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

​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!

​First, credit where it is due: I would not have found this without the help of ChatGPT. All of my readers know that I am not overly enamored with how AI handles historical material. I was trying to use it to surface medieval Arabic references to Nebuchadnezzar’s alleged invasion of Egypt—which ChatGPT failed at by conflating authors into composite characters and then hallucinating translations—but it also mentioned that Nebuchadnezzar’s name appeared in a Late Antique Coptic text called the Cambyses Romance, a place I would never have thought to look, given that it is ostensibly a novel about the Persian king Cambyses invading Egypt in 525 BCE, a story that would seemingly have little to do with Nebuchadnezzar.
 
Well, ChatGPT accidentally found an important clue without exactly understanding what it churned up.
 
I started to explore this question last month in a blog post about medieval accounts of Egyptian history in which I introduced Juan Udaondo Alegre’s hypothesis from his 2024 book The Spanish Hermes that Alfonso X fabricated his narrative and its references:

​You see, the problem is that the known fragments of al-Waṣīfi in al-Maqrizi cover the period of Egyptian legendary history from the first kings down to the pharaoh of Moses. However, Alfonso starts his excerpts from Alguazif with the pharaoh of Moses and precedes onward to the (imagined) invasion of Egypt by Nebuchadnezzar (sometimes after 600 BCE but before 562 BCE) and the reign of the pharaoh Apries (589–570 BCE). This invasion supposedly occurred when a man in Nebuchadnezzar’s employ disabled the talismans protecting Egypt. Among the few scholars that addressed this issue, most concluded that Alfonso had a lost second volume of al-Waṣīfi comprising the second half of his Egyptian history. That was the opinion of Inés Fernández-Ordóñez in her 1992 study of the General Estoria, for example. As best I can tell, the scholars holding this opinion are all experts in Alfonso’s work, not in Islamic literature; the scholars of Islamic histories do not recognize this additional text. However, in The Spanish Hermes (2024), Juan Udaondo Alegre makes a compelling case that Alfonso did not have any secret text and the stories that he attributes to Alguazif were reworked from the known stories of al-Waṣīfi, which he takes to be the text of the Akhbār al-zamān […], merged with tales from al-Masʿūdī and displaced in time from antediluvian to postdiluvian times, in keeping with Alfonso’s Biblical chronology. 

​At the time, I wrote that I partially disagreed with Udaondo Alegre for a number of reasons, not least that the Akhbār al-zamān is almost certainly not identical with the Book of Marvels, which you can see in the link to the earlier post. But now I have a text that bridges the gap perfectly and helps to resolve some of the confusion and contradiction in the narrative.
 
In the General Estoria, Alfonso’s scholars devote 239 chapters (!) to the narrative of Nebuchadnezzar preparing for and then invading Egypt. The story is highly elaborate and far too long to fully summarize here. It includes a biography of Nebuchadnezzar’s father along with a life of the king. It included lengthy and elaborate diplomatic correspondence between Nebuchadnezzar and the Egyptian king Vafre (Greek: Apries [Herodotus] or Uaphris [Africanus]), and an account of deception whereby a spy sent by Nebuchadnezzar entered Egypt to destroy the magical talismans installed by the sage Bodura, whom the former queen, Doluca, had charged with the protection of Egypt. With the talismans destroyed, Nebuchadnezzar could enter Egypt from the East. His forces battle and defeat the Egyptians, lay waste to the country, and leave it a desolate ruin.
 
This is a very brief summary that doesn’t do the full narrative justice, and I in no way dissent from Udaondo Alegre’s conclusion that Alfonso’s scholars embellished and rewrote what they found, in some cases quite dramatically. But the frame of the narrative is discoverable.
 
According to Udaondo Alegere, there is no other narrative that tells this story, and characters such as Bodura are unknown outside the General Estoria, suggesting that the narrative is Alfonso’s invention. Udaondo Alegre very briefly mentions that “there exist some biblical, Arabic, and Judaic/Midrashic traditions on this topic, to which the GE account is related.” But that surely minimizes the evidence.
 
It turns out that the story of Nebuchadnezzar’s conquest of Egypt was more widespread and better known than scholars of the GE previously suggested, and that is because the underlying texts don’t refer to Nebuchadnezzar II (r. 604-562 BCE), king of Assyria, but to Cambyses II (r. 530-522 BCE), king of Persia. Early on, Jewish and Christian writers referred to Cambyses as the “new” or “second” Nebuchadnezzar. Such references can be found in Jerome (PL 878), John of Antioch (1.28) and Eusebius (Chronicle, part 2, Olympiad 68), while Sextus Julius Africanus (Syncellus, p. 282) treated them as the same person. These references continue into the Byzantine era, but these later treatments aren’t relevant to us, as they are too late in time. More directly relevant is the history of Cambyses in the Chronicle of the Coptic Christian bishop John of Nikiû, who wrote a history of Egypt from Adam to the Muslim conquest around 700 CE. In chapter 51, he gives a full accounting of Cambyses taking the title Nebuchadnezzar II and conquering Egypt, destroying the country and leaving it a desolate wasteland.
 
Thus, we can see that there was a living tradition of Nebuchadnezzar conquering Egypt at the start of the Middle Ages. The Cambyses Romance fleshes out these brief references. The surviving text, which is highly fragmentary and represents only twelve pages of what was almost certainly a lengthy narrative, is independent of John of Nikiû, being older than it, but similarly conflates Cambyses and Nebuchadnezzar in telling the story of the conquest of Egypt. It probably dates from the seventh century CE but may be older.
 
The narrative, as we have it, involved Cambyses, named also as Nebuchadnezzar, demanding Egypt surrender to him in a letter sent to that country. The Egyptians, under the wise man Bothor, send his messengers back with a defiant letter calling Cambyses a coward. Cambyses receives advice from his advisors, who counsel him to trick the Egyptians by writing a false letter from the Pharaoh Apries attempting to trick the Egyptians into attending a festival for the god Apis, at which Cambyses planned to attack and compel their surrender. When priests of Egypt divine the trick, they refuse, and Cambyses leads his people—called the Assyrians rather than the Persians—into war.
 
Immediately, we note the similarities to Alfonso’s account. In both, the story begins with an exchange of diplomatic letters. In both, the sitting pharaoh is Apries, the king at the time of Nebuchadnezzar II. In both, Nebuchadnezzar attempts to undermine Egypt by trickery, and in both war results. Now, obviously, we have only a small part of the Cambyses Romance, so we cannot say how much of the rest of it matches Alfonso’s narrative, which is hundreds of pages longer than the surviving text.
 
But we can draw some tentative conclusions.
 
First, it is evident that the Arabic mentions of Nebuchadnezzar (known in Arabic as Bokht-Naṣṣar) invading Egypt are derived from the living Coptic tradition represented in the Cambyses Romance and John of Nikiû. The Akhbār al-zamān tells the story of a miscreant disabling the talismans of Egypt (albeit centuries earlier than Alfonso claims) before adding, “This is what allowed Bokht-Naṣṣar the Persian to conquer Egypt, although it was defended by all its princes” (2.2). The key word there is “Persian,” indicating that the author was thinking of the conflated Cambyses-Nebuchadnezzar. This is the base text for later Arabic writers, who seem to have edited out the mention of the Persians over time. (The oldest clear reference to this seems to be Al-Masʿūdī, who identifies Nebuchadnezzar as working for the Persian Empire, though maddeningly, he says that the details of the war are in a book we no longer possess.)
 
While this reference appears in the Akhbār al-zamān, it does not appear in the surviving Arabic fragments of Ibrāhīm ibn Waṣīf Shāh preserved in al-Maqrizi. The parallel text of Murtaḍā ibn al-ʻAfīf, who wrote at the same time as ibn Waṣīf Shāh and worked from a similar or the same source text, similarly does not contain this reference, but the author did write that he discussed the causes of the war between Nebuchadnezzar and Egypt later in his book. Unfortunately, the French translator, who abridged that part of the narrative before the Arabic original was lost, failed to provide that part of the story, preserving only a a sentence about the war’s aftermath. We know from al-Masʿūdī that the Arabic authors concluded the story by writing that Nebuchadnezzar left Egypt a wasteland for forty years.
 
Nevertheless, we can spot some other connections that show that the Cambyses Romance is likely behind the story. Udaondo Alegre claims that the character of the “wise master” Bodura, whose lineage is charged with protecting Egypt and its talismans, is a literary “device” used to chart the decay of Egyptian greatness. Yet in the Cambyses Romance, we read that the wiseman who advised the Egyptians in the defense of their country against Nebuchadnezzar was “Bothor,” a name that, in the loose standards of medieval orthography (where Apries = Vafres, Dalūka = Doluca, etc.), is all but identical to Bodura. The two characters also share the same narrative function, though they are placed at different points in history in the two stories. In the Romance, we can only say that Bothor is a single wise man, whereas in the GE, his is an entire lineage of sages.
 
There are, of course, elements that simply do not fit. Sections of the General Estoria narrative seem to be rearranged from antediluvian narratives in ibn Waṣīf Shāh. The prophecy of Egypt’s destruction that Udaondo Alegre likens to the Asclepius has no parallel in medieval legend, unless it occurred in the missing parts of the Cambyses Romance. Alfonso tells us that Alguazif does not mention Apries but instead calls him Gómez (!), a name not attested in any surviving text. It does not match the Apries of the Christian tradition, nor the “Pharaoh the Lame” of Islamic tradition, nor the Kabil of al-Masʿūdī, all names of the king Nebuchadnezzar allegedly fought. That said, Apries is the Hophra of the Bible, which was rendered in Arabic from the Greek Uaphris as the Uafres of Manetho. If so, an earlier Arabic version that included a glottal stop to approximate the Biblical rendering (for Michal Habaj concluded in 2018 that the Cambyses Romance likely originated among Egyptian Jews) may have been corrupted into ’Umrez and thus Gomez, similar to how the French turned “al-ʻAfīf” into “Gaphiphus,” rendering the glottal stop before the A into a G. If the same happened with ʾUafres, a transcription error could lead to Gomez. In early Arabic script, the “m” and “f” sounds look rather similar, especially if one’s handwriting was not particularly neat.
 
Sadly, without the source text, there is no way to say—except that the Cambyses Romance is a Coptic text and Alfonso explicitly worked from Arabic, so this might be another hint that the underlying text is an Arabic translation or adaptation of a Coptic original.
 
What we can say is that there is clear evidence that Coptic Egyptians had a living tradition not just about Nebuchadnezzar invading Egypt but about the diplomatic and deceptive events that preceded it. We can also say that the Arabic historians were correct in ascribing this tradition to the Copts rather than to themselves, and we know from Murtaḍā ibn al-ʻAfīf that shortly before Alfonso wrote, there was an Arabic text circulating which discussed the causes of the war and its aftermath. What we cannot say is whether Ibrāhīm ibn Waṣīf Shāh wrote an Arabic account of the story told in the Cambyses Romance, whether one was bundled with his work, or whether Alfonso borrowed the narrative from elsewhere and ascribed it to Ibrāhīm ibn Waṣīf Shāh.
 
None of this takes away from Udaondo Alegre’s contention that much of the General Estoria account is heavily embellished and rearranges material from much earlier in (fictional) Egyptian history to help construct its narrative. It does, however, call into question the claim that it is entirely made up and has little basis in either Arabic or Egyptian tradition. Unless the lost sections of the Cambyses Romance somehow turn up, we will likely never know exactly how much of the General Estoria’s Nebuchadnezzar narrative derives from it.