with great pride. Many medieval Arab scholars visited Egypt to study its heritage and ancient scripts, leading to many scholarly attempts to decipher them. A brief survey of the available materials in Arabic shows a wide use of Egyptian hieroglyphs by medieval Arab scholars and artists. These materials also show a continuous process of attempting to decipher Egyptian scripts, sometimes through a medium, or third, script in the same way as later European scholars would do. Coptic, Greek, and Demotic were still available and readable in the early medieval period. Several scholars thus succeeded in deciphering at least half of the known Egyptian alphabetical signs. It is interesting to note that nearly all the authors interested in hieroglyphs were alchemists, many of them being Sufis or mystics (e.g., Jabir Ibn Ḥayyan, Dhu Al-Nun Al-Misri, and Ibn Waḥshiyah). This may account, in part, for Egypt’s fame as the land of science, wisdom, and mysticism.</em></p>",
    "language": "eng",
    "license": {
        "name": "Creative Commons Attribution 4.0",
        "short_name": "CC BY 4.0",
        "text": "Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.\r\n\r\nNo additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.",
        "url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0"
    },
    "keywords": [],
    "section": "Language, Text and Writing",
    "is_remote": true,
    "remote_url": "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9j83j7mv",
    "frozenauthors": [
        {
            "first_name": "Okasha",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "el-Daly",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "University College London",
            "department": "",
            "country": "United Kingdom"
        }
    ],
    "date_submitted": "2009-01-12T21:15:51Z",
    "date_accepted": "2025-05-28T12:33:01.315000Z",
    "date_published": "2025-05-28T10:55:00Z",
    "render_galley": null,
    "galleys": [
        {
            "label": "4339_ElDaly_Arabic",
            "type": "pdf",
            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/nelc_uee/article/4339/galley/36355/download/"
        }
    ]
}