phlawless

​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.
​
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:

​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. 
​
Paraphrase of Alfonso:

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

​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. 

​Scott Wolter is back with another bizarre claim about supposed Templar influence in North America. On Facebook and in a YouTube short, posted in conjunction with a lengthy podcast interview on the much-watch The Basement podcast from Why Files host A. J. Stiles to promote his new book The Greatest Templar Story Never Told, Wolter posted a conspiracy theory (in the third person, no less) about Ralph de Sudeley (1133-1192), an English patron of the Knights Templar. The story he tells is straight out of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, down to humility of the worthy:

​This is a laughable story for many reasons, but it’s worth noting how this strange amalgam of influences developed.
 
Our story begins with Graham Phillips, the British author of pseudo-historical nonfiction. In 2004, he proposed in The Templars and the Ark of the Covenant that Ralph de Sudeley found the Maccabean treasure in the cave of Jebel Madhbah while on crusade in the Holy Land and transported this treasure back to England. He speculated that de Sudeley might even have found the Ark of the Covenant and brought it back with him. The only evidence for any of this is a register listing objets sacrés (holy objects) housed in his personal chapel, the usual term for any of the thousands of relics circulating as Biblical objects in the Middle Ages.
 
Many of the stories told about Ralph de Sudeley by the writers who followed Phillips are patently false. One common tale holds that he was a poor man who went on crusade and returned to his home in Gloucestershire the richest man in England. In reality, de Sudeley inherited his wealth and estates from his father, John de Sudeley, upon the latter’s death in 1165. Nor was his patronage of the Templars particularly unusual. He made gifts of land several times. De Sudeley gave lands to the Priory of Erbury, to the Templars, and to his brother William. Several other lords in the Gloucestershire, including Gilbert de Laci and Roger de Waterville had made similar gifts of land to the Templars at the time.
 
De Sudeley is often called a leader of the Templars, but there is no evidence that he was himself a Templar. De Sudeley’s patronage was almost certainly in recognition of the Templars’ role in protecting travelers to the Holy Land and aiding in the Crusades.
 
The Templar activities in Gloucestershire at the time were not all that mysterious. They ran a series of fulling mills for the making of cloth, which apparently generated quite high rents, according to Emma Dent’s Annals of Winchcombe.
 
Upon the suppression of the order, their property transferred to the Hospitallers.
 
But back to de Sudeley. We next find that Donald A. Ruh made use of Phillips’s account of de Sudeley in discussing the alleged Cremona Document and the Scrolls of Onteora, the hoax texts that so enamored Scott Wolter over the past decade. Ruh copied whole pages about de Sudeley from Wikipedia in his 2019 book on the Cremona Document (with citation), apparently unaware that the Wikipedia article was itself a massive quotation from Phillips’s website.
 
Ruh claimed that de Sudeley had “the connections and reasons to go to America.” In the book, he claims that de Sudeley found the stone tablets of the Law from the Ark of the Covenant and that he made a voyage to the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York, transporting holy objects from the Temple in Jerusalem to America and writing an account of it that he signed in his own hand, this being the Cremona Document. As I have discussed before, the text, written in code in the (sixteenth century) Theban alphabet, supposedly turned up in Italy in the 1970s before traveling through the hands of a Dr. William Jackson, who willed it to Ruh, who shared it with Soctt Wolter.
 
The full Cremona Document narrative, which runs dozens of pages of dense description, is too long to give here, but a summary can be read here. You will note how the hoaxer brought in many popular pseudohistory tropes. The worshipers of the Goddess in America are, of course, light-skinned white people who speak Welsh, and they are attended by a tribe of what is obviously meant to be descendants of Jewish priests, called Cohens (!), who are “darker” than the Goddess-worshiping Welsh but lighter than Native Americans (i.e., Mediterranean olive). The Templar crew pass through what seem to be the remnants of Norse Vinland and finds a lost temple—in New York! They even find such wonders as coal (anachronistically) in use.
 
Well, now Wolter is promoting a ridiculous section of the Cremona document in which a Freemason-style initiation ritual on Hunter Mountain in the Catskills is described, complete with reference to the Mandan, the tribe notoriously believed to be Caucasian among pseudohistory believers. In Jackson’s “translation”:

​It should be obvious that medieval writers would not reference an alphabet invented five centuries later nor refer to Jebel Madhbah, a name not attested before modern times. Even the Valley of Edom was called “Vallis Moysi” (the valley of Moses) in Crusader documents. There are many other anachronisms throughout the rest of the text—such as references to “the prophet of Islam,” a term medieval people did not use to describe Muhammad—even leaving aside the decidedly modern structure and cast to the narrative, so different from genuine medieval texts.
 
Beyond this, as you can see, the modern hoaxer has a fixation on creating a prehistory for America in which a network of Caucasians (and occasionally Jews—Hunter Mountain supposedly has a menorah carved in the ceiling of its lost temple!) preserve holy wisdom hidden from the masses of swarthy natives.
 
However, it is also worth noting what Scott Wolter has changed. The original hoax had de Sudeley receive scrolls after informing the Welsh-speaking priestess of the Goddess that he has taken a vow of celibacy and would not have sex with her. Thus, having passed the test of sexual purity, she then tells him to select a tile with a Greek letter from among many choices, and when he selects the correct tile (alpha), he is allowed access to four ancient scrolls, one of which is the marriage certificate of Jesus and Mary Magdalene (!). Wolter, however, has changed this into an Indiana Jones-style test of humility rather than purity, which is both an odd substitution and evidence of how loose he plays with the “facts” of his baroque and expanding pseudohistory.
 
This is especially strange since in 2024 Wolter and Ruh wrote Oak Island, Knights Templar, and the Holy Grail together, and it contains the whole “translation” of the Cremona Document, and Wolter makes no mention of humility in the book. 

​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:

​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.