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The Haman Hoax
Jochen Katz
[Introduction]
Stage One: Maurice Bucaille
Maurice Bucaille is, most probably, the originator of this argument. In a book
first published in 1994 (*), he makes the following claims regarding the name
“Haman” in the Qur’an:
This Haman does not appear in the Bible, while he is mentioned six times
in the Qur’an: sura 28, verses 6, 8 and 38; sura 29, verse 39; and sura 40,
verses 24 and 36. He was very close to the Pharaoh who, boastful and mocking,
said: “O Haman, build for me a tower that haply I may reach the roads... of
the heavens and may look upon the God of Moses, though verily I think him a
liar.” (sura 40, verses 36-37) Undoubtedly, Haman was a master of
constructions.
We will show that the name, as it is written in Arabic in the Qur’an, is
the exact transliteration of the name of a person whose hieroglyphic
orthograph is perfectly known today. As far as I know, no commentator of the
Qur’an has dealt with this question on a thorough hieroglyphic basis. One
has been searching for consonances with the Egyptian god “Amun,” which
would have been badly transliterated into the Arabic language. Other authors
have suggested that through “Haman” there might have been an allusion to
Aman, a counselor of Assuerus (biblical name of Xerxes) who was an enemy of
the Jews: such a comparison does not take account of the historical
chronology. The only valid investigation was to ask an expert in Old Egyptian
for his opinion about the presence in the Qur’an of this name.
In the book Reflections on the Qur’an (Réflexions sur le Coran, op.cit.
1989), I have related the result of such a consultation that dates back to a
dozen years ago and led me to question a specialist who, in addition, knew
well the classical Arabic language. One of the most prominent French
Egyptologists, fulfilling these conditions, was kind enough to answer the
question. I showed him the word “Haman” that I had copied exactly like it
is written in the Qur'an, and told him that it had been extracted from a
sentence of a document dating back to the 7th century A.D., the sentence being
related to somebody connected with Egyptian history. He said to me that, in
such a case, he would see in this word the transliteration of a hieroglyphic
name but, for him, undoubtedly it could not be possible that a written
document of the 7th century had contained a hieroglyphic name — unknown
until that time — since, in that time, the hieroglyphs had been totally
forgotten. In order to confirm his deduction about the name, he advised me to
consult the Dictionary of Personal Names of the New Kingdom by Ranke, where I
might find the name written in hieroglyphs, as he had written before me, and
the transliteration in German. I discovered all that had been presumed by the
expert, and, moreover, I was stupefied to read the profession of Haman:
“Chief of the workers in stone-quarries,” exactly what could be deduced
from the Qur'an, though the words of Pharaoh suggest a master of construction.
When I came again to the expert with a photocopy of the page of the Dictionary
concerning “Haman” and showed him one of the pages of the Qur'an where he
could read the name, he was speechless...
Moreover, Ranke had noted, as a reference, a book published in 1906 by the
Egyptologist Walter Wreszinski: the latter had mentioned that the name of
“Haman” had been engraved on a stela kept at the Hof-Museum of Vienna
(Austria). Several years later, when I was able to read the profession written
in hieroglyphs on the stela, I observed that the determinative joined to the
name had emphasised the importance of the intimate of Pharaoh.
Had the Bible or any other literary work, composed during a period when
the hieroglyphs could still be deciphered, quoted “Haman,” the presence in
the Qur'an of this word might have not drawn special attention. But, it is a
fact that the hieroglyphs had been totally forgotten at the time of the
Qur'anic Revelation and that one could not read them until the 19th century
A.D. Since matters stood like that in ancient times, the existence of the word
“Haman” in the Qur'an suggests a special reflection. (Maurice Bucaille,
Moses and Pharaoh in the Bible, Qur'an and History, p. 192-193)1
It is hard to decide where to begin since these few paragraphs from
Bucaille’s book are brimming with inaccuracies, gross misrepresentations,
twisted interpretations, and outright lies.
Formulations like “one of the most prominent French Egyptologists” should
raise a flag in the mind of any critical reader. Why is this person not
named?2
Since the above quoted claims by Bucaille will be exposed as a hoax in this
article, my suspicion (bordering on certainty) is that this person does not
exist, and the whole conversation was simply invented in order to give this
argument an appearance of authority. Bucaille could not dare to connect such
statements with any prominent Egyptologist since they are false and every
Egyptologist would have taken Bucaille to court for attaching his name to this
lie and making a fool of him among his fellow scholars of Egyptology for
allegedly saying what Bucaille claims he said.
I am convinced that the story is a different one. Most likely, Bucaille, or
some Muslims working with him on this project, searched through Hermann
Ranke’s three-volume dictionary of Egyptian personal names (which have been
discovered in hieroglyphs) to see whether they could find anything resembling
the name “Haman”. And indeed, they found something that they thought could
be used for their purposes. Only then did they create the above story around
it, adding some elements of suspense and surprise and, very important, an air
of authority.
The first hint that the above “report” doesn’t accurately reflect what
could have been said by any Egyptologist, let alone a leading expert in the
field, is found in the statement, “he advised me to consult the Dictionary
of Personal Names of the New Kingdom by Ranke”. The reason is simple. There
exists no dictionary by that name. Bucaille projected his desired outcome into
the title of the book. Since Moses is usually dated to the New Kingdom period
of Egyptian history3, Bucaille was naturally hoping to find something in that
time frame. However, Ranke’s dictionary covers all names starting from the
third dynasty (2700 BC) even up to the Roman time (ca 300 AD), not only names
from the New Kingdom. That is stated explicitly in the very first paragraph of
the preface of Hermann Ranke’s dictionary (Volume I, page v). In other
words, the first volume alone covers about 3000 years of Egyptian history
instead of only the 500 years of the New Kingdom. Furthermore, Ranke announces
in the very next sentence of his preface that he intends to add also the names
from the first and second dynasty in the second volume. The words “New
Kingdom” are not part of the title of this dictionary. Any true Egyptologist
would have been intimately familiar with this standard reference book, and
therefore would not have made such an error of reference. Bucaille did not
only invent this conversation, he was evidently rather sloppy in the
fabrication of his hoax. It would not have been too much effort to state the
title of the dictionary correctly.
Let’s look at the first sentence by which Bucaille introduces his
“Egyptological investigation”:
We will show that the name, as it is written in Arabic in the Qur’an, is
the exact transliteration of the name of a person whose hieroglyphic
orthograph is perfectly known today.
Despite sounding impressive, that sentence already disqualifies him. No
serious linguist would say anything like that. Apart from a minor quibble
regarding Bucaille’s strange terminology4, anybody who ever worked with
transliterations from one language into another knows that something like an
exact transliteration does not exist.5 There usually are several possible
approximate transliterations, but since “exact transliteration” sounds
more like what you would expect from a book that you believe (or want to make
others believe) to have been “sent down from God”, Bucaille claimed that
it is an exact transliteration for the purpose of making the alleged miracle
even more miraculous.
Moreover, the team of Islamic Awareness, which developed Bucaille’s
argument/hoax further (see Stage Two below), admit in their article that the
h-sound represented by the hieroglyph in question does not exactly correspond
to the pronunciation of the word for Haman in the Qur’an. They spend several
paragraphs in their argument in order to overcome this problem, starting with
these words:
However, an objection can be raised regarding the contents in the
hieroglyph and the Qur'an. The Qur'an uses ه (/h/) instead of ح
(/h/) for the name "Haman". The hieroglyph from the K.K. Hof Museum in Vienna
above uses ح (/h/) instead of ه (/h/) in hmn. This objection can
be tackled in two ways. … (Source)
This information also destroys Bucaille’s fictional consultation with an
expert. He writes:
In the book Reflections on the Qur’an (Réflexions sur le Coran, op.cit.
1989), I have related the result of such a consultation that dates back to a
dozen years ago and led me to question a specialist who, in addition, knew
well the classical Arabic language. One of the most prominent French
Egyptologists, fulfilling these conditions, was kind enough to answer the
question. I showed him the word “Haman” that I had copied exactly like it
is written in the Qur'an, and told him that it had been extracted from a
sentence of a document dating back to the 7th century A.D., the sentence being
related to somebody connected with Egyptian history. He said to me that, in
such a case, he would see in this word the transliteration of a hieroglyphic
name but, for him, undoubtedly it could not be possible that a written
document of the 7th century had contained a hieroglyphic name — unknown
until that time — since, in that time, the hieroglyphs had been totally
forgotten. In order to confirm his deduction about the name, he advised me to
consult the Dictionary of Personal Names of the New Kingdom by Ranke, where I
might find the name written in hieroglyphs, as he had written before me, and
the transliteration in German.
If what Islamic Awareness writes regarding the two different h-sounds is true6
then we have two options. Either there is no hieroglyph that corresponds to
this particular h-sound, or these two different h-sounds correspond to
different hieroglyphs. Therefore, the prominent Egyptologist would have said
either that this word could not exist in the old Egyptian language since it
does not have such a sound, or he would have chosen the hieroglyph that
correctly corresponds with the Arabic letter before him, thus arriving at
another hieroglyphic sign than the one which the Muslims want to make us
believe is the Haman of the Qur’an. In either case, the above story is not
credible, particularly when Bucaille emphasized at the beginning that he found
an “exact transliteration”.
In fact, both printed sources and online pages on the Egyptian Hieroglyphic
Alphabet (e.g. here and here) list four different hieroglyphs representing
four different “h”-sounds. Therefore, if done properly, the alleged expert
Egyptologist would have arrived at different hieroglyphs in his reverse
transliteration. We will come back to this issue at the end of our discussion
of Bucaille’s claims.
Actually, there is another formulation in the last sentence of the above
paragraph that shows that Bucaille’s fictional conversation partner could
not have been a “most prominent French Egyptologist”. Bucaille claims:
In order to confirm his deduction about the name, he advised me to consult
the Dictionary of Personal Names of the New Kingdom by Ranke, where I might
find the name written in hieroglyphs, as he had written before me, and the
transliteration in German.
The transliteration scheme of the hieroglyphs is international. It is used by
the French, the Italians, the Americans, the Germans, etc. etc. Even though
Ranke’s dictionary is written in German, and the translations of (the
meanings of) the Egyptian names are in German, the transliterations of the
names are not German but international. The French are very proud of their
culture and language. No French Egyptologist who works with this scheme of
transliteration every day by reading and writing French publications in the
field of Egyptology would have called that transliteration German. This
“slip of the pen” again exposes (a) that Bucaille doesn’t know what he
is talking about and (b) there was no prominent French Egyptologist who told
him these things.
Bucaille continues with his fairytale:
I discovered all that had been presumed by the expert, and, moreover, I
was stupefied to read the profession of Haman: “Chief of the workers in
stone-quarries,” exactly what could be deduced from the Qur’an, though the
words of Pharaoh suggest a master of construction. When I came again to the
expert with a photocopy of the page of the Dictionary concerning “Haman”
and showed him one of the pages of the Qur’an where he could read the name,
he was speechless...
As already indicated in the Introduction, that is simply a lie. We will
shortly have a close look at the entry in Ranke’s dictionary and see what it
really says.
Bucaille continues:
Moreover, Ranke had noted, as a reference, a book published in 1906 by the
Egyptologist Walter Wreszinski: the latter had mentioned that the name of
“Haman” had been engraved on a stela kept at the Hof-Museum of Vienna
(Austria). Several years later, when I was able to read the profession written
in hieroglyphs on the stela, I observed that the determinative joined to the
name had emphasised the importance of the intimate of Pharaoh.
Wrong again, and another lie. Wreszinski does not mention Haman at all, with
or without quotation marks.
Here is what we actually find in Ranke’s dictionary7 on page 240 of the
first volume:
This dictionary entry does not really say “Haman”, but this is apparently
the closest approximation that Bucaille was able to find in his quest for
“Haman”. So, this had to do the job. Simply delete the fourth letter of
the transcription and insert the vowels found in the Qur’an, disregarding
how Egyptologists usually pronounce the word.
Moreover, note that Bucaille wrote that he found in Ranke’s dictionary
“all that had been presumed by the expert, and, moreover, I was stupefied to
read the profession of Haman: ‘Chief of the workers in stone-quarries,’
exactly what could be deduced from the Qur'an”. The above image proves:
Ranke does not say anything like that.
Although this person did not bear the name Haman (more about that later when
we discuss the second stage of this hoax), the information about the
profession of the person with this name is found in Wreszinski’s book, not
in Ranke’s dictionary. Bucaille was incredibly sloppy when he devised his
fabricated story.
In Walter Wreszinski’s book on Egyptian inscriptions kept at the K.K. Hof
Museum in Vienna (Aegyptische Inschriften aus dem K.K. Hof Museum in Wien: J C
Hinrichs'sche Buchhandlung, Leipzig, 1906), we find the following entry on
page 130:
Bucaille gets about every detail wrong, even the most insignificant ones. To
clarify, this inscription is not found on a stela, as claimed by Bucaille, but
on a door post of a door, or rather of a gateway between two rooms within a
grave.8
Let’s quote it again. Bucaille writes:
Moreover, Ranke had noted, as a reference, a book published in 1906 by the
Egyptologist Walter Wreszinski: the latter had mentioned that the name of
“Haman” had been engraved on a stela kept at the Hof-Museum of Vienna
(Austria). Several years later, when I was able to read the profession written
in hieroglyphs on the stela, I observed that the determinative joined to the
name had emphasised the importance of the intimate of Pharaoh.
There are many reasons why I don’t believe that Bucaille ever visited that
museum to see the inscription.9 First, he would have noted that the name of
this museum had changed many decades ago. Since Austria lost its monarchy in
1918 (at the end of the First World War), there is no longer a “Hof” and
thus no longer a “Hof-Museum”.10 The museum is now called
“Kunsthistorisches Museum”. The name was officially changed on 1 September
1921.11 Second, if Bucaille had actually seen the artefact in question, he
would not have confused a door post with a stela.12 Third, this door post has
not been on display for a long time. It is not a particularly exciting
artefact and it remained hidden away in the archives of the museum for many
decades (and still is in the archives today). Did they really open their
archives for Bucaille? He does not claim any special treatment here. At face
value, he gives the impression to have visited the museum and looked at that
stone. But that is not possible, and thus further evidence that Bucaille
invented also this part of the story.13 Moreover, it is a mystery how Bucaille
deduces from the above line “the importance of the intimate of Pharaoh”.
The inscription as provided by Wreszinski does not make any kind of reference
to any Pharaoh.14 Bucaille had decided (beforehand) to identify this person
with the Haman of the Qur’an. Therefore, based on the Qur’an, he says that
he was an intimate of the Pharaoh (which one?), as well as speaking of his
great importance, but that is not something that can be deduced from this
inscription. This is a bold claim by Bucaille with absolutely nothing to
support it, and thus further evidence that Bucaille simply invented the whole
tale.
The narrative in the Qur’an makes it quite clear that Haman was an intimate
of Pharaoh and a top government official – if we do not actually have to
conclude that he was the second man in Egypt after the Pharaoh, see Appendix
1.
The title of the person in this inscription, however, means something else.
“Vorsteher” in German refers to a person who is a leading / directing /
overseeing / instructing a particular group of workers, but this word does
certainly not refer to a “minister of construction” in the government.
When Bucaille identifies this “Haman” with the one of the Qur’an he is
making a mockery of his sources. He is not taking seriously the title of this
person as it is given by Wreszinski.
More importantly, Bucaille’s English rendering of Wreszinki’s German
translation of the title is not fully accurate. “Chief of the workers in
stone-quarries” could give the impression that he was the chief of all such
workers in all the stone-quarries in the whole Egyptian empire. That is
clearly not so. Let us look more closely at the hieroglyphic inscription as
provided by Wreszinski:
This line consists of three parts.
is the name of the person, transcribed as hmn-h by Ranke.
means “chief of the stone-quarry workers”, as stated by Wreszinski.
But there is another part, in the middle of the inscription, that was not
translated by Wreszinski.
means “of Amun”.
These signs are part of the title, and the translation of the full title is
“the chief of the stone-quarry workers of Amun”. Just as Wreszinski did
not transliterate the hieroglyphs that he copied, he probably left that middle
part without translation since anyone in the field would know these signs
anyway. Wreszinski’s book was written for experts and researchers in which
not every detail is explained for the layperson that knows nothing about the
matter.15 Therefore, this person, by the name of hmn-h, was not the chief of
all stone-quarry workers in the Empire, but merely the chief of the stone
masons of Amun. What does that mean? The stone masons of Amun referred to in
this inscription probably were the stone masons working at the large temple
complex in Karnak (or perhaps at one of the other, smaller temples of Amun
existing in Egypt). Just as there were the priests of Amun, the singers of
Amun, etc. there were also the stone masons of Amun working on the buildings
and artefacts of these temples. This was the common way to name the people
appointed for certain duties at the temple of Amun. And this restriction, i.e.
being associated with one specific temple of one of the deities of Egypt,
makes it even more unlikely that he was also a member of Pharaoh’s Imperial
Court.
Now, Muslims are free to argue against Wreszinski and make a case that this
title really means something else but they cannot legitimately appeal to
Wreszinski’s translation of the title in support for their theory that this
person was a member of Pharaoh’s government.
Even if the name of that person had been the equivalent of “Haman” (and it
is not!), his title would make clear that it could not have been the Haman of
the Quran, just as most references in Islamic sources to a person bearing the
name Abdallah do not point to the father of Muhammad despite the fact that he
had the same name. Names are usually not unique.
Without really explaining what he means, Bucaille gives a hint of how he,
perhaps, made the final h disappear from the name hmn-h. He writes:
Several years later, when I was able to read the profession written in
hieroglyphs on the stela, I observed that the determinative joined to the name
had emphasised the importance of the intimate of Pharaoh.
Here is Ranke’s entry again:
The first three signs, i.e. , are transcribed as “hmn” and the final
“h” is the transcription of the last two signs: . These two out of five
signs constitute 40% of the name in hieroglyphic writing. What is Bucaille’s
justification to drop them? In Egyptian hieroglyphs there are determinative
characters:
Determinatives or semagrams (semantic symbols specifying meaning) are
placed at the end of a word. These mute characters serve to clarify what the
word is about, ... (Wikipedia, Egyptian hieroglyphs, section Determinatives;
accessed 20 May 2009; bold emphasis mine)
Although Bucaille does not explain at all what he really does (he does not
display the hieroglyphic signs that he argues to be the equivalent of
“Haman”; he does neither quote nor does he give a proper bibliographical
reference to Ranke or Wreszinski, i.e., he does not refer to these books by
their true title, he does not even state which volume of Ranke he refers to or
the page number on which the hieroglyphs are allegedly found; neither does he
explain what he means by “determinative”; etc. etc.), but by referring to
“the determinative joined to the name”, he perhaps wants to claim16 that
the first three signs (which have the transcription “hmn”) are the name of
the person and the last two signs are a determinative, and therefore not
spoken. That way he manages to “silence” the last part of the name,
leaving only “hmn” as the part that is pronounced.17
If that is Bucaille’s claim then this is a dirty trick in order to deceive
the ignorant. Wikipedia does not only tell us what determinatives are, but
also that:
Determinatives are generally not transcribed, but when they are, they are
transcribed by their number in Gardiner's Sign List. (Wikipedia,
Determinatives, section Egyptian hieroglyphes; accessed 20 May 2009; bold
emphasis mine)
Fact is that Ranke DID transcribe these last two characters with a phonetic
value, and that also means that Ranke did NOT consider these signs to be
determinatives.
Bucaille can’t eat his cake and have it too. First he appeals to Ranke’s
entry as evidence for his theory and then he goes on to interpret the
hieroglyphs differently from Ranke. Bucaille is certainly free to propose his
own theory, contradicting Ranke’s transcription, but then he needs to be
honest enough to state that this is his own theory, and he needs to argue
it.18 But that is not what Bucaille does. He gives the impression that he is
in agreement with Ranke, i.e. that the authority of Ranke, a well-known
professor of Egyptology, is behind the claims propagated by Bucaille. That is
a gross misrepresentation and an unacceptable abuse of Ranke’s dictionary.
That is intellectually dishonest.
[Side note: Although the team of Islamic Awareness originally understood
Bucaille exactly in this way, when they actually tried to substantiate
Bucaille’s argument in their revised edition, they dropped this argument and
no longer pursued the attempt of viewing the last two signs as determinatives.
(Compare their two versions in Appendix 4.) Apparently, during their research,
they recognized that this claim was not tenable. However, they substituted
this particular claim of Bucaille with another one that is just as bad. For
details, see the discussion of their claims under “Stage Two”.]
Bucaille’s appeal to Ranke and Wreszinski in support for his claim that the
Haman of the Qur’an has been found in an Egyptian hieroglyphic inscription
is a serious abuse of his sources. Bucaille’s claims are without any support
in the cited references; and he has not provided any other evidence.
Therefore, he has made only empty claims. Bucaille did not present any
evidence for his claims.
Finally, we need to return to Bucaille’s introductory claim:
We will show that the name, as it is written in Arabic in the Qur’an, is
the exact transliteration of the name of a person whose hieroglyphic
orthograph is perfectly known today.
Apart from the fact that the first consonant of the alleged Haman in
hieroglyphs has the wrong phonetic value (as pointed out above), there is
another issue with the postulated “exact transliteration”. In hieroglyphs
only consonants are written.19 Arabic script is similar in the sense that
consonants always have to be written, but for (some) vowels there are
alternative options: They can either be written as full characters in the same
line as the consonants or they can be omitted. If omitted from the
“consonantal text” (rasm) then the vowels are supplied (in the Qur’an)
as vowel marks above or below the consonantal letters. For example, Haman
could be written with the alif as a full letter in the rasm text, or with only
the vowel sign for the a-sound but without an alif in the rasm text (see the
article “The Fifteenth Qira’at”, for another discussion where the
appearance and disappearance of an alif becomes rather essential). In other
words, if we transliterate an alif in the rasm text with an upper-case
“A”, and a vowel mark for the vowel a (but without an alif being present
in the rasm text) with a lower-case “a”, then Haman could be written in
either of these ways in Arabic:
English transliteration
Rasm text
Arabic script
HAMAN
haa’ alif mim alif nun
هامان
HAMaN
haa’ alif mim nun
هامَن
HaMAN
haa’ mim alif nun
هَمان
HaMaN
haa’ mim nun
هَمَن
and each of these possible spellings of the name Haman would be the same
phonetically.
However, fact is that the Qur’an uses only the first version. In each of the
six instances where the name Haman is mentioned in the Qur’an (28:6,8,38;
29:39; 40:24,36), the name is written in the full (plene) spelling with the
two alifs.
This fact can be interpreted in a number of different ways. It could mean the
author of the Qur’an was simply ignorant of the way Egyptian names were
written. If the Egyptian name was written only with consonants, then the
Arabic transliteration should only have the corresponding consonants in the
rasm text. Vowels could then be supplied by additional vowel marks.
On the other hand, maybe the author of the Qur’an did not place those alifs
there ignorantly but very deliberately. Let’s look at the following note
about the original phonetic value of the letter alif in Arabic:
* Initially, the letter ’alif indicated the glottal stop [ʔ], as in
Phoenician. Today it is used, together with yā’ and wāw, as a
mater lectionis, that is to say a consonant standing in for a long vowel (see
below). In fact, over the course of time its original consonantal value has
been obscured, so ’alif now serves either as a long vowel or as graphic
support for certain diacritics (madda and hamza). (Wikipedia, Arabic Alphabet:
Further notes; as accessed on 1 June 2009)
Maybe, by including the two alifs in the rasm text, the author of the Qur’an
wanted to tell the Muslims they should look for a name that contains these two
glottal stops20, since those also exist as hieroglyphic signs (see this
Egyptian Hieroglyphic Alphabet which identifies the hieroglyphic sign of
“arm and hand” with the long-a vowel and the glottal stop). Also in the
Arabic pronunciation of Haman (in the Qur’an), both a-vowels are long (like
in the English word father), not short (like in the English word cut).21
Consequently, Muslims should really look for a hieroglyphic name that is
transcribed this way: hʔmʔn, not merely hmn.
Approximate transliterations may be difficult to reverse since they are
usually not unique. There may be several approximate transliterations for one
hieroglyph. But “exact transliterations” should be unique and reversible.
In any case, Bucaille claims that he showed the Arabic word (i.e.
هامان) to the Egyptologist and from that the
expert derived a hieroglyphic name. If we take that Arabic name, letter by
letter (haa’ alif mim alif nun) and transcribe it by using the hieroglyphic
alphabet here (and making sure to choose the correct hieroglyphic sign for the
h-sound), we arrive e.g. at
or . Several different combinations of hieroglyphic signs are possible
since the linked alphabet shows several options for “m” and “n”. And
many other hieroglyphs may be possible since there exist many more
hieroglyphic characters than those shown in the linked alphabet.
But the Quranic spelling of Haman is certainly not an exact transliteration of
the name found on the door post in the museum in Vienna that Bucaille wants to
sell us as the Haman of the Qur’an. It is not even a reasonable approximate
transliteration.
Now, after we have one (or more) possible hieroglyphic representations of
“Haman”, Muslims can go and search for such names in Egyptian records. Or,
if they don’t like the way I have handled the alifs present in the spelling
of Haman in the Qur’an, they are free to make a better suggestion as long as
they honestly deal with the data and take the spelling of the Qur’an
seriously. I don’t claim to be an expert on these matters. I don’t claim
the above is the only possible or the best way to handle the matter. Let
Muslims come up with a better rendering, but they need to explain what they do
in an open and honest way without trying to manipulate the evidence.
Again: if Muslims want to persuade unbelievers that the reference to the name
Haman in the Qur’an (and that includes the specific spelling of this name)
is a miracle and evidence for the divine origin of this book, then they also
need to take seriously the presence of these two alifs and not simply discard
them.
Bucaille, and Muslims who propagate his claims, need to answer this question:
What is your justification to drop the two alifs from the “exact
transliteration” when looking for a hieroglyphic equivalent?
To summarize: How did Bucaille arrive at his alleged “exact
transliteration”?
1) He drops the last two hieroglyphic signs constituting 40% of the five
hieroglyphs in this name.
2) He drops the two alifs from the Arabic spelling of Haman as given in the
Qur’an, i.e. he drops 40% (two out of the five letters) of the Arabic name.
3) He ignores that the Arabic has three different “H” letters (*) and that
the hieroglyph-H and the H of Haman in the Qur’an are not the same.22 In
other words, not even the first letter agrees with the phonetic value of the
first hieroglyphic sign.23
This means, there are actually only two consonants in which this particular
Egyptian name and the Haman in the Qur’an agree: M and N.
Can non-Muslims be faulted for getting the impression that Bucaille is
manipulating the evidence and is deliberately trying to fool an ignorant
audience? 40% of the Egyptian name correlates with 40% of the Arabic name
(i.e. both names contain an M and an N), and that is supposed to be an
“exact transliteration” and a miracle of the Qur’an that should convince
us that this book is of divine origin?
At the beginning of his argument, Bucaille had written:
The only valid investigation was to ask an expert in Old Egyptian for his
opinion about the presence in the Qur’an of this name.
If only Bucaille (and his team) had followed that approach! Perhaps they even
asked some experts, but because the answers of the Egyptologists were not
satisfactory, they created their own answer and ascribed it to some unnamed
but supposedly “most prominent” Egyptologist.
Interestingly, Bucaille actually claims to have consulted at least two
Egyptologists on this matter:
In the book Reflections on the Qur’an (Réflexions sur le Coran, op.cit.
1989), I have related the result of such a consultation that dates back to a
dozen years ago and led me to question a specialist who, in addition, knew
well the classical Arabic language. One of the most prominent French
Egyptologists, fulfilling these conditions, was kind enough to answer the
question.
There are two consultations mentioned in this paragraph, the first one
allegedly having taken place about a dozen years prior to the publication of
Bucaille’s current book24, and then the meeting with the mysterious “most
prominent Egyptologist” that is narrated in greater detail in the above text
that is under investigation here.25
Conclusion: If Bucaille had really consulted with serious Egyptologists and
accepted their answers, he would not have written what he propagates in his
book. Bucaille was not seriously interested in the truth, and he deliberately
created a hoax. This claim is a deception constructed for the purpose of
persuading people to believe in the Qur’an as revelation from God.
Continue with Stage Two: Islamic Awareness
Footnotes
1 Islamic Awareness quotes most of this text in their article (*), and they
give as reference: M. Bucaille, Moses and Pharaoh: The Hebrews In Egypt, 1995,
NTT Mediascope Inc.: Tokyo, p. 192-193. There are some insignificant
differences (not changing the meaning) between their quotation and the above
text. The text quoted here is taken from Google Books (*) which offers a later
edition of the same book, published 2008 by “Islamic Book Trust / The Other
Press” (*) under the title Moses and Pharaoh in the Bible, Qur'an and
History.
2 This “omission” is particularly telling since in their “Science in the
Qur'an” propaganda, the Muslims will usually drop the name of anyone that
they can find with a degree who supports their position.
3 The New Kingdom period lasted from 1570-1070 BC according to Wikipedia
(source, 20 May 2009) or 1552-1069 BC according to Islamic Awareness (*).
4 What is a “hieroglyphic orthograph” supposed to be? A Google search on
18 May 2009 produced exactly 19 pages containing this expression and in every
single one of them it is merely a quotation of this particular sentence from
Bucaille’s book. It is not found on even one web page that is published by
genuine Egyptologists; no Egyptologist uses this expression. What is more, the
word “orthograph” does not even exist in English dictionaries in the
meaning that Bucaille probably intended. Many dictionaries do not list this
word at all. The Wikipedia dictionary has only one meaning for
“orthograph”, and that has absolutely nothing to do with hieroglyphs. (It
is a term used in geometry describing a certain way of projecting
three-dimensional objects into two dimensions.) The solution to this mystery
is, however, rather simple: In the French edition, Moïse et Pharaon: Les
Hébreux en Egypte : quelles concordances des livres saints avec l'histoire?
[Seghers: Paris, 1995], on page 230, Bucaille uses the expression
“l’orthographe hiéroglyphique”, which is decent French and simply means
“hieroglyphic spelling” or “spelling in hieroglyphs”. There is a
certain measure of irony in this particular mistake: In a statement where
Bucaille makes an exaggerated claim about an alleged “exact
transliteration” he makes an approximate transliteration of a French
expression instead of properly translating it, and thereby turns the English
statement into gibberish.
5 This is true for modern, spoken, languages, for which we know the
pronunciation exactly, and it is even worse for the “dead” language of Old
Egyptian since the experts admit that we still don’t really know in what way
much of the Egyptian language was pronounced. Even Islamic Awareness states
regarding the pronunciation used by scholars of Egyptology: “This
pronunciation bears no relation with the original pronunciation of the
Egyptian language. It is solely a convention to enable communication among the
modern scholars or even commonfolk interested in ancient Egyptians
hieroglyphs. It is not surprising that the scholarly pronunciation of Egyptian
hieroglyphs (even consonants!) also differs.” This quotation from Islamic
Awareness further exposes Bucaille’s claim as utter nonsense.
6 Their statement is good enough for the discussion of Bucaille’s claim but
we will have to look into this matter in more detail when discussing the
claims of Islamic Awareness.
7 Hermann Ranke, Die Ägyptischen Personennamen, Band I (Verzeichnis der
Namen), Verlag von J. J. Augustin in Glückstadt, 1935; also available
online.
8 Not the outermost entrance leading into the building but the door post of an
inner gateway / doorframe leading from one room into another. For
illustrations, see Appendix 3.
9 Although Bucaille doesn’t explicitly say that he visited the museum, that
is clearly what he wants the readers to believe. He doesn’t say “when I
saw a picture of the inscription” but “when I was able to read the
profession written in hieroglyphs on the stela” which creates the impression
that he saw the artefact itself. Moreover, Bucaille had already stated in the
paragraph right before this one that having been advised by the most prominent
Egyptologist to consult the dictionary by Ranke he “was stupefied to read
the profession of Haman: ‘Chief of the workers in stone-quarries,’”.
Therefore, according to Bucaille, he had already discovered the profession
earlier. Moreover, in the first part of the present paragraph he explicitly
refers to the book of Wreszinski before he continues with “Several years
later, when I was able to read the profession written in hieroglyphs on the
stela”, thus giving the impression that when looking at the hieroglyphs
directly there is more to discover than what he could see from merely looking
at the book. Maybe Bucaille is simply incoherent, but I can only examine what
he has written in his book.
10 The German word “Hof” refers to the royal court.
11 Personal correspondence with curator of the historical archive of the
museum. According to him, this historical fact is documented, for example, in:
Herbert Haupt, Das Kunsthistorische Museum. Die Geschichte des Hauses am Ring.
Hundert Jahre im Spiegel Historischer Ereignisse. [Christian
Brandstätter Verlag: Wien, 1991], p. 71f.
12 A stela is a monument (carved or inscribed stone slab or pillar) erected on
a public place to commemorate an important person, or display an announcement
or a law of the king (*, *). A door post of a grave is usually hidden away.
13 Bucaille did not research the matter properly. He simply assumed that the
museum still had the same name and that the artefact is on display there.
However, the door post had been in the archive for many decades, and he could
not have seen it without asking special permission and being personally
brought to the artefact. I personally contacted Michaela Hüttner, the curator
of the Egyptian-Oriental Collection of the Art History Museum in Vienna and
asked whether Bucaille could have examined the door post. She answered: “To
my knowledge, both fragments of the door post were not publicly accessible for
several decades but remained only in our archives. In our files we have
neither a correspondence with Mister Bucaille nor even a note that he or any
other visitor requested to see this artefact in the time between 1975 and
1995. In recent years, we started to wonder about the unusual international
interest in this door post, but the first time we were approached about it was
in the year 2005.”
14 Wreszinski’s book lists only the name and title of the owner of the
grave. The full inscription of the door post, consisting of two standard
offering formulas for the dead person as they can be found in many graves, is
provided in Appendix 3. The conclusion is still the same.
15 It is quite interesting to observe that Bucaille uses only what is
translated but does not use anything from the hieroglyphs in this inscription
that was left untranslated. Everything that was either transliterated or
translated in Ranke and Wreszinski is included in Bucaille’s argument, but
he ignores the part of the professional title which is only seen in the
hieroglyphs provided by Wreszinski but not in the translation (let alone the
rest of the inscription that is found in the book by Reinisch referenced by
Wreszinski). That is a clear indication of Bucaille’s ignorance regarding
hieroglyphs. He didn’t know what they mean despite the claim on the
back-cover (of the second edition) of his book, stating “His classical
studies of the scriptural languages, including literary Arabic, in association
with his knowledge of hieroglyphics, have allowed him to hold a
multidisciplinary inquiry, in which his personal contribution as a medical
doctor has produced conclusive arguments.” Bucaille knew about hieroglyphs
just as much as he knew about honest research and honest reporting about the
sources that he used for the fabrication of this hoax.
16 And that is the most generous reading of Bucaille’s incoherent sentence.
What does the determinative of the name have to do with the profession of this
person? The name of a person is decided by his parents usually long before
this person then enters a profession, and certainly before he can achieve
distinction in it and become an intimate of a pharaoh. Moreover, in order to
read the profession, Bucaille did not have to see the “stela”, he merely
needed to look at Wreszinski’s book. So, does he claim that the
determinative is something that he found on the stela but which is not written
in the book? Or does he think that the determinative of the name is the same
as the title or profession of this person? (Because it ‘determines’ his
standing in society?) Then this would reveal another piece of gross ignorance
on the part of Bucaille.
17 In fact, this is the interpretation which Islamic Awareness attached to
Bucaille’s statement. In footnote 41 of their first version, in which they
try to explain Bucaille’s use of the word “determinative”, they write:
“In hieroglyphic writing words are sometimes written with meaning-signs, or
determinatives, placed at the end of the word. Determinatives do not
contribute to the sounds of the word and so are not transliterated. They
simply help us to get some general idea of the meaning of a word. Most
determinatives serve to indicate the general category of the word they
describe. Determinative signs can also assist when translating old Egyptian.
The ancient Egyptians had a habit of writing sentences without spaces between
words, and without an indication of the start of a new sentence. Because
determinative signs are placed at the end of words, they provide a means to
decipher the sentence.” In their revised second version Islamic Awareness
abandoned this interpretation and they do no longer try to explain what
Bucaille may have meant (see Appendix 4).
18 If this is indeed what Bucaille wanted to say, i.e. that is the
determinative he is referring to when he says, “I observed that the
determinative joined to the name had emphasised the importance of the intimate
of Pharaoh”, then Muslims who propagate Bucaille’s claims need to spell
out how anyone can conclude from these two signs that they “emphasised the
importance of the intimate of Pharaoh”. But before we ask about the
“importance” of this person, we need to ask how these signs, or some other
part of the inscription, give any indication that this person had a personal
relationship to the Pharaoh at all.
19 That is the general consensus of scholars in Egyptology. I stumbled upon
one dissenting voice in this blog, but cannot evaluate myself how much merit
these thoughts have.
20 Since the story of Moses, Pharaoh and Haman is placed roughly 1800 to 2000
years before Muhammad, it would not be far-fetched to assume that the early
pronunciation of the alif should be used for this name.
21 Therefore, appropriately, the name is spelled “Hâmân”, i.e. with
a-circumflex, in the French edition of Bucaille’s book.
22 That is one reason why Bucaille’s hoax works better in French and English
(which both have only one letter H) than in Arabic where the difference of the
transliteration would be seen immediately. When transliterating the Egyptian
hieroglyphic name correctly into Arabic it would start with a different
consonant than the Haman of the Qur’an, making the argument suspicious from
the start.
23 Maybe this was of no concern to Bucaille because his first language is
French, and in French the letter h is not pronounced anyway? In French the
letter h is still written but it remains silent. In any case, this observation
shows what a sloppy linguist Bucaille was. Actually, it is an insult to all
linguists to refer to Bucaille by such a title. Note that the backflap of his
book emphasizes his (alleged) study and knowledge of the ancient languages,
stating, “His classical studies of the scriptural languages, including
literary Arabic, in association with his knowledge of hieroglyphics, ...”
But it cannot be merely ignorance since Bucaille deliberately manipulated the
H when he tries to dismiss the connection between Haman in the Qur’an and
Haman in the Bible, see Appendix 2.
24 Moses and Pharaoh: The Hebrews In Egypt, was first published in 1994
according to the World Catalogue (*) and various other references to this book
that are found on the web. The publishing date of 1995 given by Islamic
Awareness is most likely a typo. (Or does there exist a later reprint which
they used?) In any case, whether it was 1994 or 1995 is of little consequence
here.
25 From Bucaille’s claims we can derive the following chronology: Give or
take a year, the first consultation supposedly took place in about 1982, about
a dozen years before the publication of his book, Moses and Pharaoh: The
Hebrews In Egypt, and Bucaille’s alleged visit to the Museum must obviously
have taken place before the publication of the book in 1994, but several years
after the consultation with “the most prominent French Egyptologist”
(based on Bucaille’s words “Several years later, when I was able to read
the profession written in hieroglyphs on the stela”). The most natural
reading is that the second consultation took place after the publication of
Bucaille’s earlier book, Réflexions sur le Coran, in 1989. Thus, the second
consultation with the greater authority, the most prominent Egyptologist,
should be dated to the time frame of 1989 – 1992 and the visit to the Museum
within the years 1991 – 1994. Less likely, but perhaps possible is the
reading that the second consultation took place shortly after the first one,
i.e. in 1982 at the earliest, and the visit to the museum somewhere between
1985 and 1994. However, it would be unnatural to report only about the first
consultation in the earlier book when the more important one had already taken
place. Finally, in the French edition, published in 1995, Bucaille speaks of
“d’une quinzaine d’années” which means “about 15 years” instead
of “a dozen” which is his claim in the English edition of 1994. One
interpretation of this contradiction is that Bucaille simply doesn’t know
what he is talking about, or it doesn’t really matter to him how he dates
his consultations since they are invented anyway. Nevertheless, if we assume
the French date to be the intended one, then that would push the above
calculation back about 2-3 years. In any case, this results in another piece
of the evidence that Bucaille lied and invented the whole story. (See my
correspondence with the museum, already mentioned above. The official
statement as issued by the curator of the museum is also found in the press
release in Appendix 7.)
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