Haman in the Koran - a follow-up

Haman or Hemenhetep - a follow-up

Hi guys,

This is a quick follow-up to my Haman video.

When I was in Germany in May and June, I was in contact with some people, who are in touch with Professor Emeritus Dr. Jürgen Osing, a scholar of Egyptology at the University of Berlin and a renowned expert in the field. They kindly provided me with the original correspondence he had, regarding the naming convention surrounding the Haman in the Koran and Professor Osing agreed that they could be used to clarify the situation I already mentioned, based on his open letter from August 2009.

As we have seen in the last few days, Muslim miracle seekers are currently being hit hard by being confronted with reality as well as the truth and are caught out when using their dishonest tricks and tactics. One such tactic I demonstrated in my Haman video, where I showed that sites such as Islamic-Awareness.org simply use the name of a renowned scholar, misquote him and, when he protests and corrects them, simply ignore this.

} page http://www.islamic-awareness.org/Quran/Contrad/External/haman.html re Osing

Just to show I am not making anything up or inventing things, here are some examples of where Professor Osing is mentioned in his university, conferences, events and where he is cited or a member of.

Islamic-Awareness is trying to follow the path laid out by Bucaille and has had to change their document over time as more and more facts emerge. We can see this miraculous evolution over time in the different versions, where today they are leaving it as an open question. One simply has to wonder, when the next step occurs and renders this page extinct. A reason for this could be that more and more people object to being wrongly cited. One of these is Professor Osing. Islamic-Awareness writes:

There are early examples (in plural form) of a merger between /h/ and /h/ from the New Kingdom Period mentioned by Jürgen Osing.^[70]

citing his book

"Die Nominalbildung Des Ägyptischen: Anmerkungen Und Indices", 1976, Deutsches Archäologisches Institut: Abteilung Kairo, Verlag Philipp von Zabern: Mainz / Rhein, Note 47, pp. 367-368

as proof and making it look as though this is what Professor Osing wrote.

It seems that German professors are more interested in intellectual honesty and have more integrity than French gastroenterologists or Canadian anatomists, fortunately for us and all truth-loving individuals. But, in all fairness I need to acknowledge that if Moore were to retract his statements and admit the truth today, he - and his family - would not exactly have a happy life.

But then, others did not get themselves in such a mess. In his recent YouTube video, Prof Kröner clarified his statements regarding geology and the Koran when he found he was misquoted in the old video: "Western Scientists Attest to the Koran".

Well, now Professor Osing has consented for his original correspondence, in addition to his open letter, to be publicised to show what he really said and what he thinks of the way Islamic-Awareness is abusing his name and reputation.

In his open letter,

my translation of which you can find below, he calls the approach of Islamic-Awareness "self-righteous", as Ranke - as do other Egyptologists - consider the -h to be part of the name and not something that can simply be dropped.

What Islamic-Awareness is aware of - pardon the pun -  is that there are several problems with the name and its vocalisation of the Egyptian inscription and in the Koranic texts. So on top of suggesting that the last part of the name is superfluous, they also claim that the two types of h do not present a problem, as Professor Osing has said so, to try and make the name Haman of the Koran a match with the Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Rebutting Islamic-Awareness Professor Osing is adamant that the alleged merging of the two types of h for the case of Haman has never been postulated by him and that he is only aware of one single example where this merging has happened during this era - and that he doubts that this is the case here.

He also points out that this is a secondary vocalisation, further moving it away from the possible interpretations by Muslim miracle seekers and putting it firmly into the realm of religious wishful thinking.

This is a typical example of quote mining an expert for the benefit of improving the Koran.

Professor Osing then repeats his concerns regarding the morphology of the name, as neither Hebrew nor Arabic present an etymological background for the name. While it does in Persian.

Using plain facts and not wild speculation, he summarises:

1. There is a discrepancy in the vocalisation of the first and last h

2. The two vowels are long in Arabic, the equivalent of which has not been found in Egyptian hieroglyphs

3. Profession: the Egyptian person is described as a local foreman in a quarry of Amun

In addition, the usage of fired bricks was not used in Egypt at the time to construct large or tall buildings or monuments.

My own conclusion is: there is no reason to assume that the Haman of the Koran has been identified using the door post in the museum in Vienna as evidence.

Let's take a look at their second expert quote.

Carsten Peust is not one of the top experts in the field and worked as assistant in the Institute. In his book: Egyptian phonology: an introduction to the phonology of a dead language, he is quoted as saying:

It is presently impossible to decide whether the primary distinction of /h/ and /ḥ/ [i.e., /h/] was one of voice or one of place of articulation.

Now this would indeed mean that there could be a controversy surrounding the pronunciation of this ominous h. But what IslamicAwareness has done is deliver a typical quote mine, as the section is about the Coptic era. IslamicAwareness is off by roughly 1000 years. It would have been more honest to also refer to the beginning of the section and then show the conclusion on page 99, which is all about the merger of the two h's in Coptic. The book is available online so anyone can check the original.

This shows that if one just accepts the apparently oh so rational explanations of Muslim apologetics, one does so at one's own peril. Every single time I check these absolute and monstrous claims I find they are based at best on what you find plenty of in the Arabian desert: sand.

Better luck next time.

Thanks for your time.

Sources:

http://www.islamic-awareness.org/Quran/Contrad/External/haman.html

http://www.islaminstitut.de/Artikelanzeige.41+M5fff2d8c174.0.html

J. Osing, die Nominalbildung des Ägyptischen

C. Peust, Egyptian phonology: an introduction to the phonology of a dead language, P 54ff.
http://diglit.ub.uniheidelberg.de/diglit/peust1999/0099?sid=8780ba563e6a623fb4a5b9b9ab31dc30

From:

Prof. Dr. Juergen Osing (em.)

Egyptology Seminar

University of Berlin

Germany

Dear Sirs,

The name on the two Egyptian jambs or door-posts are decipherable easy enough. They both appear at the end of the text columns as h mn-h (both h marked as emphatic h), as indicated by Wreszinski and Ranke.

Whether or not a longer form of the name exists is of secondary importance for me, when comparing the name with the name Haman mentioned in the Koran. What we have on the doorpost is the name h mn-h - and these are the sounds to be considered.

This h mn-h consists of the name of the god h mn and an element which cannot be determined with any certainty, a biliteral sign hw, which was frequently used in the New Kingdom era in connection with the "Papyrus scroll" as a phonetic complement for the consonant h. If Ranke transliterates the name as h mn-h it is self-righteous to explain the question mark "As if suggesting „h“ was not actually part of the name" as Islamic-Awareness.org is doing (as of July 2009) and to completely eliminate it. The interpretation of the adjunct h might be questionable, but not the existence as part of the name, which in addition is then followed by "with true voice, just" for the dead body.

In comparison with the name of the Arabic Haman we have two discrepancies:

1. The Arabic version lacks the h at the end of the name.

2. The type of sound, the phonetics, of the first h is different. It is correct that in the Egyptian language a merging of sounds from the emphatic to a normal h has been observed during the 19.-21. Dynasty when used in conjunction of an m (see my book „Nominalbildung des Ägyptischen“, Mainz 1976, S. 367 f.) However, during the New Kingdom period, which is where the door-posts where dated, this merging were extremely rare. I have only found one single example of this during the time period in question. The merging is considered as secondary vocalisation. I find it highly questionable to assign this secondary vocalisation to a source which is assumed to be of a godly authority. The discrepancy of the different sounding h's is secondary in my opinion, as there are a number of additional factors which exclude the affiliation.

According to the Koran, Haman is commissioned to construct a tall building using burnt bricks. It is remarkable that an Egyptian King somehow does not assign the construction of such a huge building endeavour to his "Foreman of Construction for the King", but to an unimportant "Foreman of quarry workers". The latter usually had only some local influence and was hardly qualified to produce these bricks (presumably in huge numbers).

As for the usage of burnt or fired bricks we need to consider the huge amount of buildings originating from the Pharaoh era, which are conserved until today, both colossal and smaller, all made from dried bricks. In addition we see that only a tiny part of the buildings erected during the 19. Dynasty, which sees the emergence and increasing usage of burnt bricks in the Eastern Nile Delta, especially when considering colossal or monumental buildings, use burnt bricks. (A. J. Spencer, Brick Architecture in Ancient Egypt. Warminster 1979, passim)

On semantics I want to stress once again that the name Haman itself is etymologically isolated in the Arabic and Hebrew language and would be in all Semitic languages, as there is no root *hmn or any known type of morphology. As an Egyptian name, Haman would be highly unusual and completely unknown to date.

The origin of the name would point more in another direction (e.g. Persian Humajun „the Great“, see Köhler-Baumgartner).

It is not only due to these facts that the name Haman initially reminded me of the Persian Haman, who, in the book of Esther was known as Seal Keeper and Prime Minister of Xerxes and the declared enemy of the Jews, is said to have found a highly inglorious death. In the Hebrew texts the name is assigned the same phonetics as in the Arabic texts - both relating to vowels and consonants (see Köhler-Baumgartner).

The mentioning of such a character is limited to the scripture of the Jews (and Christianity) and Islam. The amount of congruence between the two people named Haman in my opinion suggests a direct link.

The vision of a tall building rising into heavens and the hubristic confrontation of the god of the Israelites could have been reminiscent of the Tower of Babel. In Mesopotamia these brick towers were quite common. According to Genesis 11:3 the Tower of Babel was constructed using smoothened and burnt or fired bricks.

Best Regards