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:

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