← New Books Network
New Books Network
Felege-Selam Solomon Yirga, "The Chronicle of John of Nikiu: Coping with Crisis in Post-Roman Egypt" (U California Press, 2025)
01:21:15
Loading summary
Transcript47 lines
- [00:00]
Felige Salamon Yirga
Hello everybody.
- [00:01]
Marshall Po
This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:08]
Mike Motia
Hello and welcome to New Books in Late Antiquity, presented by ancient Jew Roorkee Few. I'm Mike Motia and today we're talking with Falaga Salamon Yirga about the chronicle of John of Nikiu Coping with crisis in post Roman Egypt. In 642, Egypt fell under Arab rule. Egypt was the the region of the Roman Empire that generated its most wealth. It was an access point to a whole lot of trade. It was the hub of a whole lot of learning. And if in this moment we were making a textbook map, Egypt would go from red to green or something like that. But this is not a map. And if we think about what this Arab takeover of Egypt would mean, we'll know that kind of day to day, very little changed. Even if so much ideologically was starting to. Taxes were going to new places, there were new troops wandering around, sometimes bullying people. There was a little bit more Arabic bouncing through the streets, but most people still spoke Greek or Coptic. There would be hundreds of years before Islam became the majority religion in Egypt. The deep grooves of the Nile still basically directed life. And yet, especially for those who were on top of society, there was some explaining to do. Like what. What actually happened to Rome and where was God? Yes, it's true that Egypt had briefly fallen under control of other empires. Some people were old enough to remember when the Persians took control of Egypt about three decades before. But this time seemed different. We we see authors starting to tell their history to make sense of this change and what remains of those stories. It gives us some insight into Roman ways of thinking and of coping with loss. Dr. Yirga has written a book about the Chronicles of John of Nicu. It's a history that goes from the creation of the world all the way up to his present in the 7th century under Arab rule. And John uses these traditional forms of Roman record keeping and storytelling to discuss not the rise of Rome, but the collapse of Roman control. It's also a good reminder of just how many languages were going on in Rome and how many legacies Rome contained.
- [03:14]
Felige Salamon Yirga
The chronicle.
- [03:15]
Mike Motia
It was likely written in Coptic. John translates and cites some Greek sources that were coming from Constantinople and Antioch. And it was written when there was plenty of Arabic kind of in the air. Eventually there would be an Arabic translation of this text, but our only remaining copy of the text actually comes from a 17th century Gez translation. Dr. Yurga is going to fill us in on the details, but just so we're kind of up to speed, John, he was a bishop along the Nile city of Niciu and the administrator to the monasteries of Upper Egypt. So he was likely in charge of a lot of the rebuilding of the monasteries after some different barbarian takeovers of them or kind of collapsing of them. And he also set himself this task of rebuilding a Christian story. So he's taking care of buildings, but he's also kind of ideologically trying to tell this new story of creation and fall and redemption. It was a story Dr. Yuga shows us largely centered on personal virtue, but it was a virtue that was still in service of a larger empire. He was hoping for a good Christian ruler that would have good Christian subjects to rule. And Christians, he argued, had kind of gotten decadent. And that Arab conquest, It was the latest version of God disciplining God's people for greed and for a lack of self control. This is a text that was written around the same time as the Apocalypse of Pseudo Methodius, the text we heard about in the last episode. And it's also grappling with this new political reality. But it shows a much different response than that Syriac work. It's still kind of longing for Rome. There's still some hope that a new ruler will rise up. And it's also gonna tell the same kind of story that goes from Genesis all the way to the present. But this Chronicle. It doesn't. I don't know, it doesn't look into the future. It doesn't give us any, like, glowing crosses. But it does tell a story that expects Christians to. To look, I don't know, less for a kind of final reckoning and more for a slow rebuilding of spaces and mainly a slow rebuilding of virtue. And we see that not in the fires of Revelation or the book of Daniel, but in this kind of triumphant. Not even a triumphant rhetoric, really. Instead, what he's looking for is just another version of Roman history, and it's this chronicle form that lots of Roman historians had used. It's got these kind of short, staccato entries that give you the highlights of the time. And he sees in that kind of basic form of storytelling the possibility of a different kind of governance. And we can see how kind of Christian this Roman audience was. Still, when he's writing sentences like this, he writes, in the days of Hezekiah, the king of Judah, there were two brothers whose names were Romulus and Remus. It's one of those kind of moments that, I don't know, just made me totally stop in my tracks. Like, the author assumes that readers will understand the biblical references almost better than the kind of classical Roman stories, right? That, that he's going to assume that you know who Hezekiah is, and then he's going to be like, and do you remember there were these brothers, Romulus and Remus. He compares life under Arab rule to Hebrews under Egyptian enslavement. And we can see kind of part of the explanation for Rome falling into Arab hands with a concluding sentence that says, the Roman Emperor lost the imperial crown and the Ishmaelites and the Crucians won the mastery over them because they did not walk in the orthodox faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, but divided the invisible. It's that kind of blending of Christian and Roman inform and content that shows us how late late antiquity can go. But it also shows us how much did change the thousand years of Roman have. Triumphal history and history writing, even, I don't know, centuries of Christian triumphal rhetoric is now kind of. That same frame can control and contain the story of loss and a call for repentance. The kind of forms of history that Roman writers used to tell, the kind of growth and expansion of Rome could now tell the story of a kind of collapse and fall, even if there is a kind of hope for repentance and renewal. So Dr. Yerga, he is an assistant professor of history at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and we're lucky to have him with us. So, Felige, thank you for being here. Can you introduce yourself? Who are you? How'd you come to write this book? How'd you get interested in John take you?
- [07:37]
Felige Salamon Yirga
Yeah. First, thank you for having me. So my name is, I guess, Felige, as you heard, assistant professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. I got my PhD in 2020 from the Ohio State University under David Bracke. How I got interested in this text, I guess, like most monographs. Right. First monograph, certainly this started as my dissertation. I had been in graduate school, I guess, focusing a lot on language training. Initially, I thought I was going to come in and work on sort of. Actually, the Komneni was what really interested me about Byzantine history. But my interest started to track earlier, and eventually I got into Syriac texts, but also I got into Classical Ethiopic, initially thinking I'd do something on the Aksumites, until Kevin von Bledel sort of introduced me to this text, the Chronicle of John of Nicu. And I think at the time, I was particular like everyone. I think I was particularly interested in the account of the invasion of Egypt. But, you know, eventually you read that enough times and you start to get curious about the rest of the book. And I sort of realized there's way more to this book than just this account that historians of early Islam and late antiquity tend to mine. Right. For the relevant information. And so initially, while I thought the chronicle would form a part of my dissertation, eventually I found so many interesting sort of problems with it and confusions. Some of it, you know, a product of John's own work, some of it a product of the Ethiopic translators that eventually just became the entire dissertation and the focus of this book.
- [09:21]
Mike Motia
Yeah. So the textual, it only survives in Ge'.
- [09:24]
Felige Salamon Yirga
Ez.
- [09:24]
Mike Motia
Can you tell us just a little bit about the language?
- [09:27]
Felige Salamon Yirga
Yeah. So Ge', EZ or Classical Ethiopic, is a Semitic language from, I guess, the highlands of the Horn of Africa. So I guess today it would be like modern Eritrea and Ethiopia. So Semitic text, meaning it's sort of a, let's say, cousin of Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac or Aramaic. It was a spoken language under the kingdom of Aksum. This was the late antique, sort of, let's say, Ethiopian, Eritrean Kingdom. And it is also like, in that kingdom is where we find our earliest texts in Classical Ethiopic through these inscriptions that Aksumite kings would put up, usually celebrating victories. The text is written in a script that is today called Fidel which seems to be a sort of modified version of the old South Arabian script. After the Aksumite kingdom collapsed around the seventh century, it remained as an important sort of formal form of communication. So it was a language used by the medieval Ethiopian court and used as well as part of the ecclesiastical language, and today remains as the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Eritrean Orthodox Churches.
- [10:47]
Mike Motia
Great, thanks. Okay, so let's get at least a little bit into the details, but before we get there, like, what's a chronicle?
- [10:56]
Felige Salamon Yirga
Yeah, this is a great question. It's sort of a fraught category, but let's say broadly we can say that it's a genre of historical writing that purports generally to cover like all of human history. It doesn't actually do this. Especially those chronicles produced by the Roman Empire tend to focus. Right. Strictly on the Roman Empire once it enters the picture. But basically what it does is it takes in the form of short entries, as you'd mentioned, it takes all sorts of events and sort of mashes them all together. Right. So it'll take biblical events, events from Hellenistic history, early Roman history. It will also take figures of classical myths, so like the ancient gods, turn them into historical kings and historical figures, and turn them into one sort of linear narrative stretching from creation usually to the author's own time. The chronicles are usually contrasted with like, what I guess older scholarship would properly call like histories or classicizing histories. And these would be written by figures who were essentially emulating writing in Greek, emulating the written tradition of people like Thucydides, account of the Peloponnesian War. So those accounts by contrast would tend to deal with the reign of a single emperor or even like a single war or series of wars. So think like Procopius's accounts of the wars of Justinian. And these would tend to also be in a more, let's say, let's say higher register of language, A language that's deliberately sort of trying to emulate the Greek, the Atticizing Greek. Thucydides.
- [12:39]
Mike Motia
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like sometimes these chronicles, they can read like bullet pointed entries almost. But. And like, I think the temptation to that is to say, like, you know, Thucydides is interested in like cause and effect and like that's what histories do. And then you have these chronicles that are more like timelines or something like that. But there is, and I found this really helpful in the book, like there is like an actually overarching story that these chronicles also are telling, even if they're doing it in. I don't know more bullet pointed forms. And so you write with this chronicle that the real story is kind of God's gradual alienation from the Christian state. So can you tell us a little bit more about this? Like what is the overarching story for John and why is God pulling away?
- [13:25]
Felige Salamon Yirga
Yeah, absolutely. So as you mentioned, right, the format doesn't really lend itself easily to seeing what the argument is, but there is an argument. It tends to emerge through the repetition of particular themes, right. In each of these entries in the brains of particular emperors. And the overarching story that emerges, as you mentioned, is the sort of rise of the Roman state and its Christianization, a sort of high point in its Christianization. But ultimately what you see, as you mentioned, is a sort of moral decline. And the cause of this decline, like I guess the major decline for the Roman state seems to be for John of Nicu, the adoption of the decisions of the Council of Chalcedon, which basically calls on Christians throughout the empire to adopt a particular theological view, to put it in the simplest terms, about, you know, what Jesus is made out of. And for John this is like a serious theological misstep. Beyond this, however, and so the Roman state's sort of decision to defend this theological position eventually through force of arms, provokes God's alienation. But it's not just that. Certainly there's also just the sort of moral or sort of ethical or religious degradation of the Roman citizens writ large. Right. So you see this sort of gradual decline of like the moral excellence of the Roman citizens in the Roman state. And as this declines, right. God sort of separates himself from them, Right. He sort of withdraws some of his protection and I think most importantly begins to provide them with emperors who reflect the moral degradation of the society. And ultimately he sees this alienation as culminating in the separation. I think that's how he sees it. The separation of Egypt, the province of Egypt from the empire by the armies of Amr Ibn Alas.
- [15:25]
Mike Motia
Great. Yeah. And so we'll get into the details of the text in a second, I promise. But like, I think a little bit more context is going to help us us here. So can you kind of give us a sense of like the, I don't know, on the ground reality of, I don't know, 642 compared to 632. Like, you know, like it would take Arab soldiers a few years to defeat the Romans, but by 642, I think Romans really do control or Romans have lost control of Egypt. Right. And partly what that means is that lots of monasteries around the Nile would have been destroyed, but kind of. Can you give us like a picture? Like what actually changed under Arabic rule? Like what kind of context is he writing in?
- [16:03]
Felige Salamon Yirga
Yeah, so like the classic late antique problem. Right. Some things change in pretty significant ways, but a lot of things stay the same. So I guess I'll start with, let's start with the continuities, actually. This might be good. So I like what you did in the introduction where you said, like, in our minds, like you can almost imagine like the map changing from one color to another, but. Right. As I'm sure everyone knows, like that's generally not how this works. Right. You don't see an instant sort of Arabization or Islamicization of the society. So for centuries afterwards, a majority of the population is going to remain Christian. Many people, certainly by John Adnici's time, are going to be speaking Coptic. This is the sort of, let's say, latest form of the Egyptian language. A lot of people working in administrative positions and also in ecclesiastical positions are also going to be working in the Greek language. Right. So this was the sort of, let's say, universal language of the Roman Empire. There are other continuities as well. Many administrators are holding the same post that they did under Roman hegemony, and they're going to require the same sorts of educations, education and training, reading the same texts that they did under Roman rule. The machinery of Egyptian agriculture, which used to be mobilized to sort of feed Constantinople or broadly enrich the Roman Empire is still there. It's, it's more or less working the same way, although there are like changes that are beginning to be introduced. They're just sort of feeding new, let's say new masters in the Rashidun caliphs and the Umayyad caliphs as opposed to the Roman Empire. That said. Right. I, and I really want to emphasize this. It's not all continuity, right? It's never all continuity. There's a real rupture here. Right. So the Arab invasion came with, well, like a military conflict. And this is sort of traumatic and destructive. Certainly monasteries and churches are destroyed, as you'd mentioned, but also entire cities, particularly in the upper Delta, are, you know, pretty, pretty badly destroyed. John's own city of Nicu is a victim of this sort of brutal, total destruction. A good number of people are apparently killed and enslaved. And again, none of this is really abnormal for pre modern warfare. That doesn't mean it's not like traumatic or significant. What's more, John of Nicu mentions that the tax burdens put on the Egyptians by the Arabs seem to have been particularly onerous, both in the form of a corve labor and in calling for monetary taxes. It's bad enough certainly that around the time or shortly after John of Niki was writing, so in the beginning of the 8th century, you start to get a number of rural uprisings in Egypt that are going to last for the next 50 years or so. Another big disruption, I think, for the urban elite is that you have now been sort of unplugged from this wider world of Roman elites in this pan Mediterranean Roman Empire that, you know, sort of expanded your horizons, right? You're no longer. You no longer have the option of taking up positions in Constantinople. Sailing the Mediterranean is now a sort of trickier, questionable affairs. And you are no longer a local elite who could have had pretenses of being part of a broader pan Mediterranean elite. You're also just sort of disconnected from Roman law, which a lot of people took advantage of, right? The limits of your appeal now stop with, I guess by John of Nicu's time, the governor Abdelaziz, you no longer have the theoretical possibility of like, you know, sending your complaints all the way to the top in Constantinople. Finally, and I think this is most important for John, there's an important change in the church when the Arabs arrive. There are several groups of people who all claim to be the true representative of all of the Christians of Egypt. There is, I guess, what would later be called the Melkite Church, representing the church that had been supported by the Roman state. So much so, in fact, that the Chalcedonian patriarch, a guy named Cyrus, was also sort of understood to be more or less the governor of Egypt by this point. But when the Arabs arrive, this seems to be less clear to them. And they certainly don't have a stake in identifying which sort of Christian theology is correct and which isn't. So it gives the clergy in John's own church, which I call the Severin Theodosian Miaphysites. It allows them to come out of their sort of hiding, right, the imposed hiding that they had been under. They can now sort of present themselves to the Arabs as like legitimate representative of a significant number of Christians. And while that is complicated, there are accounts, for example, in the history of the patriarchs of Constantinople where there seems to be like moments of competition, right, over who gets to do this. Ultimately, the Miavasite Christians in John's church get the opportunity and are successful in convincing the Arabs that, like it's them who are the sort of more or less representatives of the Christian community. And this is an option that wasn't really available to them, certainly not in the 6th and 7th centuries under Roman rule. So again, the continuities and discontinuities there.
- [21:19]
Mike Motia
That is such a helpful backdrop. Thank you so much. That was really. That's great. So can you tell who like, so now we've got like the kind of 10,000 foot view, but like who was John?
- [21:31]
Felige Salamon Yirga
Yes. So we don't know a lot about him. What we know about him basically comes from three texts. One is his own chronicle, the other is the history of the patriarchs of Alexandria and a particular section that was written by a contemporary of his, an archdeacon named George. And finally the life of Isaac of Alexandria, who was a patriarch. It's sort of a hagiography written by Mena of Nicu, was John of Nicu's successor. So what we do know about him and what we can infer as well, we know that he was a bishop of Nicu, which seems to have been, let's say, a mid sized polis or city in the upper delta region or southern Nile delta, which had been devastated by the Arab conquest. He seems to have been fairly well educated. He likely understood Greek very well or was able to read Greek work with it, even though he wrote his chronicle in Coptic. And he opted initially occupied something like an upper, let's say like an upper middle management position in the Egyptian church. So he was present for the selection of two patriarchs after the Arab conquest of Egypt. We know he was likely a monk at some point, although we have no like, hard evidence of his monastic life. We were simply told by the archdeacon George that he was familiar with the monastic life at some point under a patriarch of Syrian extraction named Simeon. He was made a mudabbir or the overseer of the monasteries of Egypt. And this is a fairly significant position for a few reasons. One, a lot are being repaired or rebuilt and so he's overseeing the acquisition and dispensation of like a lot of material wealth and a lot of labor. Second, these monasteries had historically been sort of important theological backgrounds, right? So the monastic communities are the ones that provide shelter for the Miaphysites and others once they are declared deviant or heretical by the government of the day. And so as they house these, right, because they're housing these people, they also become sites of fairly fierce theological debate. And every once in a while, of course, some of these monks from the monasteries are going to wander into the cities and cause trouble. We also know that he's in a position to directly or indirectly impose discipline on these institutions. So he's able to bring them to heel in line with his theological thinking, with the theological thinking of his church. So this is pretty important in that sense as well. And finally many of these institutions, and this is an argument that Eva Vipa and others have made, are in many instances the equivalent of like a parish church in rural areas. So not only are you overseeing like the discipline of these monks, you're sort of entering, maybe not quite, but like beginning to enter like the nitty gritty of people's day to day spiritual needs in Egypt. So it's a fairly significant position. It makes them quite important. It also puts him in conflict with a lot of bishops. As you can imagine. A lot of bishops were under like we're used to an arrangement in which if something is donated to their particular church, they are the ones who get to manage it. Right. So John's position as Mudabbir puts him in a position potentially to like undermine their direct control over some of the, some of the material wealth here and also uh, some of the uh, monasteries. So he's likely made a lot of enemies in this position as well. And this is relevant for the, I think most significant biographical fact we have about John of Nicu. We are told that at some point a group of monks in Sketis sort of break into a nunnery, remove a nun from there and they sleep with her. It's sort of, I think, inferred that this was an instance of sexual assault. John of Nicu finds out about this, he rounds up these monks and he decides to, to beat the ringleader. Apparently he was a little too enthusiastic in this dispensation of justice. The monk who was beaten ends up dying 10 days later. We are then told, and this is sort of an interesting wrinkle of the story, appears in the History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria. We are then told that the bishops of Egypt met in secret to determine his fate. So it's not clear at all in the text whether Simeon was aware that this had happened or that there was a meeting. It's not clear that the lay population or some of the lower order clergy with this we're simply told that the bishops meet specifically in secret. They give him an informal trial and they punish him not only by taking away his position as Mudabbir, but they take away his title as bishop. They basically demote him down to the rank of mere monk. According to George, he does not Take this. Well, he tells the bishops in response to this that because they had deposed him sort of unjustly, in his view, he says, I think it was something to the effect of, like, God will make you strangers to your seize. You know, it was like, until the end of the period in which you condemn me. And then George follows this up by saying, abdulaziz shortly thereafter called all of the various Christian leaders together and, like, banned the practice of the Christian liturgy. And that's just about all we know about him, at least from sort of other sources and from his texts. The things we can inform, of course, is that he, of course, is that he seemed to be fairly wealthy, and the education that he seems to have gotten align with what we would expect from a Roman aristocrat, right? Not just a mastery of scripture, but also a familiarity with some of the chronicles and also classicizing histories that one might expect an educated Roman to read.
- [27:27]
Mike Motia
Yeah, yeah, yeah, thanks. I mean, what a story, what a life, right? From what we know, right. But, yeah, so moving into the audience for a text like this, I mean, it's pretty long, at least as far as chronicles go. And you argue the first audience for this text would have been the philoponio. And these are like lay Christian in confraternities. In my head, they're kind of like the beguines, but they're these kind of. Not quite monks, but they're doing, like, lots of charity work. Even if they're still, like, you know, technically attached to the world. If you squint, it might be hard to tell them apart from a monastic community, but they're not, like, formally part of a monastic group, I think. But can you tell us about this, this audience? Like, what. What kind of work were they doing? And really, like, why. Why would they want attacks like this?
- [28:20]
Felige Salamon Yirga
Yeah, absolutely. So the philopenoi, the lovers of toil, they're. They're an interesting group. So it's sort of a position you can take up where you're fully convinced, right, that this life of asceticism, making yourself dead to the world, is a good thing to do. Right. For your spiritual salvation. Right. Is ultimately like a great expression of your. Of your Christianity, but for whatever reason, you know, practical or otherwise, you are unable. Right. To do this. Right. So they end up occupying this sort of, as you'd mentioned, this strange middle ground. This allows them to do things right, like engaging in charity work, but they also do much more besides. So we have accounts of them involving themselves in theological controversies at times, you know, sort of of getting in the streets and fighting people. But we also see them donating their time and resources to their churches without holding any formal position in them and relevant for our purposes. We get evidence into the 6th century and 7th that they seem to form reading circles. And we're also interested in sponsoring the production of texts. So these are a group of people, then, who are concerned with, like, attaining the greatest degree of Christian virtue one can attain without, you know, going through the trouble of making yourself, like, truly dead to the world and then, like, living at the boundaries or beyond, right? The reach of, like, civilization proper in terms of why they would want this text. I know in general terms, it's unfashionable to speak in universals, but I think, like, if you're aware of that, something traumatic, tremendous, like a tremendous rupture has happened. Like, people tend to ask, I think, among other things, like, two classic questions, right? Like, what just happened? How did we get here? And, like, what do we do next? And I don't even think that's a question that's necessarily particular to the philopenoi. I imagine tons of people who recognize this as a trauma were asking this question. And so here. And I think there are a number of answers to this question. And so I think John of NICU is providing them with an answer to this question that turns what they're doing anyway, right? This pursuit of virtue, these reading circles, this charity, this, like, spiritual perfection into a sort of what is, like, answer to the what is to be done question. Like, keep doing what you're doing. And in fact, there. There's. There's basically no, like, instruction on, like, how to behave yourself as a good philopanoi in here. It's. It's more answering the question of, like, what. Like, why you. Why you ought to be doing this? Why you ought to keep developing, right, this pursuit of perfect Christian virtue. And the answer that he seems to come to is that, like, this will not only lead to, like, the development of your soul and your salvation. This, like, your actions, right? As philopono, as people seeking this virtue and wisdom can redeem the Christian empire, right? Can bring us back into the fold of a Christian Roman empire.
- [31:30]
Mike Motia
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's great. I mean, like, they. You're gonna be right, that, like, there is this kind of universal impulse to be like, okay, bad thing happened. Why did the bad thing happen? But it's that when it gets combined with this kind of previously established long tradition of, like, semi monastic reading circles that. That, I mean, like, I don't Know, like activist circles still do similar things today. Like you get together and you, you know, you read a book, you talk about kind of what, what you think, and it, it reinforces kind of some sorts of ideology, but it's also, yeah, I don't know, it's like a, it's a way to kind of bind yourselves together to, to those people in that, in that kind of circle as well. And, and so that kind of big, big history, answering the big questions also has kind of, you know, social specificity to it. You know, one of the kind of telling things about this text is the kind of sources that you, that it pulls in. And you've. We've kind of been talking about this, about, you know, how exposed he was to other histories. But do we know kind of what kind of sources he's drawing on and what they teach us about John and his readers?
- [32:33]
Felige Salamon Yirga
Absolutely. So I guess I'll start with these sources. So it seems as though the skeleton, like the narrative skeleton of this text is a 6th century Greek text, the Chronographia of John Malalas. This is a guy in Antioch in the province of Syria. It's sort of a major city in the Roman Empire at the time. And it does the same thing, right? It goes from, you know, creation, right, Adam and Eve, all the way to the author's own time. So, well, a little before, like sort of the end of his life, but like during the reign of Justinian, so in the middle of the 6th century. But that narrative skeleton is not the whole text, right? So he supplements, right, this narrative skeleton that the entries of John Malalas offer us with all sorts of texts. You'll get everything from classical texts like Diodorus Siculus's histories. You get passages from Herodotus that he uses to explain certain things about Egypt. You also get an explicit recommendation from John that his readers ought to go read the histories of Procopius and the histories of Agathius to better understand Justinian's campaigns in Italy. But you'll also get Byzantine church histories. So the works of Socrates of Constantinople, writing in the fifth century. You will also get a number of sort of later chronicles from the 7th century in Constantinople. That said, you also get a number of local texts. So John is very happy to integrate local Egyptian sources, secular and otherwise, into his accounts. So, for example, for the reign of Maurice towards the end of the 6th century, between like 582 and 602, he offers us accounts that we find nowhere else about uprisings in Egypt. And the account or and the career of an Egyptian aristocrat named Aristomachus, who goes from, you know, starting trouble in his home province of Egypt to building a cistern in Constantinople. And you'll also get the inclusion of local hagiographies, in particular for the reign of Diocletian. These aren't all sort of uncritically absorbed. John certainly questions all of his sources at times. You know, in some instances he'll call reports that he's heard foolish or accounts that were given without evidence. So they're not always all uncritically absorbed into this text, but they come from a wide range. And one other thing I want to add as well is while the text shows a bent towards his own church's theological positions, he's quite content to use the works of theological opponents when it suits him. So in two instances, we find accounts that describe the persecution of Gyanites, who are a rival anti Chalcedonian group. And he uses their historical accounts particularly to attack the Chalcedonian patriarch, Cyrus. So what we learn about his readers and him from this is that some of them apparently are Greek literate. If they're being asked to read these texts, and most importantly, I think they're interested in understanding this Roman state. And had this been written like 50 years prior, 60 years prior, I wouldn't find that remarkable because they're all Roman citizens. It is weird to have this well into Islamic control of Egypt. Right. Something that is functionally a Roman history with Roman sources being read by people who are then asked to supplement their reading with things in Greek.
- [36:14]
Mike Motia
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, just like, for comparison. Can you give us like a. Some kind of comparison with kind of how John Moss was writing this? Like, he's kind of taking that. That skeleton, that outline and. And changing it a bit. Like, can you give us a little comparison with that?
- [36:32]
Felige Salamon Yirga
Yeah. So I think some of the critical differences are. Malala seems particularly interested in keeping track of time. And I mean that in, like, literal senses, not just like, organizing the years of emperors, but, like, also counting how many years it's been since creation or how many years it's been since the formation of the Roman Empire. John of Nicu tends to strip away all of that. He also gives us little portraits of Roman emperors that are quite interesting. Right. This emperor had, like, gray hair and looked a little funnier. This one walked with a limp. Most of that is also stripped away from the chronicle. But I think the biggest difference is that John Malalas isn't particularly hung up on theological questions. And it doesn't read like a Christian text. In other words, there's not a lot of theology in Malalas. But for John of Nicu, there is a ton of theological thinking in his vision of history. So much so that I think it's fair to argue that it's like God is the primary actor in this narrative for John of nicu. Right. Everyone else is more or less like, responding to him or reflecting either his. His grace or alienation. Whereas for John Malalas, like, it kind of floats in the background. Theological controversies, martyrdoms, like divine wrath, they're there, but they're not as sort of prominently placed as they are for John of nicu. And I think that's a sort of critical difference. That's where John of NICU's voice really comes out of the text.
- [38:03]
Mike Motia
Yeah. And I mean, partly because there's so much God talk in it and partly because it's written in Coptic, I think that the temptation has been to read John Keough's chronicle as something like Coptic as opposed to Roman. And I don't know, I think about that line I quoted in the very beginning about kind of how God allows destruction because they divided Christ's divinity and humanity. It can make it seem like the sphere of influence of a text like this was only two Coptic readers who just didn't care that much about Romanitas or Romanness. But like, I don't know, like Miphysite Coptic Christians were still pretty attached to their Roman ness. I mean, there were, there were Miphysite Roman emperors. Like, it's, it's not. We don't have to make that hard of a distinction. Can you tell us a little bit about, like, what Romanness looks like in this text? Maybe you could tell us a little bit about Diocletian's reign and kind of Egypt's role in it.
- [39:01]
Felige Salamon Yirga
Absolutely. So I guess I'll start with the Roman ness thing, like broadly. And here I've borrowed some of these notions from Anthony Caldelis. I tend to see Roman ness in this period, like prior, let's say, to John of Nicu's writing and through his writing as really the expression of universal values through your provincial identity. Right. All sorts of Roman authors are very into their hometowns. Malalis himself has a lot of focus on things that are happening in Antioch, in Syria. You certainly get works like that of Libanius, which focuses a lot on the deep, sometimes even pre Roman history of Antioch. But that shouldn't signal that these people see themselves as in some way alienated. From the Roman state. In the end, the Roman state is just a patchwork of provincial identities through which are expressed sort of universal Roman values. And in the chronicle of John of Nicu, I think this came out most clearly in the Diocletian account. Now, when I put it in my book, the sort of John of Nikki's treatment of Diocletian, I selected it because it struck me as a way of like the opposite of straw manning, like steel manning. The argument for a Coptic, an expression of a Coptic identity here, there's no better place to do it, right? Egyptian, like sort of Christian, like miaphysite dating structures. This era of martyr system starts with the era of Diocletian as this sort of important formative point for a Coptic identity, right? Like this is the moment in which our like persecution as Egyptian Christians begins and it continues through the Arab period, right? But as I looked at it, I found sort of something quite stunning. So John of Nicu's account of Diocletian's persecutions, first of all, very interestingly identifies Diocletian himself as an Egyptian and it identifies him as a Christian apostate. So this is not the case as far as we can tell. John of Nicu seems to be the only person, the only historian who makes the claim that Diocletian was an Egyptian who used to be a Christian. He doesn't make this up though. He pulls this from a local Egyptian hagiographic tradition where a lot of the early martyrs, Christian martyrs under Diocletian during his persecutions, were sort of all friends together in Egypt and Christians. And in this group was a farmer named Agrippa who joins the Roman army with his friends. And he is a Christian. He eventually gives up Christianity when he sees his power and then persecutes all of his old Christian friends. So John of Nicu combines this local hagiographic tradition of Diocletian's persecution with something that he finds in John Malalas, which is a very sort of confused account for which no date is given, of an actual rebellion that occurs in Egypt in 297, 298 under a guy named Domitianus and his right hand man Achillaeus. They basically seize Egypt and Alexandria, hoping to like cut off the grain supply and use that as a base from which to attack Diocletian and try to seize imperial power. This was not like an actual, like, as far as we can understand, this was not like a popular uprising of Egyptians against the Romans as it actually happened. It was just two Provincials, right, Attempting to use Egypt as a base to attack by accletion. But Malalas understands it instead as a popular uprising. And so what John of Niciu does is he takes these two traditions and he melds them into one. And the account that he produces is basically to say that when Diocletian took power, the Egyptians, right, and Christians rise up against Diocletian because. For two reasons. I mean, one it's his Christian apostasy, his persecution of the Christians. But another is because he had seized power unjustly, right? The idea being that Diocletian had come to power in some sort of illegal way. Now it's not illegal because he came to power through the army, right? John of Nicu, like all Romans, sort of understands that like these violent transitions of power, like completely normal. What's unjust, what's illegal about it, what's problematic is that Diocletian then like, takes this power that he has secured through like, let's say, extra legal means and uses it as an opportunity to abuse the Christian Roman citizens, right? So what he, what he basically does is he turns this account, right, this account of an uprising into a Christian, almost popular republican uprising against an unjust tyrant, right, who is not just unjust because he is persecuting Christians and because he's a naughty apostate who, you know, engages in sacrifice and forces others to engage in sacrifice, but also because he has sort of, in an extra legal way acted against the common good of the republic. And when I read the text that way, like, everything Egyptian about it, like Egyptian as sort of separate from the Roman Empire, kind of, of melts away. This is a story about Roman provincials acting on behalf of a Christian Roman Republic. And, and I, I, I think there's nothing more sort of Roman than that idea.
- [44:19]
Mike Motia
Right, right, right, right. Yeah, yeah. So, and I mean, I think that gets in a way that, like, we don't need to think about the kind of, you know, theological or kind of God acting as, as opposed to the Roman ness. But, but we, we do see like a lot of kind of of God acting in this story. So sometimes it's like wars and conquests are a way that God acts. And then other times we have earthquakes and floods and natural disasters. And you talk about kind of how he'll distinguish between kind of when God is working directly through natural disasters or indirectly. And one time you talk about this earthquake in 526 in Antioch. Can you tell us about the earthquake and kind of how God's working there?
- [44:55]
Felige Salamon Yirga
Yeah, so this is the great earthquake of Antioch526, I should mention, like in Malalas and then also subsequently in John of Nicu, we're told that there are like, several destructions of Antioch through earthquakes. This apparently is the worst one. Though it occurs in 526. It's particularly destructive as well because there were at the time apparently a great number of tourists in Antioch who are there for the Feast of the Ascension. And so this, this city is totally destroyed by the earthquake. We're given a number of like 250,000 people die from John Malalas. And John of Nicu repeats this claim. John Malalas saw this as part of a sort of cycle of divine punishment and divine mercy. So we're told that there's this horrible earthquake, right, because of the sins of the city. Malalis doesn't really get into what those sins are, but that this is an expression of the wrath of God. And then we're told that immediately after we get like an expression of God's philanthropia, right, his love of man. You get survivors who are miraculously pulled from the rubble, right? Babies who are recovered from the rubble. We're told that those who attempt to loot, you know, those who are fleeing the city are like, punished by the, by the love of God or by the wrath of God, that they're like, sort of miraculously struck dead. John strikes all of that, and he offers a new, more specific explanation. He's like, yes, okay, this happened because you were naughty sinners, but here is particularly how you sinned. He saw the destruction as a result of two things. One is broadly, the public and the imperial government's abandonment of the orthodox faith, which is to say the Miaphysite faith. So he bans this specifically on the decisions of the Council of Chalcedon. More importantly, though, he sees this specifically as a punishment for the expulsion of Sirius of Severus of Antioch from his sea. So, right. There's a specific punishment there related to this. And, and more importantly, there's no moments of mercy for John, right? And it's not targeted. This isn't an earthquake that just affects the pagans, right? This isn't an earthquake from which like the Miaphysites are spared. Everyone is sort of targeted in a broad way, right? The destruction and the murder is universal. So John basically sees this as a signal, right, of God's separation and alienation. He's not trying to teach you a lesson, right? There's, there's no lesson to be learned here like, ah, that's what you get, right? So, you know, don't do this again or there'll be another earthquake. The disaster is just a reflection of the moral rot in the Roman government and society, right? You can't undoing. Undo it by saying sorry or by saying that you don't want this emperor. In fact, we get a related account prior, where the Roman people in Constantinople actually do this and God picks someone in the crowd to tell them, right? No, no, no. I've given you precisely the ruler who reflects like your behavior, right? I've given you this horrible sinner because you are all horrible sinners. And this is sort of a larger part of a larger, like, recurring theme in the text that God is ultimately going to give the Romans, right? Their society and their government is ultimately going to reflect their individual rot. So I think the analogy I used in the book was like, that destruction in Antioch is something akin to like, you know, a bridge collapsing because of an incompetent mason, right? Or a lazy mason who doesn't like, construct it properly or doesn't engage in the. Maintain the maintenance of the bridge properly. There's no lesson that the mason is trying to teach you by having the bridge collapse. This is just like a function of the mason being bad at his job.
- [48:46]
Mike Motia
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's great. So there's another Antioch story that you tell. And this is so the Arab conquests, like, take Antioch like five years before Egypt, something like that, right? And the way John tells the story of the loss of Antioch, it's a story about Chalcedonia and Mephistite Christians and kind of God punishing the Chalcedonians for ousting Meophysites. But the point is in the talk, like, get people to convert, to emphasize Christianity. Like, what's he, what's he trying to do in, in this story?
- [49:18]
Felige Salamon Yirga
Right? So the story as I understand it, is, is, is, is sort of to point out that like, there is this kind of, again, this kind of alienation from the Ro. Of God, from the Roman state that has occurred and that individually what people are going to have to do is, you know, demonstrate a kind of Christian virtue that is ultimately going to allow, you know, God to put a sort of pious figure back in charge who is going to reclaim all of these territories in a, in a, in a broader sense. So like, again, there's no particular lesson that the Arabs are going to try to teach anyone in, in the conquest of, of Antioch or anything like this. It is simply like a reflection of how bad Things have gotten for the. For the Roman state.
- [50:08]
Mike Motia
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And like, another version of that. You talk about kind of just like how important. Like we talk about how important God is in the story, but, like, there's all these, like, demons who are working, right? And you have this story. It's during the reign of Maurice, what is it, 582 to 602. Sometime in there of these kind of. There are two creatures, like, in the Nile and like the. And like, people just, like, can't recognize just, like, all the evil around them. Can you tell us about that story? And just kind of like the. What he's trying to do with it with the story like that.
- [50:40]
Felige Salamon Yirga
So this is a sort of strange story, and it's one that I'm working on another article about. The story is basically a digression. It appears at the end of a chapter in which John describes two major uprisings that occur in Egypt during the reign of Maurice. It's sort of how he ends that whole chapter. And basically what happens is the Roman governor of Egypt, a guy named Minas, who's the duke in Augustalus. He's sort of like, you know, on his tour on the Nile. And these two creatures emerge from the Nile river and, you know, they basically sort of reveal themselves to the audience. People, like, stare at them for a while and, you know, sort of after a certain number of hours, right, these creatures sort of dive back in the Nile. And then John begins to tell us about the speculation, right. He seems to suggest that the people who were there in the moment say, like, these were demons. Pretty clear these were demons, right? What they were trying to do is sort of unclear. I'll get into that in a bit. Then he. Then he points out there are other people who say sort of lots of weird things about it. Some say it was like an evil apparition, right? Like a bad omen. So it was just like the apparition of these demons, but there were no actual demons there. Others say that it was a good omen. And here John of Nicu may have been referring to. To a work by John Lytus, which talks about a festival that Egyptians used to conduct where they would look for the appearance of these creatures that emerge from the Nile. He also points to another theory that seems, depending on how you read, the Ethiopic, seems to have fairly ancient roots. He seems to suggest that some people were convinced that the Nile, because of certain environmental factors, right? The. The mud of the. The waters of the Nile, the mud of the Nile combined with the hot and humid environment of Egypt had the ability to like auto generate new creatures. And they're like, well there's your evidence, right? You've never seen a weird creature like this before. But that's because the Nile, right, because of the weird environmental conditions of Egypt is able to just spontaneously create new creatures. And then John of NICU sort of, it's like his tersest and most angry comet. He's like, like all of these people are liars, right? And they write, you know, they write these things without sort of evidence to John with this. For John, I think what this indicates is that like this state has fallen to such total disarray that what would have seemed obvious to previous generations that these are demons who are like tempting these people, right, with their form could be like, oh, the Nile's creating new creatures or it's like a good or bad omen. He's like, there is something wrong with Maurice's society to such an extent that people have lost the ability to identify, you know, the fact that they're being tempted with demons. And I should point out, like John is not the first to tell this story. We actually find this from the account of the histories of Theophylact. So Theophylact was another actually Egyptian writer writing in the course of Heraclius, Court of Heraclius, about the reign of Maurice. And, and this is part of something that Theophylax scatters throughout his histories. There are lots of weird things that happen in the Roman Empire that are sort of supposed to hint at the fate that Maurice is about to experience, right? He's about to be brutally murdered by the usurper Phocas along with his family. So you get lots of weird events in Theophylact. There's like a birth of a lion headed dog. Conjoined twins are presented in constant who were born outside of Constantinople are presented to Maurice. These are supposed to be subtle hints that there's some sort of like profound disorder in the empire and that tragically he's unable to realize this. A Theophylact has to be subtle because writing in the reign of Heraclius, he can't say that Maurice was like bad and incompetent because that might lend legitimacy to Phocas. And we can't lend legitimacy to Phocas because Heraclius reign. His legitimacy is built on the idea that focus had sort of illegally or illegitimately come to power and thrown the empire into disarray. But at the same time you also don't want to inspire Nostalgia for the good old days of Maurice, before the Arab invasion, before the Persian invasions, before everything fell into chaos. So, like, theophylact has to walk this, like, tight line of like, pointing out that things were going wrong but, like, Maurice couldn't recognize it. But it's not his fault because he's not totally bad. John of NICU has none of these problems. Doesn't like Maurice, right? Accuses him at one point of like, being a practitioner of like, satanic magic. He has no problems at all attacking him. So he takes this story, sort of strips the nuance from it and says, like, listen, there are lots of explanations for why this happened. It's very obvious why this happened. It was a demon. And society by that point was so degenerate, so corrupt that no one could recognize these demons, like, how far we had fallen. And it. You're almost left with the impression, like, well, my God, of course, like something like the Arab conquest was going to happen. Like, look, these people couldn't even recognize a demon, like, literally staring them in the face.
- [55:36]
Mike Motia
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and I mean, just what a, what a story, right? Like, it's just so, it's so vivid. So, I mean, this is not a huge part of the book, but people love Hypatia and he's got like a, he's got a take on, on Hypatia. So Hypatia, she's a philosopher working in Alexandria. She gets murdered in a riot in 415. So can you tell us about like, his, his version of the story?
- [56:03]
Felige Salamon Yirga
Yeah, absolutely. So I guess staying with the, with the demons, the basic accusation he levels at Hypatia is that not only is she this bright lady, right, this, this, this brilliant philosopher, she's also like a magician, right? And she uses her ability with astronomy, which John of NICU understands as being using the stars to divine the future, which he sees as the product of life, like, you know, sorcery, which is like inherently demonic or satanic. And he use. She uses this influence to beguile the governor Orestes, right? So he basically accuses Hypatia of using her skills with astronomy and magic to alienate Orestes from the Christian community. And so what you get in the end is a story. I mean, there are a number of things that are weird about this story, but what you get from John of NICU is this unique take that does not at all apologize for the death of Hypatia, right? That's not a problem to him. Other like his his source material, right? Other authors, like contemporary and later, who read this story, are embarrassed by it, Christian or otherwise, right? Even the Christians are like, it's not good that she was a pagan. It was not good that she alienated Orestes from the Christian population. But we are, at the end of the day, Roman aristocrats. It is embarrassing to have people who represent like, like our theological institution, our Christian institution rioting in the street and murdering university professors, right? This is, like, embarrassing to them. John of Niki was a little more ambivalent about it as far as he's concerned, right? Whether it's good or bad, he actually offers no explicit comment. He does, however, note the following. John tells us that not only is Hypatia killed, but that Hypatia is killed afterwards, right? That the actual riot was not about Hypatia at all. The actual riot was about the Christians of Alexander Alexandria driving the Jewish population of Alexandria from the city. And he concludes this story after the killing of Hypatia not by commenting on Hypatia at all, but by saying that the citizens of Alexandria surrounded the Patriarch Cyril and praised him, even though he was not accused of doing any of this explicitly. John is very clear to keep Cyril's hands clean. He says that the people of Alexandria surround him and praise him as a new Theophilus because he has destroyed the last remains of idolatry in the city. Theophilus famously destroying the Serapeum in Alexandria not only, I guess, because he had killed one of the last prominent polytheists in Alexandria, but he seems to be inferring also because, you know, the Christians had successfully managed to drive the Jews of Alexandria out of the city. All of this is to say, like, for Hypatia in particular, his interest is more in the fact that not only is she a polytheist, but that she basically acts as an agent or intermediary for Satan or demonic forces that drives a government representative of the Roman state in Alexandria. Orestes, like, separates him sort of violently from the Christian community.
- [59:10]
Mike Motia
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a hot take. So, you know, like, so much of this story is the kind of. Of slow, steady alienation of God because of the kind of increasing, like, blindness to sin that people have. But, you know, like, if, I don't know, like, if we can see how the demons rule, then there is like, a flip side. Like, if you know why God pulls away, then you have some idea of how God might return. And the answer for him is piety. And that really, like, Starts at the top. And he, you know, speaking of takes like, he's like, like starts to praise Honorius, who's, I think he's most famous for being the emperor during the sack of Rome. But to John, he's this like, ascetic emperor who is destroying pagan temples and who was a victim of the Roman Senate. And there's also a rehabilitation of Eudocia, the 5th century empress poet. Can you tell us about kind of how John presents her and what her example might mean for his readers?
- [60:11]
Felige Salamon Yirga
Yeah, absolutely. So Eudocia is the wife of Theodosius ii. I think, think famously, she was accused of infidelity. There's this story that's preserved in several Roman texts in which a friend and government official in the reign of a friend of Theodosius and a government official, a guy named Paulinus, receives an apple, right, As a gift from. Or sorry, Eudocia receives an apple as a gift from the emperor Theodosius. He in return gets it from this Phrygian farmer, is like apparently the greatest apple anyone had ever seen. Eudocia then apparently gives it to Paulinus, who then presents the apple back to Theodosius, my best friend. Like, hey, check out this amazing apple, right? And the conclusion that Theodosius draws from this in the official story is that Eudocia was sort of cheating on. On Theodosius ii, right? So the, the standard line, both from Chalcedonians and anti Chalcedonians, is that Eudocia, this pious woman, the wife of Theodosius ii, is ultimately a sort of, let's say, either, you know, cheating on Theodosius or is the victim of the machinations of Theodosius II's sister Pulcheria. And Pulcheria is an important figure ultimately because she marries the Emperor Marcion, who ends up calling the Council of Chalcedon. And as far as John is concerned, starting all of these problems in the first place, the standard Biafra site line might be to refer to her as a particularly pious woman. But John of Nicu goes a step further and kind of reads her as a founding mother of the Miaphysite movement rather than as a hapless victim. So she's presented as someone who goes to Jerusalem, right? This is something we can confirm to happen, and acts as a benefactor. And she, he goes through the story of her time in Jerusalem, noting that not only does she visit Jerusalem and sponsor the construction of all these churches and monasteries, but that she goes to meet a certain Theodosius, who was made patriarch of Jerusalem by a Bunch of, let's say, anti Chalcedonians in Jerusalem, when the actual patriarch, juvenile, sort of came to support the Chalcedonian position. So while juvenile is away, they basically replace him with Theodosius. So this, right, this story is combined with a bunch of others, right? So there's another story that John of Nicu uses to explain why Eudocia and Theodosius had no sons, right? Which is another sort of underlying problem, right? If Theodosius had a son, right, then theoretically he would be the next in line for power and maybe we could have avoided Chalcedon. And they. John of Nicu basically takes a local Egyptian story which states that some Egyptian desert fathers, right, respond to a request from Theodosius II and Eudocia. Like, they ask, you know, what can we do to have a male heir here? What can we do to have a son? And they respond, God's not going to let that happen for you, right? Bad things are going to happen in the near future. You're not going to have a son. And so John of Nicu tells us from that point onward, Eudoci and Theodosius commit to being like ascetics in public. So they naturally stop having sex. They begin to live apart, right? And they begin these sort of austere aesthetic practices. And I think what this does for John of Nicu is that it makes the anti Chalcedonian position not only the correct position, because of abstract theological positions that maybe his philopenoid may not fully understand, indeed, which has produced a lot of confusion among the anti Chalcedonian set. That's why there's not one anti Chalcedonian resistance. There's like six or seven, like splinters. But it also like it. It makes the anti Chalcedonian position one that is held by ascetics and martyrs, right? So basically it's a way of arguing like, you know, the anti. Like the Miaphyside position is good not just because of this theological argument you don't understand, but because these amazing people, these virtuous and pious people also held this position, right? They're all in a network of pious people who all agreed Chalcedon is bad. Then you're invited to look at Pulcheria by John. And John has very unkind things to say to her. For example, he says that Pulcheria sullied her virginity for the sake of power. Her words, not his words, not mine, right? He. He basically says that like, you know, so the Chalcedonian position is one that is formed by this woman who sullies her virginity for the sake of power. And the anti Chalcedonian position is held by the most pious. Right. Ascetic you have ever met in her life, a woman who abandons imperial power for the sake of showing her solidarity with. Solidarity with Theodosius and the anti Chalcedonians of Jerusalem.
- [65:01]
Mike Motia
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's great. Like, we. We see so many pieces moving there. And so we've got these kind of. Of like, ascetic leaders and. But we also have kind of persecuted monks, and you can imagine why those would be particularly important for the Filipone, the labor lovers. But what is the kind of role of these persecuted monks in the story?
- [65:25]
Felige Salamon Yirga
Yeah. So I read these monks scattered throughout the text at several points, strictly as sort of sacrificial lambs. They're often killed because of their sanctity, but there's no interest that John shows in their sanctity per se. Right. So it's not like a hagiographic account where you get, like, specific details about, like, how pious they are generally. It's about highlighting the brutality of their persecutors. Furthermore, I think it's important to note that their deaths tend to come, like, at the cusp of or as a result of their martyrdom. So a great example of this, I think, is in the reign of Honorius. A monk named Telemachus, right, Is killed in Rome for calling for the end of gladiatorial fights. He is killed by the crowd, according to John of Nicu. But it does yield something. Right. Honorius is compelled by the argument to end the gladiatorial fights in the city of Rome. So it shows that the martyrdom of these holy people does not only yield their individual salvation. Right. That's sort of the classic line with these martyr accounts, right. They've earned the crown of martyrdom, right. So their individual salvation is secured. These are like, you know, let's say people to be emulated. But it also, like, he also shows like, that their martyrdom also leads to the collective improvement of the Christian empire. So it's not like he's telling you to go out and martyr yourself. Right. It's not like the circum kaliones, but for the reader, right. If they're trying to figure out part of the why of it all, right. This is a great, clear example of it. The martyrdom saves the soul of the martyr, right. It guarantees their salvation or it also redeems, like the Christian oikumene writ large. Right. Like their deaths. Right. In a way, like, contribute to the like collective piety of all.
- [67:17]
Mike Motia
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They're. They're like little reminders of, like, you know, like, why it lasted so long, but they're also kind of hints at, you know, what. What a better future could. Could possibly look like. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, like, with Late antiquity, we're always asking the kind of continuity versus change type questions, but in the conclusion, you write that the chronicle is this real post Roman text. You say, like, you know, we could still see the kind of Roman Christian ideology and its genre interests and arguments, even though the Roman state itself was absent. So kind of, I don't know, as you step back from this kind of one text, can you talk a little bit about kind of how writing the book has shaped the way you think about this kind of continuity versus change in the post Roman world? Type question, how do you see it shaping kind of our wider view of Late Antiquity and the early medieval Islamic period?
- [68:07]
Felige Salamon Yirga
Yeah, so I think what it's done for me is two things. One, and I don't think I was necessarily successful here, but I think what I wanted to do was come up with some sort of a synthesis here of like, a way of viewing, right, this period that acknowledges both continuity and change, right, in a sort of holistic, like a combined narrative, right, that accounts for both. And I think another thing that it did was that it revealed to me that, like, this question of continuity and change was like, live in John of NICU's own milieu. So I should point out, right, that John's idea doesn't win out. The text doesn't seem to be popular. In fact, like, it seems to have been more popular in Ethiopia than it ever was in Egypt. In terms of, like, we have Ethiopian texts that cite the chronicle, right, in pretty explicit terms, right? They. They use it for the indigenous life of John Chrysostom. They use it for the indigenous life of Cyril of Alexandria. We simply find, like, all of our copies of John of NICU in several copies in Ethiopia. We can't really say the same of the Egyptian context. What we do know, however, is that, like, what this does suggest, though, is that like, you know, even though John, like, seems to have lost this debate, it seems to have been a debate. And the reason I find this interesting is because when I look at other, let's, let's say positions in this debate about, like, what the Arab conquest means, where we're at. Everyone else also seems to be using Roman intellectual tools now. Now there are a very small number of, like, a very, like Negligible number of people who convert, right? So, you know, let's leave them aside from now. There are a number of responses to this. One is the creation of a nascent Coptic identity. It's not clear at this point, like I, I wouldn't suggest that like everyone sort of quickly understood themselves as Copts, but we see that some people are responding to this by saying, like, like, well, this sort of weird alienation that you feel being the, you know, Christian subjects of a non Christian ruler. This is, this is your history as Egyptians, starting with Diocletian, going all the way up to the regime of the day, right? And so your identity is Copts, right? That is a way of explaining what is happening here, right? And so your basically sort of object here, your. What is to be done here has to be understood in that framework. I think that's ultimately a winning position for quite, quite some time. Another position that we find a couple of centuries later is understanding this or, you know, at least in Egypt, I think contemporarily you find it elsewhere is to understand this is the end of days, right? That's, that's, that's a sort of another position. But both of those positions rely on, you know, views of Roman history, right? They rely on even the Coptic position, like understanding yourself as Christian Egyptians persecuted by both the Romans and the Arabs. Arabs relies on a particular understanding of yourselves as, you know, sorry, a view of history that is informed still, right, by Roman texts, right? So everyone is kind of, let's say, Roman brain, for lack of a better word, right? Everyone is deploying the intellectual tools that were designed to reproduce an empire that no longer exists, to explain why that empire no longer exists, exists and what they're supposed to be doing now. And to me that suggests, right, like again, a kind of synthesis that, that if we want to understand, right, the nature of continuity, we have to understand that continuity in the context of this real rupture, right? We can't write off the rupture and say, ah, but look at this continuity. It's like eventually what is going to happen is that the nature of that, of those Roman, let's say mental and physical structures, right, that shaped Egypt for centuries are going to change certainly over the course of centuries. But like in that moment that John of Niki was writing, everyone is deploying those tools, right? To understand that situation, to me that indicates that Rome is still very much alive, right, in the Rashaduda and even in the Umayyad to some degree we could say Abbasid periods as well. 1 One last thing I want to add as well is I think that also has to, like, reshape our understanding to some degree of, like, when we can start about the idea of an Islamicate or Islamic world. Because it suggests to me that, like, John of nicu, if John of NICU can write this book, even if it's not accepted, this suggests to me that, like, no one understood this as, you know, the Arab domination of Egypt as a fait accompli. And why would they? Right. The Persians had been there for 10 years, and it's not like people dropped what they were doing and they. And picked up Pahlavi and. Right. You know, things continued on as they were. So if so many of the mental and, you know, for quite some time as well, the. The physical apparatus of Roman Egypt remained. Right. And the only thing that's really changed is, like, the, the government of the day. To me, that indicates that, like, we're not quite in a world yet where Islam is on, you know, know. You know, Islam is sort of determining, you know, everyone's mental world. And I think eventually you'll get there. Right. I think the appearance of the Umayyads, the appearance of the Abbasids, Right. The, the creation of these states in the near east are going to change not just the Christian populations that live there through conversion, but also through, you know, their, Their understanding of their Christianity. It's also going to change the Roman state itself. Right. Everything is going to change eventually in response to that Islamic history to. Right. In response to the emergence of these governments. Right. But we're not there yet. And so I think that means we have to, like, reassess, like, if we're going to use that periodization, like, we need to reassess, like, when our early Islamic world really begins. Because I don't think change of government is sufficient for me.
- [74:14]
Mike Motia
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's. It's a really great point. And it's. I mean, there's a lot to think about that, you know, I don't know, especially if you're. If you're, like, teaching a course on, you know, I don't know, fall Rome or something like that. And like, like, you know, it's tempting to, like, do it by dates of, like, well, you know, here's when this battle was. And then, you know, like, that's when things change. But of course, like, it moves much slower than that and like, trying to get a feel for kind of how that change happened and when that kind of the new common sense really sits in. That's A much trickier form of history to do. But I mean, let's like, kind of wrap up. What do you hope readers take from the book? I mean, those answers, there's, you know, there's a lot to think about with that, but do you have kind of takeaways that you're. You're thinking about?
- [75:00]
Felige Salamon Yirga
So, as I'd mentioned, I hope it's a step towards a synthesis of the, you know, classic continuity change question, a way of, like, harmonizing our understanding of, like, ruptures and continuities in a world that isn't, like, Roman, at least in the politics of the day, but not quite Islamic. You know, it shouldn't just invite us, I think, as well to, you know, re understand, like, when we get the beginning of Islamicate world, I think it should. Should prompt us to, you know, maybe reassess, like, what Roman ness meant. Right, to get away from a view of Roman ness that is centered in Rome or in Constantinople and reimagine a Roman identity after the third century that accounts for, like, the provincial, the crazy provincial variety that we see. And, you know, I don't think I've fully done it in this book, but I hope to have contributed in a move to that direction, especially because I think it's an important thing to think about as our society sort of debates whether we're entering a world in which like, you know, a sort of pox Americana or American hegemony is no longer taken for granted. You know, I hope it prompts us to think about other people who had thought about questions like, are we at a rupture point and we haven't quite seen the result yet. Did we already hit that rupture point at some point in the past? If so, would we be able to recognize it? Yeah. Not just then for thinking about, right, this late ancient or early Islamic world, but also thinking about empires, their rise and fall, and how people react to it in our own day.
- [76:29]
Mike Motia
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's great. All right, last question. What's next?
- [76:34]
Felige Salamon Yirga
Yeah, so this work, and in particular the stuff about its reception in Ethiopia really sort of piqued my interest in Ethiopian history. And what surprised me, I think, as I read this work and others, was how much of the medieval and early modern. Those terms don't quite work. But let's say for our listeners between, like, the, like, 13th century and the 17th century, how much of Ethiopian conception, self conception and Ethiopian conception of the world is filtered through this late antique lens? It's not just John of Nicu that's being translated. Right. This late antique text. There are many late antique texts translated into Arabic that are then brought to Ethiopia that end up shaping not just how Ethiopians see the world, but how they see themselves. So my next book, which I've been working on for like quite a while, on and off since graduate school, it's been become a bit of a mess, is the history of the idea of Ethiopia. And I've like tentatively called it like From Homer to the Cabra Nagast and Beyond. So the premise that I'm starting with is that the idea of Ethiopia is not indigenous to the Horn of Africa. The Aksumites certainly didn't call themselves Ethiopians. So the question that follows from that is simply to say, like, how does this idea of Ethiopia shape in the Greco Roman world? How does Christianity affect the shaping of that idea? And then, right. How do Ethiopians or, you know, the Christians in the highland of the Horn of Africa take on that idea and use it to shape their conception of themselves in the medieval and early modern period? Period.
- [78:07]
Mike Motia
Wow, that sounds really great. Yeah, Whenever that's out, I hope we can talk about that too. Thank you so much for talking. This has really been wonderful.
- [78:16]
Felige Salamon Yirga
Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity.
- [78:18]
Mike Motia
Yeah, let's talk soon.