Chronicle of John of Nikiu (eBook)

Coping with Crisis in Post-Roman Egypt

Felege-Selam Solomon Yirga (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025
200 Seiten
University of California Press (Verlag)
978-0-520-42118-9 (ISBN)

Infos

In the midst of profound political changes in late seventh-century Egypt, after the end of Roman hegemony and during Islamic rule, a bishop named John from the city of Nikiu sat down to pen a chronicle. It is a puzzling and fascinating work that reimagines the established Roman genre of Christian world history as a dialectic between a Roman state that often failed to maintain Christian orthodoxy and Roman citizens who attempted to nudge the state in the direction of correct theology. Felege-Selam Solomon Yirga treats the bishops text as a historical artifact of Egyptian cultural and intellectual history, one of the last works of an educated elite forced to use the tools of Roman education to tackle the crisis brought on by the end of Roman Egypt. Placing the Chronicle in its broader setting, Yirga positions the text as quintessentially post-Roman, arguing that it was a rearticulation of imperial ideology for and by post-Roman subjects that allowed them to explain and cope with the failure of the Roman state to maintain control of Egypt.

Inhalt

Contents
 
Acknowledgments
 
Introduction
1. Understanding the Chronicle: Audience, Genre, Sources, and Authorial Voice
2. Egypt, Rome, and Romanness in the Chronicle
3. The Chronicle's Theory of History, Part 1: God, Natural Disaster, and the Arab Conquest of Egypt
4. The Chronicle's Theory of History, Part 2: Demonic and Diabolical Interventions
5. From Religious Practice to Political Praxis: Worldly Asceticism, Pious Subjects, and the Prescriptive Argument of the Chronicle
Conclusion
 
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 23.12.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Vor- und Frühgeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie ► Islam
• Schlagworte: Christian historiography • Cultural transition • early medieval thought • Late Antiquity • Middle East • religious texts • Roman Empire
• ISBN-10: 0-520-42118-3 / 0520421183
• ISBN-13: 978-0-520-42118-9 / 9780520421189