Ibn Wahshiyya

Ibn Wahshiyya the Chaldean (Arabic: أبو بكر أحمد بن وحشية الكلداني‎, /ʼabū bakr ibn waḥšiyyah al-kaldānī/; fl. 9th/10th centuries) was a Chaldean Iraqi alchemist, agriculturalist, farm toxicologist,egyptologist and historian born at Qusayn near Kufa in Iraq. He was one of the first historians to be able to at least partly decipher what was written in the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, by relating them to the contemporary Coptic language.

Works

Ibn al-Nadim (in Kitab al-Fihrist) lists a large number of books on magic, statues, offerings, agriculture, alchemy, physics and medicine, that were either written, or translated from older books, by Ibn Wahshiyya.

His works on Alchemy were co-authored with an Alchemist named Abu Talib al-Zalyat, their works were used by Al-Dimashqi.

The Nabataean Agriculture

Ibn Wahshiyya the Chaldean translated from Nabataean (Babylonian Chaldean Aramaic) the Nabataean Agriculture (Kitab al-falaha al-nabatiya) (c. 904), a major treatise on the subject, which was said to be based on ancient Babylonian sources. The book extols Babylonian civilization against that of the conquering Arabs. It contains valuable information on agriculture and superstitions, and in particular discusses beliefs attributed to the Sabeans that there were people before Adam, that Adam had parents and that he came from India. These ideas were discussed by the Jewish philosophers Judah ben Samuel Halevi and Maimonides, through which they became an influence on the seventeenth century French Millenarian Isaac La Peyrère.