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

​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.

Imaginary ancient history leads me to my main topic for today, which I am sure you are all tired of hearing about. But my whole schtick is drilling down into the archives until I find answers, so I’m going to do it anyway. I have now read through hundreds of pages of Old Castilian text to review the fragments attributed to Ibrāhīm ibn Waṣīf Shāh (under the name Alguazif) in the General Estoria of Alfonso X, composed around 1270 CE.
 
The fragments appear primarily in Part I (covering antediluvian history) and Part IV (covering Nebuchadnezzar). Even though Alfonso’s collection of scholars wrote in the thirteenth century, his massive work wasn’t published until the twentieth century. Consequently, the modern edition, last revised and republished in 2009, asserts that the medieval text remains under copyright and includes a warning that the publisher will sue anyone who translates or quotes extensively from it.
 
The text of Part I, however, is indisputably in the public domain in the United States, as it was first published in 1930 and its copyright has now expired. I have therefore translated the relevant sections in full. For Part IV, section one (entitled “Nebuchadnezzar”), I have produced a summary of the fragments attributed to Alguazif and his History of Egypt, which comprise primarily chapters 3 through 66 and then are scattered afterward mostly as counterpoints and commentary through the next nearly hundred chapters. The narrative in chapters 3 through 66 comprises one unit and gives the full outline, according to Alfonso, of Alguazif’s book, albeit with many interpolations from other sources and an astonishing amount of repetition. Following this, Alfonso then retells the story using other sources and comparing it to Alguazif.
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According to Alfonso’s team, writing in 4.1.87, the General Estoria did not work directly from the Arabic text of Ibrāhīm ibn Waṣīf Shāh but instead worked from a Castilian translation which omitted what the General Estoria describes as “exceedingly lengthy” descriptions of magical wonders. Given that Alfonso’s discussion runs 63 chapters and tens of thousands of words, it does make one wonder how much lengthier it could be!
 
My summary runs around 2,000 words and is about 10% of the length of the full text. It is too long to paste in here, but you can read it at the end of my page for Ibrāhīm ibn Waṣīf Shāh’s fragments. As best I have been able to tell, it is the only detailed summary of the full narrative available in English.
 
There has been controversy among scholars about whether the History of Egypt of Alguazif actually existed. Some argue that Alfonso made it up based on hints in the known fragments of Ibrāhīm ibn Waṣīf Shāh, which cover Egyptian (mythic) history from Creation down to Moses. Others argue that Alfonso had access to a second volume of Ibrāhīm ibn Waṣīf Shāh covering history from Moses to the Muslim conquest.
 
After reading through the text as given in the General Estoria, my feeling is that there is a real underlying Arabic text, but that it must have been of a different nature from the Great Book of Marvels of Ibrāhīm ibn Waṣīf Shāh (c. 1200 CE) known from the fragments preserved in al-Maqrizi’s Al-Khitat two centuries later. Those fragments, which closely parallel the Akhbār al-zamān of c. 1000 CE, are not narrative history but a collection of marvel stories arranged by the reigns of the (fictional) pharaohs, with none long enough to sustain a book-length narrative. By contrast, the narrative given in Alfonso more closely resembles an epic poem or a novel, with material very similar in nature to the Cambyses Romance, a Coptic novel about Nebuchadnezzar’s invasion of Egypt known only from six pages that survive. It would not surprise me if the underlying text is an Arabic adaptation of the Cambyses Romance or something similar.
 
Here, I want to make a few notes about the contents of the text attributed to Alguazif.
 
The story begins with Queen Doluca, who is the Dalūka of al-Masʿūdī’s Meadows of Gold and the Dulaīfah of the Akhbār. However, the fragments of Ibrāhīm ibn Waṣīf Shāh preserved in al-Maqrizi make no mention of this queen, placing a king in her place. Indeed, al-Maqrizi himself mentions her only in quotations from ibn Abed al-Hakam and al-Masʿūdī. Murtaḍā ibn al-ʻAfīf, writing around 1200, gives both versions, first naming a King Dalic and then saying that others claim he was actually a queen named Dalica. I won’t get into the increasing censoriousness of Islamic authors during the Middle Ages, but this is our first clue that the text Alfonso used was not one similar to the Akhbār but rather one that drew on the tradition reported by al-Masʿūdī. As Juan Udaondo Alegre pointed out in 2024, Alfonso’s source and al-Masʿūdī both place Dalūka after Moses, while the Akhbār and its derivatives place her long before.
 
To that end, the garbling of the tradition in Alfonso makes plain that the translators only partly understood the text thy worked with. They mistook the word Berba, meaning temple, for the “Old Woman’s Wall,” the name of another legendary work built by Dalūka, a wall that surrounded all Egypt:

al-Masʿūdī
Today, in 332 AH, the ruins of this wall, which is called hā’it al-‘ajūz (the wall of the old woman), can still be seen. […] During a reign of thirty years, or a shorter period, she endowed Egypt with its berba (temples) and its statues. Initiated into the practices of magic, she placed within the temples the images of the peoples surrounding Egypt, and those of their mounts, horses or camels [and, performing spells,] the camels or other figures represented in the temples disappeared underground; the foreign army immediately suffered the same fate, and soldiers and animals were annihilated.
 
Alfonso
And they named that temple, with its images, in their Egyptian language, the Barbe; and as you will find this story recounts further on, Barbe in Egyptian means the same as “old woman’s wall” in Castilian, and in this place it means the fortress of the wise woman, because both the Pharaohs and others of the kingdom placed their trust for strength and defense in that Barbe as if it were God.

​As you can see, Alfonso’s translators did not fully understand what they were reading. Later, they will render “Barbe” (i.e. a berba) as an “enchanted fortress” when the story told of it seems to have originally been told of the Temple at Akhmim.
 
From there, the narrative proceeds to the birth of Nebuchadnezzar, whose father was said to be an Egyptian priest who foretold that his son would destroy Egypt. There is no parallel for this story in any extant medieval text, and Alfonso himself later attributes a second and contradictory origin story for Nebuchadnezzar to Alguazif, suggesting that this legend is part of a romance like the Cambyses Romance that has become incorporated into a historical text.
 
We can guess that something like the Cambyses Romance lays distantly behind the text because Alfonso, in citing Alguazif, refers frequently to Nebuchadnezzar as “Persian” instead of Assyrian, as does that Coptic romance and a historical tradition of Late Antiquity that conflated the Assyrian king Nebuchadnezzar and the later Persian conqueror Cambyses. Other Arabic texts that claim Nebuchadnezzar conquered Egypt also make the same telling error, but while historians like al-Masʿūdī attempted to explain the legends in rationalist terms (positing that Nebuchadnezzar served as a vassal of a Persian king, for instance), romances did not, and Alfonso’s source seems to follow the reasoning of romance.
 
I won’t go through the whole narrative line-by-line, but I will point out that the stories attributed to Alguazif about Jeremiah and Daniel appear in other Arabic histories. The reference to the mirror that allowed the king to see anywhere in the world appears in Akhbār al-zamān and al-Maqrizi the as the work of Sūrīd. The story of the idols failing, allowing Nebuchadnezzar to conquer appears in the Akhbār, but in a different chronological position, occurring long before Nebuchadnezzar. Udaondo Alegre thinks Alfonso moved the story to make his own narrative, though equally we might posit it as an episode in a romance, particularly given the fanciful, novelistic detail of the otherwise unknown narrative of the Assyrian wizard-spy who deactivates them.
 
The names of the kings involved are clearly mangled beyond all recognition, with the king in the place of the Apries of the historians being named Gómez, whose father was Lucas and son Capodoco. The Castilian translator’s choice of names is one of the reasons some believe Alfonso’s narrative is a forgery. The conquest and its aftermath, however, have clear parallels in other texts, including the Arabic historians and their Christian counterparts. John of Nikiû gives a similar account of the devastation, and the claim that it lasted forty years appears in Arabic sources attributing it to al-Masʿūdī. Confusing contradictions in the text—the rebuilding took 19 years in one chapter, 23 in another—suggest that the underlying source has been somewhat misunderstood or different traditions were not fully integrated.
 
A number of stories about earlier kings apparently attached to the narrative around the geography of places Nebuchadnezzar visited, find close parallels in the Akhbār al-zamān and al-Maqrizi, with recognizable, if distorted, versions of the names of kings in those books, suggesting they are genuine bits of an Arabic text.
 
The final section of Alguazif’s narrative is completely out of place in Alfonso’s narrative, as Alfonso himself noted, saying he recorded it only because it is how Alguazif ends the book. Alfonso’s translator seems to have misunderstood the text, which implies to me that there was a genuine book they were using. Arabic writers sometimes used “Roman” to mean “Greek” because the Byzantines were the Greeks they knew and called themselves Romans, and in Alfonso’s version, the Greek and the Romans are conflated. 
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Paraphrase of Alfonso:

Afterward, the History of Egypt recounts how Egypt remained under the dominion of the Persians for a long time until the coming of the Romans who fought against Egypt for three years until reaching an agreement whereby the Romans would protect Egypt from other enemies in exchange for a fixed amount of tribute. This arrangement lasted until the Persian king Nosiruan (i.e. Khosrow I Anushirvan) attacked and the combined Egyptian and Roman forces fought against him. This necessitated a new arrangement whereby the Romans and the Persians would split the revenue of Egypt between them. This lasted for seven years until the Persians launched a new war and the Romans returned the assault with overwhelming force. “The Persians were unable to withstand them and were compelled to relinquish Egypt to them. And Egypt remained under Roman dominion until the time of Muhammad and the Moors, who arrived, drove the Romans out of Egypt, and expelled them from the land of Shem.”

​Compare this to al-Masʿūdī, who is more precise and distinguishes Greeks from Romans and includes a Persian invasion of Egypt that Alfonso omits:

After the departure of Bokht-Nassar and the Persian army he commanded, the Greeks invaded Egypt, subjugated it, and made it an ally. This state of affairs lasted until the reign of Khosrow I Anushirvan. This king, after conquering Syria, entered Egypt, seized it, and possessed it for about twenty years. At that time, Egypt paid a double tax, one to the Persians and the other to the Romans. An event that occurred in their capital forced the Persians to evacuate Egypt and Syria. The Romans then subjugated these two countries and spread Christianity there, which remained the dominant religion until the advent of Islam. 

However, the wording used by Alfonso is closer to the later version given by al-Quḍā'ī around a century later:

After Egypt was rebuilt following its devastation by Nebuchadnezzar, the Greeks and Persians subjugated the other kings in central Egypt. The Greeks were hostile to the Egyptians for three years until they made peace on the condition that the Egyptians pay an annual tribute to the Greeks, who in return would take them under their protection and defend them against the Persian kings. Thereupon, the Persians defeated the Greeks, drove them out of Syria, and threatened Egypt with an attack. However, it was agreed that Egypt’s revenues would be divided annually between the Persians and Greeks, and this continued for nine years. Then the Greeks gained the upper hand over the Persians, drove them out of Syria, and the tribute with which the Egyptians had purchased peace accrued entirely to the Greeks. This was the situation when Islam arrived.

Taken all together, we can conclude that Alfonso’s scholars were using real Arabic myths and legends, at least to a degree. Udaondo Alegre argues that these genuine bits are window-dressing on a fictitious narrative they invented, but that raises the question of why Alfonso’s scholars would include material they did not fully understand, why they would include material that did not support the narrative, or why they would contradict themselves from one paragraph to the next. If they were using only the known material from Ibrāhīm ibn Waṣīf Shāh, we would have expected them to make reference to the antediluvian material and the pyramid legends rather than material from Moses downward.
 
Al-Masʿūdī says in his Meadows of Gold that he recounted these later events in deep detail in two of his other books, neither of which survives. I think we may be looking at a later Arabic writer’s (whether Ibrāhīm ibn Waṣīf Shāh of someone whose work was confused for his) history that drew on some Cambyses Romance-style lost romance and the lost works of al-Masʿūdī in creating a second volume of Egyptian history from Moses to Muhammad.