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

​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. 

​If you have been following my research, you know that the General Estoria contains a long narrative about the history of ancient Egypt in two parts. The first part covers the time from the Flood down to the aftermath of the Exodus, focusing primarily on the (fictitious) Queen Doluca (Dalūka), while the second part covers at length Nebuchadnezzar’s (also fictitious) invasion and conquest of Egypt and continues down to the Islamic conquest. Both are attributed to an Arabic historian named “Alguazif,” typically understood to be Ibrāhīm ibn Waṣīf Shāh, also known as al-Waṣīfi. The trouble is that the stories Alfonso attributes to Alguazif are not found in the surviving fragments of Ibrāhīm ibn Waṣīf Shāh’s Great Book of Marvels.
 
Many scholars, like Inés Fernández-Ordóñez, concluded that Alfonso had access to a lost book by ibn Waṣīf Shāh, while Udaondo Alegre argued that Alfonso’s account was essentially a fraud that his team of writers invented themselves and sprinkled with a few sentences from ibn Waṣīf Shāh’s known text. He pointed to the unlikelihood of an Arabic writer of giving pharaohs the “suspiciously” Spanish-sounding names Gómez and Lucas as evidence of a Castilian origin for the story.
 
I can now reveal that Udaondo Alegre is provably wrong.
 
A few days ago, I got out the two-volume French translation of al-Maqrizi’s Al-Khitat (c. 1420 CE) to see what the medieval historian said about Nebuchadnezzar in the hope of tracking down more of the legends. And I was shocked to find him referencing a pharaoh named “King Lucas”! This led me to sift through the passages of the Khitat to identify his source, and since al-Maqrizi is generally (though not always) good about naming where he quoted from, he helpfully obliged. He got it from the Conquest of Egypt, North Africa and al-Andalus by ibn ‘Abd al-Hakam, which also happens to be the oldest surviving Arabic-language history of Egypt.
 
Al-Maqrizi quoted from ibn ‘Abd al-Hakam extensively, though not always the parts I needed to see. There were also some puzzling omissions, such as the name of the king Nebuchadnezzar fought. Could it be Gómez?
 
There were just enough hints for me to realize that ibn ‘Abd al-Hakam’s narrative must have born a suspicious similarity to Alfonso’s. Unfortunately, no one had ever translated it into English. Scholars had long focused on the extremely valuable later section covering the Islamic conquests, of which they are a very early account, but the mythological and legendary section was largely ignored. (Interestingly, this was also the case later in the Middle Ages, when ibn ‘Abd al-Hakam had fallen out of favor.) I do not read Arabic, so Charles C. Torrey’s 1922 critical edition left something of a mystery for me. His introduction, though, was helpful in pointing me to a nearly forgotten 1856 Latin translation. Torrey said that it was incomplete and abridged, though, crucially, the part I needed to see was almost complete, minus one section of little importance to my purposes.
 
So, to cut a long story short, I prepared a translation of the Latin text while using machine-aided translation to translate the Arabic text. It’s a good thing that I had the Latin to compare to the machine translation, since most software now uses AI to generate the translations, and that in turn gives them a penchant for pulling similar texts from their data set or the internet rather than actually translating the words literally. Many times, the AI-aided translations went wildly off the rails into stories it pulled from other medieval writers. When AI encountered unfamiliar words—especially berba, the Coptic-Arabic word for “temple”—the AI agents became confused and mangled the sentences. In one chapter, three different translation agents produced three mutually incompatible translations, only one of which matched the Latin.
 
In the end, having the Latin and, to a lesser extent, the quotations from the French version of al-Maqrizi as a guide was essential for assuring the accuracy of the machine-aided Arabic translation. A few references to Arabic names from the text that were mentioned with little context and no analysis in Okasha El Daly’s work on medieval Arabic interpretations of Ancient Egypt, Egyptology: The Missing Millennium​, also helped to ensure accurate transliterations of names. The result is therefore a composite, but as reasonably accurate as I can make it since I can’t afford to commission an Arabic scholar to translate directly.
 
You can read my full translation here.
 
At any rate, the results were nothing short of revelatory. Both books start Egyptian history with the Flood and know nothing of antediluvian Egyptian history or the occult legends surrounding the pyramids, which appear in every other Arabic history of ancient Egypt.

Ibn ‘Abd al-Hakam’s narrative contained several of the stories that Udoando Alegre claimed had no parallel anywhere and must have been fabricated. In the relevant section, it contains the story of Dalūka in the chronological position it occupies in Alfonso, after Moses, which differs from other writers, who placed her centuries before. It contains the story of her wall around Egypt and her magical temple, built by a witch, in which the carvings could be used to destroy threats to Egypt—animal carvings killed animals, military carvings combatted animals, etc. The wisdom-keeper Bodura appears here under the name Tadhūra, performing the same function of building the temple, though with a different gender. It even included the detail of the temple’s partial collapse in the reign of King Lucas, here called Luqās. The whole story appears exactly as it does in Alfonso, with the same names. 
 
The narrative of Nebuchadnezzar is also almost the same. It provides details about Nebuchadnezzar’s invasion of Egypt and its aftermath that match Alfonso but do not appear in other Arabic texts. The king Nebuchadnezzar fought is given as Qūmis ibn Luqās, which made me gasp because Qūmis is transparently Alfonso’s Gómez, which the Castilian translators rendered phonetically. I was honestly shocked that Gómez the son of Lucas was a real character in an old Arabic text, Qūmis ibn Luqās, translated faithfully and as accurately as medieval standards allowed.
 
Ibn ‘Abd al-Hakam’s narrative then rapidly summarizes the Persian, Greek, and Roman periods, and his summary of them is exactly the same as the parallel passage in Alfonso, down to the details of the tax system. The Castilian writers of the General Estoria admit to not fully understanding its positioning or why it appeared at the end of Alguazif’s book, yet they copied it anyway.
 
This is enough to absolve Alfonso of any claim of making up his narrative.
 
A couple of the passages, especially about Dalūka and the Persian through Roman periods also appear out of context in the work of the great historian al-Masʿūdī a century later, though it is evident that he was copying them from ibn ‘Abd al-Hakam without copying the narrative, which does not appear in his work. Hence Udaondo Alegre’s incorrect conclusion that Alfonso borrowed from al-Masʿūdī.
 
However, while this text proves that Alfonso was accurately reporting a genuine tradition from an Arabic text, there are reasons to believe that the text he worked from was not that of ibn ‘Abd al-Hakam, at least not directly.
 
First, Alfonzo includes incidents and details that do not appear in ibn ‘Abd al-Hakam, most notably the dramatic incident where the sage Drimiden, working for Nebuchadnezzar, sneaks into Egypt, bluffs his way into the temple Dalūka had built, and disabled the idols. He also claims Gómez died before the invasion and that a regent named Quiludema fought Nebuchadnezzar while Gómez’s son Capodoco fled. There is just a hint in another text of the source, where al-Masʿūdī in passing gives Kūmis ibn Nikas as the father of Kabil, whom Nebuchadnezzar fought. (The much later al-Qalqashandī, writing in the fifteenth century, gives a somewhat corrupt lineage of Fuqis ibn Baqash and his son Kamabil, the longer name suggesting a possible origin for the lengthy Capodoco moniker.) Those names are close enough to those in our texts that there must have been a Coptic tradition that Alfonso and al-Masʿūdī both drew upon from related but independent sources. (Al-Masʿūdī says the traditions he reported were widespread in Egypt at the time he wrote.)
 
Second, Alfonso writes in much more depth and detail than ibn ‘Abd al-Hakam, whose rather terse account is but an outline of the lengthy detail Alfonso goes into. Even granting that Alfonso’s writers were repetitive and often expanded on their source material, the underlying text they worked from had to be around twice the length of ibn ‘Abd al-Hakam’s version.
 
I have not been able to locate any text with the narrative of Drimiden or Quiludema, but other details not in ibn ‘Abd al-Hakam can be confirmed. Alfonso identifies Nebuchadnezzar as a Persian king, which ibn ‘Abn al-Hakam does not, but many other Arabic sources do, clearly drawing on the Coptic composite Nebuchadnezzar-Cambyses figure of the native Egyptian Cambyses Romance. Alfonzo gives the governor of Egypt under Nebuchadnezzar as Fazesmart, a character who does not appear in ibn ‘Abd al-Hakam. But al-Maqrizi gives that same character, under the name Fasamūt, as one of the five “Babylonian” kings of Egypt that followed Apries (Gómez) and his son—the exact group of kings that correlates with Cambyses and his successors in historical reality. (Two similar names appear earlier in his king list as native pharaohs as well.) We also know from the abridged surviving section of Murtaḍā ibn al-ʻAfīf’s history of Egypt that there was once a longer narrative about Nebuchadnezzar in Egypt circulating. Although it does not survive in his text, reference to the return of the Egyptians to Egypt after the death of Nebuchadnezzar with details about the man who led them back show that this narrative did once exist.
 
We know ibn ‘Abn al-Hakam did not originate the narrative. He worked, according to his own citations, from the collection of Coptic legends and myths collected by Uthmān ibn Ṣāliḥ, a scholar of the early ninth century famous for memorizing a vast number of stories and anecdotes and whose tales must have been written down at some point. It is evident from abrupt transitions and missing parts of the stories that ibn ‘Abd al-Hakam abridged his source heavily. The ultimate source, as El Daly suggested for the whole catalog of wonder stories, was probably a Demotic romance about a pharaoh of the kind known to be popular in Egypt in the early medieval period.
 
I can’t say for certain whether Alfonso’s writers—who claimed to be working from a previously translated text—had a genuine second volume of Ibrāhīm ibn Waṣīf Shāh or whether they gave the name “Alguazif” to a work by another. But we can say that Alfonso’s narrative draws from a genuine Arabic-language history of Egypt that is itself rooted in native Coptic legends from Late Antiquity. He did not invent the history of Egypt given in the General Estoria. It had existed for at least 400 years before Alfonso and probably centuries before that.