Ibn Wahshiyya

Ibn Waḥshiyya (Arabic: ابن وحشية), died c. 930, was a Nabataean (Aramaic-speaking, rural Iraqi) agriculturalist, toxicologist, and alchemist born in Qussīn, near Kufa in Iraq. He is the author of the Nabataean Agriculture (Kitāb al-Filāḥa al-Nabaṭiyya), an influential Arabic work on agriculture, astrology, and magic.

Already by the end of the tenth century, various works were being falsely attributed to him. One of these spurious writings, the Kitāb Shawq al-mustahām fī maʿrifat rumūz al-aqlām ("The Book of the Desire of the Maddened Lover for the Knowledge of Secret Scripts", perhaps 1022–3 CE), is notable as an early proposal that some Egyptian hieroglyphs could be read phonetically, rather than only logographically.