The Chronicle of John of Nikiu: Historical Writing in Post-Roman Egypt

The Chronicle of John of Nikiu: Historical Writing in Post-Roman Egypt

Yirga, Felege-Selam

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, History

While there has been a great deal of work on the late seventh-century Chronicle of John, the anti-Chalcedonian Bishop of Nikiu, since its 1883 publication and French translation by Hermann Zotenberg, there have been few modern studies devoted exclusively to the author and his work. What is more, these modern studies primarily engage with the text as a source of data for the reign of Emperor Herakleios, and the Arab conquest of Egypt, meaning that modern historians often read past the author to a layer of sources beneath them. This positivist utilitarian view of the Chornicle often involves reducing John's worldview to that of a monophysite historian and a Coptic proto-nationalist, and as such interprets the relevant data through this framework. Modern scholarship has further transposed this world view onto the author's world, creating the impression that the Chronicle presents a narrative which reflects the development of a Coptic identity characterized primarily by hostility towards the Chalcedonian church, and the Roman state which had previously supported it. Anything in the text which challenges this view is dismissed as the product of John of Nikiu's method of compiling sources and inverting pro-Chalcedonian and pro-Roman sentiments where they appear. This dissertation moves beyond the heretofore utilitarian-positivist approaches. It instead argues that the entire Chronicle must be viewed as a complete work which, while compiled from a variety of identifiable and unidentifiable sources, still reveals a coherent and distinct historical narrative and theory of history, and one that does not neatly align with the theological and historical positions of the Egyptian Severan Church. This dissertation examines John of Nikiu's theory of history and prescriptive guidelines through a series of challenges to established scholarly views of the Chronicle. The first chapter challenges the notion that the Chronicle reflects a parochial view of world history centered pr (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: David Bernhard Brakke (Advisor); Anthony Kaldellis (Committee Member); Kristina Marie Sessa (Committee Member)