Okasha El Daly, "The reception of ancient Egypt in the medieval Muslim world"

In this lecture, Egyptian archaeologist Okasha El Daly fills a gap of about a thousand years in the history of Egyptology. Contrary to the prevailing view that the conversion of Egyptians first to Christianity and then Islam ended interest in their own heritage, they continued to study their own past with great pride. Many medieval Arab scholars visited Egypt to study its heritage and ancient scripts. This interest in ancient Egyptian scripts led to many scholarly attempts to decipher them. Here is a brief study of the motivations behind their interest and the degrees of their success in the decipherment and understanding of ancient Egypt. Nearly all the writers interested in Egyptian hieroglyphs were alchemists; many were also called Sufis or Mystics (for example, Jabir, Dhu Al-Nun, and Ibn Waḥshiyah).  The fame of Egypt as the land of science, wisdom, and mysticism created a welcoming environment for the reception of ancient Egyptian thought and arts among medieval Muslim scholars and the general public.