Some Interesting New Insights into Medieval Legends about Ancient Egypt

​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).

​The least important of these, but nevertheless interesting, is a translation of the notes that the astronomer and antiquary Nicolas-Claude Peiresc left about the manuscript of the Rabbi Barachias Nephi (Abenephius), an Arabic-language text known only from excerpts quoted by Athanasius Kircher in his various works. In these, Abenephius provides variants and echoes of the medieval Islamic pyramid myth, but many scholars have argued that Kircher fabricated the text to support his own eccentric theories.
 
Peiresc left the only independent account of the manuscript, and his handwritten notes have never been published in full (two partial transcripts exist) nor translated into English. However, much of the debate centered on a centuries-long game of telephone in which Peiresc’s 1633 notes were excerpted, transmitted through secondary sources, and distorted over time. Eventually, the standard story became that Kircher would only show Peiresc one page of the manuscript, suggesting fraud. However, the original notes make clear that Peiresc actually said that he saw the complete folio volume, which he skimmed through. He described at least two major parts: a history of Egypt and a lexicon of hieroglyphics. He also described the contents of the lexicon but said that Kircher would not allow him to copy even a single page of that section. This is the origin of the claim he saw only one page.
 
Peiresc though the manuscript might have been a copy of Horapollo’s Hieroglyphica, but that cannot be true because the list of hieroglyphs he provided does not match those in Horapollo.
 
In short, Peiresc’s full notes make plain that there was an actual Arabic-language medieval manuscript that Kircher drew from and it did indeed contain content of the type Kircher quoted. A subsequent letter from Peiresc describing the book at a manual for making talismans confirmed my own suspicions many years ago that Abenephius’s book was just such a manual, which we know from Islamic sources were both popular in medieval Cairo, where Abenephius allegedly lived, and often written by Jews, who did good business in talismans.
 
More important than this sidelight, however, is my translation of the great historian al-Masʿūdī’s chapter on the ancient history of Egypt from his Meadows of Gold (947 CE), one of the earliest surviving Islamic histories of Egypt. Al-Masʿūdī’s chapter is digressive, a bit rambling, and filled with promotional messages for his other books. But it also preserves earlier versions of stories better known from later texts, with some startling differences. For instance, al-Masʿūdī gives a version of the pyramid myth, but his account, unlike later texts but quite similar to that of the astrologer Abu Ma‘shar a century earlier in The Thousands, does not assign the story to the pyramids but to the temples of Egypt, specifically the Temple of Akhmim, long associated with Hermes Trismegistus. Of the pyramids, he offered a most logical conclusion: that they were the tombs of kings, that they were built in staircase form before casing stones were added, smoothed, and polished, and that they had a subterranean door to the tomb within.
 
There are other important treasures buried in al-Masʿūdī’s text, including a description of a medieval excavation of an Egyptian tomb, complete with the discovery of sarcophagi and grave goods, as well as a list of (legendary) kings and queens of Egypt that largely agrees with the list found the Akhbār al-zamān, a slightly later text that introduces the pyramids rather than the Temple of Akhmim as the locus for knowledge preservation. The two lists, however, have significant differences that show they are almost certainly independent of each other, testifying to the existence of an earlier list, probably Greek or Coptic from Late Antiquity or the early Middle Ages, that the Muslim authors drew upon.
 
I decided to finally translate al-Masʿūdī’s text because, ironically, I gave up on a longstanding project I had always wanted to attempt: translating the fragments of the book of Egyptian history written by al-Waṣīfi (a.k.a. Ibrāhīm ibn Waṣīf Shāh) and preserved under the name Alguazif in Alfonso X’s medieval General Estoria. Nearly all the other known fragments of his work are preserved only in al-Maqrizi’s al-Khitat from around 1400 CE. However, after reading through the those quite lengthy fragments embedded in Part I of the General Estoria, covering the period around the Exodus, I gave up after learning that Alfonso cited the remaining fragments as his key source for 239 (!) chapters in Part IV on the life and times of Nebuchadnezzar. Even I am not so much a glutton for punishment as to translate 239 chapters of anything, let alone quite difficult Old Castilian, even with the assistance of an AI translator that understands Old Castilian. (All machine-aided translations of course have to be read back against the original and hand-corrected, which is a lengthy process of its own.)
 
Anyway, what makes this interesting is the scholarly debate about whether Alfonso was lying about his use of al-Waṣīfi in the General Estoria. 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 (see below), merged with tales from al-Masʿūdī and displaced in time from antediluvian to postdiluvian times, in keeping with Alfonso’s Biblical chronology. To that end, for example, he traces how the story attributed to Alguazif about the legendary Queen Dalūka building temples, talismans, and a wall around Egypt to protect it from invasion following the Exodus merges al-Masʿūdī’s historical narrative, where Dalūka succeeds the pharaoh of Moses, with magical stories reflecting several different pharaohs from centuries before Moses, where al-Waṣīfi (or, rather, the Akhbār al-zamān) situates Dalūka.
 
The details are long and complex, but it’s also worth noting that al-Waṣīfi references the imagined invasion of Egypt by Nebuchadnezzar, implying that it occurred because of the failure of the talismans Dalūka set up, thus providing the framework for Alfonso’s story. Alegre argues that the 239 chapters on Nebuchadnezzar attributed to Alguazif are—and here I am simplifying some—basically made up. Alfonso’s scholars invented them from a mishmash of sources and attributed them to Alguazif because it is in his work that brief scattered references to Nebuchadnezzar’s invasion and talismans could be found.
 
It's an interesting argument, and supported by the obvious problems with a different passage in the General Estoria, that of the Hermetic history of giants (one I have translated elsewhere), which similarly contains obvious traces of reworking an Islamic text originally set in antediluvian times and repositioning it in postdiluvian times.
 
But there are a few concerns. First, Alegre accepts as his basic position that the al-Waṣīfi Alfonso cites is the Ibrāhīm ibn Waṣīf Shāh of al-Maqrizi and that both are also the author of the Akhbār al-zamān, whose text Alegre uses as the basis for his comparison of Alfonso and Islamic lore. I explained many years ago why I don’t believe this to be the case. The short version is that Islamic sources place Ibrāhīm ibn Waṣīf Shāh two centuries too late to have written the book (though more recent writers have moved him to c. 1000 CE), and when comparing al-Maqrizi’s quotations to the full text of the Akhbār al-zamān, there are small but clear and consistent differences between the two, with Ibrāhīm ibn Waṣīf Shāh having the inferior reading and censoring references to Giants and Hermetic and astrological lore. (There is a forty-page abridgment given in the pyramid book by al-Irdisi in the late 1100s, but it has never been published in a European language, and I am not sure whom al-Idrisi gave as the author.)
 
However, we are not limited solely to these books to understand what Alfonso may have used, for many authors repeated the same material, often verbatim. Murtaḍā ibn al-ʻAfīf wrote a version of the material in the Akhbār al-zamān around the same time as Ibrāhīm ibn Waṣīf Shāh, copying even more closely than ibn Waṣīf Shāh, but attributing it to a worm-eaten manuscript. His book, too, was lost in the original. It survives only as a seventeenth-century French translation, which is full in the first half but abridged in the second by its French translator, who was uninterested in that part. That second half, crucially, takes the history down to the coming of Islam, and it contains at least one passage about Nebuchadnezzar’s invasion of Egypt (concerning his son’s return to Egypt following his death) that is similar to what is found in Alfonso’s Alguazif fragments, but not in the Akhbār al-zamān. Murtaḍā’s allusion to displaced populations implies a longer text existed. Sadly, the passage occurs in the abridged section, so there is no way to know how detailed the original was. Our only clue is that Murtaḍā attributes it to the Annales du Geranien (Annals of Geranian), which is unfortunately an unclear translation or transliteration, referring to some unknown book, possibly by one of the many Persian scholars named al-Jurānī or al-Jurjānī, though I am not aware of one who wrote historical annals.
 
It is interesting, however, that this clue correlates with Ulrich Haarmaann’s suggestion that the body of lore that became the Akhbār al-zamān originated in Persia, perhaps with the lost work of Abu Zayd al-Balkhi “on the history of Egypt, its wonders, its tombs and its kings.” This is also supported by the fact that the oldest reference to the myths in question comes from fragments of The Thousands by Abu Ma‘shar, who also lived and wrote in Persia before 850 CE.
 
At any rate, all of this shows that there were indeed books that recycled the Akhbār al-zamān and expanded that history beyond where that book stopped, meaning that I can’t be as confident as Alegre that Alfonso made it all up, however much he may have expanded on the text.
 
But I’m still not translating 239 more chapters.