John of Nikiu

John of Nikiu was a 7th century Egyptian bishop and historian .

Little more is known about John's life than that he was bishop of the Egyptian city of Nikiu in 688 . Between 691 and 700 he was disempowered and lost his office after punishing unruly monks so severely that one of them died.

Already very soon after the conquest of Egypt by the Arabs in 642 (see Islamic expansion ), Johannes wrote a world chronicle. This was probably written in Greek , but perhaps also in Coptic , but today it is only available in a late Ethiopian translation, which in turn was made in 1601 from an Arabic version. John wrote the work, which deals with the events up to 643, apparently as a young man and probably before he entered the clergy. The chronicle is formally one of the last works of late antique historiography and deals primarily with Greek and Roman history (from an Egyptian-Christian perspective). Ultimately, only the sections in which John describes the story from 640 to 643 are important: 610 begins a long space that does not end until 640. Apparently John had no written sources for the 30 years that followed 610 (during which Egypt had been occupied by the Sassanids for eleven years ), or John's account of these decades was no longer available to the translators in 1601.

Despite some errors and mistakes, the short text is an extremely important source for the conquest of the Eastern Roman province of Aegyptus from 640 by the Muslim Arabs, about which we otherwise have little reliable information.

translation

• RH Charles: The Chronicle of John Nikiu . London 1916 ( online ).

literature

• James Howard-Johnston : Witnesses to a World Crisis. Historians and Histories of the Middle East in the Seventh Century . Oxford 2010, pp. 181-189.
• Alexios G. Savvides, Benjamin Hendrickx (Eds.): Encyclopaedic Prosopographical Lexicon of Byzantine History and Civilization . Vol. 3: Faber Felix - Juwayni, Al- . Brepols Publishers, Turnhout 2012, ISBN 978-2-503-53243-1 , p. 393.
• Harald Suermann: Coptic texts on the Arab conquest of Egypt and the Umayyad rule . In: Journal of Coptic Studies 4, 2002, pp. 167-186.

Web links

• John of Nikiû in the Catholic Encyclopedia .