Ibn Wahshiyya

Ibn Wahshiyyah the Nabataean (Arabic: ابن وحشية النبطي‎‎), also known as ʾAbū Bakr ʾAḥmad bin ʿAlī (Arabic: أبو بكر أحمد بن علي‎‎) (fl. 9th/10th centuries) was an 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.

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.

In agriculture, the Filahât al-Nabâtiyyah (Nabataean Agriculture) of Ibn Wahshiyya is the most influential of all Muslim works on the subject. Written in the third/ninth century and drawn mostly from Chaldaean and Babylonian sources, the book deals not only with agriculture but also with the esoteric sciences, especially magic and sorcery, and has always been considered to be one of the important books in Arabic on the occult sciences.

Ibn Wahshiyya translated from Nabataean 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 Sabians - understood as people who lived before Adam - that Adam had parents and that he came from India. These ideas were discussed by the Jewish philosophers Yehuda Halevi and Maimonides, through which they became an influence on the seventeenth century French Millenarian Isaac La Peyrère.

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