The Manuscript of the Rabbi Barachias Nephi

[Zosimus]

Turns out the evidence for it being a Kircher forgery isn't so strong, and there very well may have been a history of Egypt and lexicon of hieroglyphics written by a Rabbi Nephi after all:

Some Interesting New Insights into Medieval Legends about Ancient Egypt

"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."