On Ibn Wahshiyya and the Dating of the Legend of King Surid

​I wanted to share a bit of information about the medieval Arabic pyramid myth that I recently came across since it helps to correct a small but important problem I encountered in writing my Legends of the Pyramids five years ago. As you will recall, the myth’s most developed form holds that an antediluvian Egyptian king named Surid built the Great Pyramid to protect science and knowledge from the Great Flood, which was foretold in a vision. However, that version is attested a century after an earlier form, involving Hermes Trismegistus preserving science and knowledge in the temple of Akhmim (also called Ikhmim or Panopolis) after foreseeing the coming of the Flood.

​The underlying story, of course, is the Judeo-Christian tale, dating back at least to Flavius Josephus, that Enoch (whom Islam equated with Hermes) foretold the coming destruction of the Earth and built pillars inscribed with scientific knowledge to withstand fire and flood. Hermes came to be identified with Enoch in the Middle Ages.
 
The progression of the myth has always been fairly clear. It began in Late Antiquity among hermetic philosophers and alchemists, probably operating in and around the old Egyptian temple of Min at Akhmim, long a center for both Hermeticism and alchemy. The three oldest references to the myth all support this interpretation: Abu Ma’shar (c. 850 CE) says that Hermes built the Temple at Akhmim to preserve science and wisdom from the Flood. Al-Mas’udi (before 956 CE) also associates the legend with the Temple of Akhmim, without mentioning Hermes, but also linking the secret wisdom to alchemy. Al-Nadim (c. 997-998 CE) knows the Great Pyramid as the tomb of Hermes, but he associates inscriptions of secret knowledge with the temples, where he identifies the secret wisdom as alchemy.
 
In time, as Islam became less tolerant of Hermeticism, the old mythology of Hermes, Fallen Angels, and alchemical secrets (which itself dates back to the Asclepius and the writings of Zosimus of Panopolis—Panopolis being Akhmim) fell out of favor, and the Enochian ideas gave way to a more Quranically acceptable tale, with Surid substituting for Hermes. Confusion over the meaning of the Coptic-Arabic word birba, which means “temple” but became conflated with “pyramid,” helped encourage the swapping of the Great Pyramid for the Temple of Akhmim.
 
However, this outline has some evidence that doesn’t quite fit. One piece is Murtaḍā ibn al-ʻAfīf’s statement that the lost books of Abu Ma’shar make reference to the Surid story. Comparing Murtada’s text with the parallel passage preserved in the Akhbār al-zamān, written more than two centuries earlier, which is nearly word-for-word identical, shows that it is likely a copyist’s error where a citation to the preceding reference to magic talismans during the supposed Amalekite invasion, attributed to Abu Ma’shar’s Book of Thousands in the Akhbār al-zamān, was attached to the wrong sentence. Murtaḍā also attributes the story to Abu Ma’shar’s Book of Miraculous Dreams, which the Akhbār al-zamān does not do. There is not enough information to identify whether this text is the same as Abu Ma’shar’s lost Kitāb tafsīr al-manāmāt min al-nujūm (Book on the Interpretation of Dreams from the Stars), but from the little information that exists, it seems that the Miraculous Dreams is possibly a later work passing under Abu Ma’shar’s name since the genuine book was about using astrology to interpret dreams and the cited book is about prophetic dreams. No book about prophetic dreams occurs in al-Nadim’s list of Abu Ma’shar’s works in the Fihrist (discourse 7, section 2). Alternatively, and perhaps more likely, the French translator of Murtaḍā (for only the French translation survives) has mistaken an Arabic line about the dream being in the book for a book about a dream, creating a title out of a description.
 
More challenging is a reference to Surid in Ibn Wahshiyya’s Kitab Shawq al-Mustaham (known as Ancient Alphabets Explained in English) in middle 800s, even before Abu Ma’shar. In that book, we read that Surid is an ancient philosopher and the inventor of the al-Birbawi alphabet, which is supposed to be the secret writing of the Egyptian temples.
 
The dating does not fit.
 
The problem is that most scholarship I had read gave only two options, that the text was authentic or that it was a Renaissance forgery, neither option being fully convincing. It turns out that the late Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila had offered a more convincing solution back in 2006, but it was not widely cited in the best-known scholarship on pyramid myths, given that the alleged work of Ibn Wahshiyya does not mention pyramids. The fact that the argument is contained in a footnote in a book on a different work probably didn’t help. A footnote in Hämeen-Anttila’s The Last Pagans of Iraq: Ibn Wahshiyya and His Nabatean Agriculture (2006) provided specific reasons to believe that the text is indeed a forgery, but one from c. 1020-1030 CE, not the Renaissance:

The author of the Shawq refers to his travels in Egypt (e.g., his visit to as-Sa‘id, p. 115) and is very interested in Egypt in general, whereas Ibn Wahshiyya never refers to any visits to Egypt in the Nabatean Agriculture; he, in fact, has next to nothing to say about Egypt. Likewise, the grossly anachronistic reference (Shawq, p. 135) to “the Caliph ‘Abdalmalik ibn Marwan,” dated to 241 A.H. (!) is quite unlike the exactness of Ibn Wahshiyya. In my opinion, the real author might be the copyist of the original, Hasan ibn Faraj, an otherwise unknown descendant of Sinan ibn Thabit ibn Qurra, who dated his work to 413 (p. 136).

​If this is correct, that fixes the chronological problems. The Surid story therefore is an outgrowth of the Hermetic one. Indeed, placing the Ancient Alphabets around 1020 also fits better in terms of what it says about Surid. Recall that he is supposedly the inventor of the al-Birbawi alphabet. Well, according to “Going Egyptian in Medieval Arabic Culture,” a 2017 book chapter by Isabel Toral-Niehoff and Annette Sundermeyer, other Islamic texts of the era attribute that same alphabet to—wait for it—Idris, who is Enoch and Hermes Trismegistus!
 
This fits perfectly the with the notion that Enochian material (i.e. Christian stories inspired by the Book of Enoch) was revised to eliminate references to fallen angels mating with humans, which is impossible in Islam, and the Watchers narrative, which is incompatible with Islamic ideas about the perfection of Allah’s creation. Traces remain here and there—the Akhbār al-zamān mistakenly retains a reference to antediluvian leaders as “Watchers,” the pre-Flood kings are called “giants” (implying they are Nephilim), and several texts can conclusively be shown to trace back to the Christian monk Annianus’s chronicle which was centered on the Watchers, etc.
 
So, if we accept the proposal that Ancient Alphabets Explained is from the 1020s rather than the 860s, the story of how the pyramid myth developed loses almost all of the confounding data and flows rather smoothly from Late Antique alchemical story to Islamic historiography.