Category:

The Surprising History of the Sea Monsters That Destroyed Alexandria

4/20/2026

This weekend, I worked on translating chapters from ibn ’Abd al-Hakam and al-Mas‘udi on the foundation of Alexandria. These chapters contain a mixture of history, legends associated with the Alexander Romance, and fossilized bits of more ancient mythology, particularly references to the Arabian myth cycle of Shaddād bin ’Ād, the legendary builder of Iram of the Pillars and the pyramids. In Arabic myths, Alexandria wasn’t merely the city Alexander built but rather the successor to a marvelous ancient city called Raqūdah. As al-Marqizi put it in a marginal note found in his personal manuscript of his book Al-Ḫabar, “Alexander did not found the city of Alexandria as it already existed, being known as Raqūdah (Rhacotis). He rather restored the city and made it the capital instead of Memphis” (trans. Mayte Penelas).

3 Comments

New in My Library: Texts on the Antichrist and the End Times

4/9/2026

5 Comments

I wanted to share with you a little of what I have been working on this week. In my Library, you'll find a number of new entries, including a brand new section devoted to the Alexander Romance, the Late Antique novel that changed literature forever. I have included a number of public domain translations of the Romance and its offshoots, including my translation of the Coptic fragments, and summaries of the major texts that have never been translated into English.

I became interested in the myth included in some version of the Romance about Alexander locking the tribes of Gog and Magog behind impenetrable gates in the north. This myth found its way into the prophecy of the Tiburtine Sibyl, which I had previously translated, and then into the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius, which I have translated since, to my surprise, it was only translated into English in the 21st century, in a translation that remains under copyright. Since these latter texts also revolve around the End Times and the Antichrist, I also added my translation of the early and late versions of the letter Adso sent to the Queen of France around 950 CE, The Origin and Time of the Antichrist, providing the first biography of the Antichrist.

This text was highly influential in both content and form, and it's all the more relevant now because Peter Thiel is traveling the world delivering lectures on the biography of the Antichrist, which in turn are influencing the tech industry and Thiel's acolytes in government.

I have some ideas about possibly working this into a book, but I am not sure whether it is worth the time and effort, given how little money books make.

5 Comments

Who Was "Phanophis"? Unearthing Bar Hebraeus's First King of Egypt

3/31/2026

4 Comments

This is a weird little rabbit hole I found myself in this weekend, and I hope that you find it interesting, too. I have been working with a number of medieval Arabic histories of Ancient Egypt, and for a change of pace, I thought I would look at the medieval Syriac histories of Egypt to see how they differ. I translated the sections of Gregory Bar Hebraeus’s Chronography (c. 1284 CE) on Egypt (since the standard translation is under copyright until January), and this raised a question. Bar Hebraeus gave the name of the first king of Egypt as “Phanophis,” which was otherwise unknown to me, and scholarly analysis in the literature on Bar Hebraeus was about as useless as you would expect. Very little had ever been done, most of it old, little of it extending beyond Bar Hebraeus and his immediate source, and a lot of it obviously wrong. So where did this name come from? Little did I know how hard it would be to find out.

4 Comments

Al-Idrisi's Legend of Hermes' Antediluvian Temple in Akhmim

3/27/2026

2 Comments

I had long known that Muhammad al-Idrisi, the famed twelfth-century geographer, had written a brief passage about the pyramids in his masterpiece, the Tabula Rogeriana (1154 CE). It was almost wholly descriptive and of relatively little interest. (It should not be confused with the book by the other al-Idrisi, Abu Jafar, who wrote a treatise on the pyramids, which has never been translated.) However, I discovered yesterday that the surrounding chapter on Egyptian geography was actually only one of two chapters on Egypt in the book, and the other contains a surprising treasure that provided a little bit more evidence for my longstanding thesis that the myth of antediluvian pyramids was originally told of the Temple of Akhmim as a local adaptation of Enoch’s Pillars of Wisdom.

2 Comments

Ibn 'Abd al-Hakam and the Secret Source of the "General Estoria's" History of Egypt

3/23/2026

0 Comments

After several weeks of investigation, I am happy to provide the closest possible solution to the mystery of where Alfonso X got his history of Ancient Egypt in the General Estoria (c. 1270 CE)—and it’s a solution that none of the experts, including the modern editors of both editions of the General Estoria as well as Juan Udaondo Alegre, who wrote about it in his 2024 book The Spanish Hermes, discovered. And now you can see it for yourself for the first time here.

0 Comments

Round Up: Trump Alien Website, Debunking "Professor Jiang," and Medieval Sources

3/18/2026

8 Comments

Yesterday, according to reporting from Steven Greenstreet of the New York Post, the White House registered the domain names alien.gov and aliens.gov, presumably in conjunction with Pres. Trump’s executive order mandating the release of documents related to space aliens.

But I want to start today by pointing you toward Flint Dibble’s new video on “Professor Jiang,” a Chinese pseudohistorian who claims to use something called “predictive history” to foretell world events. Jiang Xuequin is not actually a professor in the Western sense—he teaches secondary school in Beijing—nor is he trained as a historian. In his videos, he says that he does not do research but instead relies on vibes. This has led him to conclude that Roman history never happened, putting him in the company of Jean Hardouin (1646-1729), who was the first to argue that ancient Rome was a hoax, and the Russian nationalist pseudohistorian Anatoly Fomenko, who similarly argued that ancient Rome had been fabricated from Byzantine history. Dibble debunks Jiang’s claims and his approach to history.

8 Comments

An Ancient Text on Nebuchadnezzar That Might Solve a Medieval Literary Mystery

3/12/2026

0 Comments

Since there is no new episode of Ancient Aliens tonight, I thought I would use the time to discuss a surprising discovery I stumbled across that provides a plausible solution to the mystery of “lost” second part of medieval writer Ibrāhīm ibn Waṣīf Shāh’s Book of Marvels, his history of ancient Egypt. Regular readers will recall that Alfonso X cited this book as his source for the history of Egypt in the General Estoria (c. 1270 CE), but that the passages he attributes to the author, under the name Alguazif, do not match the surviving fragments of his work. I think I found the source text that stands behind both Alfonso’s narrative and the scattered references in the surviving fragments of ibn Waṣīf Shāh—and it took me completely by surprise!

0 Comments

On Ibn Wahshiyya and the Dating of the Legend of King Surid

3/7/2026

2 Comments

I wanted to share a bit of information about the medieval Arabic pyramid myth that I recently came across since it helps to correct a small but important problem I encountered in writing my Legends of the Pyramids five years ago. As you will recall, the myth’s most developed form holds that an antediluvian Egyptian king named Surid built the Great Pyramid to protect science and knowledge from the Great Flood, which was foretold in a vision. However, that version is attested a century after an earlier form, involving Hermes Trismegistus preserving science and knowledge in the temple of Akhmim (also called Ikhmim or Panopolis) after foreseeing the coming of the Flood.

2 Comments

Lue Elizondo Claims Vatican Showed Him an Ancient UFO Account (But It Didn't)

2/25/2026

4 Comments

Glenn Beck interviewed Lue Elizondo by phone for his podcast yesterday, and Elizondo made an unfounded claim that the Vatican showed him evidence of ancient flying saucers. Beck—who has used his platform in the past to claim a lost white race inhabited ancient America—promoted the supposed revelation online with hyperbolic headlines: “Former UFO official saw ANCIENT EVIDENCE of aliens at the Vatican?!” Meanwhile, the supposed “evidence” is (a) not secret, (b) well-known, and (c) has nothing to do with aliens except in the minds of ufologists, as I will show you below. This, though, is yet another example of what ignoramuses who don’t know what they are talking about do not actually create knowledge by bouncing their ignorance off one another.

4 Comments

Some Interesting New Insights into Medieval Legends about Ancient Egypt

2/11/2026

2 Comments

I wanted to call your attention to some new additions to my Library. As most of you know, I have spent more than a decade researching the medieval Arab-Islamic pyramid myth, which told of how either Hermes Trismegistus or Surid built the temples and pyramids of Egypt before Noah’s Flood to preserve scientific knowledge. I have finally completed some of the translation work I had long mean to do but hadn’t quite gotten around to, as a supplement to the many translations I had already posted, and the material contains some interesting insights into the growth and development of the myth, which I had previously discussed in my book The Legends of the Pyramids (2021).

2 Comments

<<Previous

The Surprising History of the Sea Monsters That Destroyed Alexandria

New in My Library: Texts on the Antichrist and the End Times

Who Was "Phanophis"? Unearthing Bar Hebraeus's First King of Egypt

Al-Idrisi's Legend of Hermes' Antediluvian Temple in Akhmim

Ibn 'Abd al-Hakam and the Secret Source of the "General Estoria's" History of Egypt

Round Up: Trump Alien Website, Debunking "Professor Jiang," and Medieval Sources

An Ancient Text on Nebuchadnezzar That Might Solve a Medieval Literary Mystery

On Ibn Wahshiyya and the Dating of the Legend of King Surid

Lue Elizondo Claims Vatican Showed Him an Ancient UFO Account (But It Didn't)

Some Interesting New Insights into Medieval Legends about Ancient Egypt

Author

Newsletters

Categories

Terms & Conditions

Archives