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.

[4] 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),[5] is notable as an early proposal that some Egyptian hieroglyphs could be read phonetically, rather than only logographically.

[8] The nisba al-Kasdānī is a variant of al-Kaldānī ('Chaldaean'), a term referring to the native inhabitants of Mesopotamia that was also used in Greek, but (given the known -shd-/-ld- variation in Babylonian language) may perhaps be based on a living oral tradition indigenous to Iraq.

[19] Another work attributed to Ibn Wahshiyya is a treatise on toxicology called the Book of Poisons, which combines contemporary knowledge on pharmacology with magic and astrology.

[21] Pseudo-Ibn Wahshiyya's 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, see above), has been claimed by Egyptologist Okasha El-Daly to have correctly identified the phonetic value of a number of Egyptian hieroglyphs.

[23] However, other scholars have been highly sceptical about El-Daly's claims on the accuracy of these identifications, which betray a keen interest in (as well as some basic knowledge of) the nature of Egyptian hieroglyphs, but are in fact for the most part incorrect.