were presented to King George III and are in the royal collection at Windsor Castle. According to Edward Ullendorff, "There is little doubt that those volumes contain the pick of Bruce's work, and when they were shown, in 1862, by permission of Queen Victoria, to the Society of Antiquaries, all who saw them were greatly impressed." Bruce also brought back to Europe a select collection of Ethiopian manuscripts. "They opened up entirely new vistas for the study of Ethiopian languages and placed this branch of Oriental scholarship on a much more secure basis," writes Ullendorff. "It is not known how many MSS. reached Europe through his endeavours, but the present writer is aware of at least twenty-seven, all of which are exquisite examples of Ethiopian manuscript art. Bruce presented a fine and specially prepared copy of the Book of Enoch to Louis XV in Paris." While most of these manuscripts are in Ge'ez, one notable exception is a version of the Song of Songs written in Gafat, a language which Ullendorff states "is known to us only from this manuscript." Among the Ethiopian manuscripts were three copies of the Book of Enoch. The apocryphal text had been lost in Europe since the Middle Ages, with the exception of a few quotations in the Church Fathers and some Greek fragments preserved in the work of the Byzantine chronicler George Synkellos (IX sec.) and first published by Joseph Justus Scaliger in 1606. Although it was known since the mid-16th century that the full text was preserved in Ethiopia, any attempt at acquiring the manuscript had failed. Of the three copies, Bruce presented one to King Louis XV on his arrival in Paris in 1773 for the French National Library. The second copy was given a year later to the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, while the third copy was kept by Bruce himself, to be also added to the Bodleian collections after his death in 1794. The three manuscripts brought by Bruce mark the beginning of modern studies on the Book of Enoch. Bruce also acquired rare Gnostic manuscripts in Coptic in the Bruce Codex, which contains the only surviving copy of the Books of Jeu. Bruce's travels and discoveries inspired the founders of the British African Association (1788) in their efforts to promote exploration to discover the course of the Niger and the city of Timbuktu. Some of Bruce's stories influenced