Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1
Bruce
While empty to the eye, extraordinary things come out of the wilderness. On December 20, 1772, a few days after his forty-second birthday, a bedraggled, near-starving Scottish-born explorer emerged from Upper Egypt’s burning desert into the shades of Barjurah, close to the Nile’s bank, 360 miles south of Cairo. Leaving his exhausted master to rest, Michael, the explorer’s Greek servant, hastened to nearby Farshut, seeking help from a community of Capuchin fathers. The Capuchins bluntly informed Michael that his master was dead, drowned in the Red Sea three years before. In Barjurah, meanwhile, the village’s hospitable Muslim Sheikh Hagi Ishmael delighted in finding the explorer alive and cheerfully acceded to the infidel’s request for two loaves of bread and some rice.
That James Bruce, bright, open-faced laird of Kinnaird in Sterlingshire, had suffered murder, death by drowning, or a narrow escape from a pitiable end had been rumored among officials throughout Bruce’s five-year-long search for the source of the Nile. As Bruce wryly observed of Farshut’s Capuchin monks tasked with bringing Egyptians and Ethiopians into the Roman Catholic fold, a rooted aversion to their mission received no "increase in keenness" when they heard Bruce’s account of what he’d seen as a guest of Ethiopia’s emperor Tekle Haymanot II. Bruce’s last few years’ sojourn in Abyssinia’s distant capital Gondar had been anything but uneventful.
Before retiring exhausted to a brief hermit’s life, young, handsome, and cultured Tekle Haymanot had endured a seven-and-a-halfyear reign (1769–1777) scarred by murderous scheming and merciless combat among Ethiopia’s princes, warlords, and senior clergy. Given Abyssinia’s instability, Bruce’s returning alive to Egypt was itself somewhat miraculous; the Capuchin fathers expected no such graces.
A week’s recuperation and a well-needed shave at Farshut did little to restore the demeanor of this wealthy descendant of Robert the Bruce, Scottish king and hero of Bannockburn (1274–1329). James Bruce hadn’t seen a shirt for fourteen months. Chafing under a waistcoat of coarse, brown wool, his trousers—of like material—only escaped falling down thanks to a rough woolen girdle wrapped repeatedly about the waist. The girdle also supported Bruce’s two silver-mounted English pistols and a crooked Abyssinian knife with rhinoceros horn. While a red Turkish cap protected his head, Bruce’s agonized feet, bereft of shoes and stockings, were pocked with holes from inflammations suffered in the desert.
Weakened further by residual pleurisy, Bruce and Michael boarded a Cairo-bound vessel—probably the familiar dhow of Nile-borne traffic— at, or near, Nagaa Hammadi, a few miles south of the Jabal al-T ārif’s sandstone cliffs, at whose feet in 1945 Muhammad Ali al-Sammān and his brothers would discover the famous "Nag Hammadi Library" of fourth-century Gnostic codices while digging—as they claimed—for fertilizing birdlime (sabak).
Close to ancient Thebes, the Thebaid region would acquire exceptional repute for discoveries of precious, late antique papyri. Here Bruce purchased what came to be called the "Bruce Codex," supposedly unearthed amid a ruined monastic structure near Medinet Habu, a day’s camel ride south of Nag Hammadi, a hamlet just south of the larger Nagaa Hammadi. The caves that pierce the Jabal al-T. ārif—not far from Faw Qibli’s ruined Pachomian monastery to the west—once sheltered Christian hermits, and in ancient times the Jabal’s other caves served as tombs. The Thebaid’s old grave sites have yielded rich pickings for archaeologists—though seldom by accident; grave-robbing means substantial business, and the presence of a collector like Bruce would hardly have passed the miscreants’ notice.
Bruce had a sharp eye for artifacts. The Bruce Codex (MS. Bruce 96; Bodleian Library, Oxford, since 1848) contained seventy-eight leaves of approximately fourth-century CE papyrus, inscribed on both sides in Sahidic Coptic. Calling itself The Book of the Great Logos corresponding to Mysteries, the longest section, illustrated with Gnostic cryptograms and diagrams, reveals the "living Jesus" instructing his apostles on the mystery of forgiveness of sins and the baptism of the spirit. He also recommends "crucifying the world," rather than being crucified by it, and tells of the spirit’s ascent through hostile archons—dark, angelic "rulers"—to the "Treasury of the Light." A figure named "Jeu" (Ieou), described as the "true God," projected by the eternal Father, has access to the Father’s "treasuries" in the highest heaven. From these, Jeu emanates further realms of intelligent spiritual principles. The word "treasury" in relation to high heaven is also significant to the Book of Enoch, but even more significant is the appearance of the word "watchers" applied to angels in chapter six of the First Book of Jeu:
This is his character. He [Jeu] will set up a rank corresponding to
the treasuries, and will place it as watchers at the gate of the trea-
suries which are those which stand at the gate as the three . . . [text
missing] This is the true God.
In 1892, German Coptologist Carl Schmidt identified the Book of the Logos with "Books of Jeu" mentioned in the parallel Gnostic collection Pistis Sophia. Known as the Askew Codex after Dr. Anthony Askew who purchased it, this work appeared for sale in London in 1772 or 1773—was it another of Bruce’s finds? An incomplete text from another scribe’s hand in the Bruce Codex is called Untitled Apocalypse. It concerns the spirit’s ascent through those archons that in gnostic cosmology seek to entrap souls devoid of spiritual knowledge. Redemption from the fatal world (symbolized as water) by the new wine of the "living Jesus’s" spiritual baptism is the dominant theme of these impressive, didactic texts.*
Sailing northward down the Nile, Bruce noted docking at the ancient textile-making city of Akhmim (formerly Panopolis)—once home to third-century alchemist Zosimos of Panopolis. In the nineteenth century, Akhmim hosted excavations of graves that brought to light numerous rare papyri, including the only known Greek version of parts of the Book of Enoch.*
Having befriended an Egyptian Christian, or Copt, who collected taxes from predominantly Christian villages near Akhmim, Bruce sailed on, returning at last to Cairo in mid-January 1773, about the time Captain James Cook became the first European explorer to cross the Antarctic circle. His feet still a mass of sores, Bruce avoided the worst of Cairo’s hot streets by mounting an ass and traveling at night, desperately trying to keep his feet from scraping the earth.
Brusquely summoned from the St. Victor convent to the palace formerly held by Bruce’s old friend Ali Bey al-Kabir, Bruce entered the luxurious apartments of the latter’s son-in-law, Mahomet Bey Abou Dahab (1735–1775). Abou Dahab had assumed power after falling out with his father-in-law when commanding Egypt’s army against the Ottomans in Syria the previous year; he would shortly connive in Ali Bey’s death in Cairo.
Notwithstanding his beggarly appearance, Bruce’s tact and exceptional manners made a good impression on the Bey, even encouraging him to issue a firman to establish a new trading agreement with East India Company merchant ships at Jidda. The English merchants were about to forgo the trade after the local sheriff enforced extortionate duties, demanding a "present." Bruce himself declined all financial assistance, despite the Bey’s offering a handsome purse. In the future, Bruce would justly claim other benefits to British trading relations with Egypt, including better maps of the Red Sea and precise instructions on how to secure advantageous contact with the Bey and his ministers, which earned, he noted, no official recognition despite his being interviewed by Prime Minister Lord North. North, at the time, was more concerned with imposing an incendiary tax on tea imported into the American colonies. Such frostiness was not shared by the Bey who, before leaving to battle with al-Kabir, informed Bruce that his filial opponent had told him the English were a uniquely remarkable people, something he now recognized, since only such a country could have produced so many great and able men yet permitted one as superior in skill, courage, and judgment as James Bruce to spend his life not as leading merchant or state minister, but in the private—and politically irrelevant—pursuit of exploration and knowledge.
Bruce’s ship departed for Cyprus just as Alexandria erupted in startling flashes of musket fire—signals of Egypt’s latest tumble into instability. Leaving the troubled zone, but soon threatened by severe storms and a leak off Derna, the vessel’s captain approached Bruce’s bed and asked in French how many of "these things" Bruce had loaded on to the ship.
"What things?"
"Dead men," replied the captain. Convinced Bruce’s trunks carried corpses, the crew had conspired to jettison the lot—and would again if conditions worsened. Offering keys to the trunks, Bruce declared that should they find a single corpse, they could throw them all overboard. Opening two, the captain was satisfied, and when a storm arose close to Malta, the threat to Bruce’s precious cargo passed—fortunate for our story, for had the crew succumbed to fear, we should have no story to tell.
