Two books in one of glorious Egyptiana from Ralph Ellis. Ellis’s work is always enjoyable: he is enough of a scholar to dig real nuggets from the spoilheaps of orthodoxy; and he is a deft speculator on his gleanings, producing colourful theories harder to scotch than most of the efforts leering off the New Age bookshelves.

First, the design. The book comprises two texts, each printed from cover to centre. The press blurb claimed that this was an original format. However, I have a book called the New Sins/los Nuevos Peccados, by David Byrne, which uses the same idea, and was published in 1989; and science fiction’s ‘Ace doubles’ started in the early 1950s.

Nonetheless, this is a cost-effective, and environmentally friendly, way to produce books. Even if it is not original, I hope it starts a trend. If nothing else, it would provide a stern initiative test for occupationally psychotic librarians.

Scota covers ground that is probably familiar to forteans; the idea that Ireland was colonised at a formative stage by exiles from Egypt. A recent book by Lorraine Evans, Kingdom of the Ark, tells the same story.

Ellis’s version is much fuller, although he and Evans start from the same point: Walter Bower’s Scotichronicon. This 15th-century document, part of a longer chronicle, is based on an earlier work by John of Fordun (from around 1360) and also cites a number of earlier historians and chroniclers, including the venerable Nennius.

Bower states that the founding royal couple of Ireland and Scotland were a Greek prince called Gaythelos, and an Egyptian princess called Scota; they occupied the royal throne of Egypt for a short time.

Ellis, again like Evans, and original to neither of them, identifies Scota as the daughter of Akhenaten. This gives the legend a historical context and a likely timeframe. It also bumps up hard against orthodox historical accounts.

Ellis is not shy of such confrontations, as his earlier books demonstrate: he has built up a comprehensive revision of ancient history, as it relates to both biblical narrative and Egypt’s hermeneutically labile history. Scota fixes the Irish legend against this revisionist framework, and comes up with a richly rewarding weave. It is also an entertaining exercise in alternative textual scholarship, and for my money Ellis does this far better than most.

The orthodox history of ancient Egypt is full of holes and anomalies; convention is forced to do the job of evidence, too often. The signal failure of orthodox Egyptology is its relationship to the rest of the ancient world and its history. Egypt is quarantined, an axiomatic oasis of civilisation as we are prepared to recognise it, and the fact that the quarantine is retrospective doesn’t relieve its academic isolation.

Ellis, or any other maverick scholar, doesn’t have to be right to be interesting. He needs only to show that orthodoxy can get it wrong and that there is plenty of space for revision. He does this with scholarly aplomb and impious glee. Read his gloss on variant names of Gaythelos, their Osirian connotations, and their originating role in the mediæval iconography of the Green Man. Good stuff.

Readers of a numismatic bent will know that Antony and Cleopatra were recently struck in a very different light; a coin discovered in Egypt shows them as less than glamorous. Cleopatra’s reputation for physical beauty derives from mediæval sources, and Shakespeare, not from any classical author. In the years after her death, scurrilous rumours about her were rife.

One such rumour concerned her relationship with Julius Cæsar. It was suggested she was pregnant with his child when he was assassinated. Certainly her children did not disappear entirely from the pages of history. At least one of her daughters remained a ward of the Roman imperium until she was married off to an apparently minor Numidian prince.

This is the starting point for Ellis’s second Egyptian excursion, Cleopatra to Christ. The subtitle (‘Jesus was the great-grandson of Cleopatra’) gives you a rough idea where he goes with it: Hosea’s attraction for the evangelists takes on a whole new light (‘Out of Egypt I have called my son’).

The second point of reference for Ellis is an anecdote from Flavius Josephus. This concerns a settlement of Persian royalty, just east of the Sea of Galilee; and a joke about a Persian king, Phraates IV, and an ‘Italian concubine’ whom he raised to the position of queen.

Once inside this labyrinth, Ellis teases meaning out of names, iconography, and historical marginalia, to deduce a genealogy of Jesus leading back to Cleopatra. Along the way, he revises much of the Old and New Testaments, reminds us that he believes Josephus and Saint Paul are the same person, and opens up a whole web of possible international connections across the ancient world.

This may be eccentric, even fanciful. But it is based on evidence available to us. Ellis does not invoke aliens, or supernatural sources, to make his narrative cohere. He takes issue with canonical history on its own terms; and his narrative rests on the same evidential foundations as the orthodox account. This should remind the reader that interpretation is a political act.