(), died , was a Nabataean (Aramaic-speaking, rural Iraqi) agriculturalist, toxicologist, and alchemist born in Qussīn, near Kufa in Iraq. He is the author of the Nabataean Agriculture (), an influential Arabic work on agriculture, astrology, and magic. Already by the end of the tenth century, various works were being falsely attributed to him. One of these spurious writings, the ("The Book of the Desire of the Maddened Lover for the Knowledge of Secret Scripts", perhaps ), is notable as an early proposal that some Egyptian hieroglyphs could be read phonetically, rather than only logographically. Name His full name was . Just like the semi-legendary Jabir ibn Hayyan, he carried the despite the fact that he is not known to have engaged in or to have written anything about Sufism. The is a variant of ('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. Biography Ibn Wahshiyya was likely born in (Iraq) and died in the year 318 of the Islamic calendar (). Very little else is known about his life. Our main source of information are Ibn Wahshiyya's own writings, as well as the short entry in Ibn al-Nadim's (died ) , where he is explicitly said to be among the "authors whose life is not well known". Ibn Wahshiyya himself claimed to be a descendant of the Neo-Assyrian king Sennacherib (), whom the rural, Aramaic-speaking population of southern Iraq (known to Arabic authors of Ibn Wahshiyya's time as 'Nabataeans') revered as their illustrious ancestor. Despite the fact that these Iraqi 'Nabataeans' (who are not to be confused with the ancient Nabataeans of Petra, with whom they have nothing in common) were generally looked down upon as lowly peasants, Ibn Wahshiyya identified himself as one of them. Ibn Wahshiyya's self-identifaction as 'Nabataean' seems credible given the accurate use of Aramaic terms in his works. Works Ibn Wahshiyya's works were written down and redacted after his death by his student and scribe Abū Ṭālib al-Zayyāt. They were used not only by later agriculturalists, but also by authors of works on magic like Maslama al-Qurṭubī (died 964, author of the Ghāyat al-ḥakīm, "The Aim of the Sage", Latin: Picatrix), and by philosophers like Maimonides (1138–1204) in his Dalālat al-ḥāʾirīn ("Guide for the Perplexed",