The ''Alexandrian World Chronicle'' or ''Chronographia Golenischevensis'' is an anonymous

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

chronicle compiled in

Alexandria Alexandria ( or ; ar, ٱلْإِسْكَنْدَرِيَّةُ ; grc-gre, Αλεξάνδρεια, Alexándria) is the second largest city in Egypt, and the largest city on the Mediterranean coast. Founded in by Alexander the Great, Alexandri ...

, recording history from

Creation Creation may refer to: Religion *''Creatio ex nihilo'', the concept that matter was created by God out of nothing * Creation myth, a religious story of the origin of the world and how people first came to inhabit it * Creationism, the belief tha ...

until the year 392 AD. The chronicle survives in the fragments of a papyrus named the Golenischev papyrus, well known for its examples of early historical illumination.

Papyrus

The Golenischev (or Goleniščev) papyrus is a fragmentary illuminated

papyrus Papyrus ( ) is a material similar to thick paper that was used in ancient times as a writing surface. It was made from the pith of the papyrus plant, '' Cyperus papyrus'', a wetland sedge. ''Papyrus'' (plural: ''papyri'') can also refer to a ...

which serves as the primary source for reproductions of the ''Alexandrian World Chronicle''. It has been dated to various periods between the 5th and 8th centuries, though the consensus now dates the text to the ; It has been conjectured that the papyrus belonged to a very wealthy patron, due to its lavish illustrations. It has been named after the Russian Egyptologist

Vladimir Golenishchev Vladimir Semyonovich Golenishchev (russian: Владимир Семёнович Голенищев; 29 January 1856 – 5 August 1947), formerly also known as Wladimir or Woldemar Golenischeff, was one of the first and most accomplished Russian Eg ...

who obtained it at some point before 1901 from one 'Sheikh Ali' in Giza. The papyrus is extant in 80 fragments of Alexandrian majuscule text currently housed at the Pushkin Museum with marginal illustrations depicting - among other figures - Roman kings, a map of the Mediterranean, Old Testament prophets and characters, and personifications of the Roman months. The best preserved fragment (Pl. VI verso) depicts Pope Theophilus atop the

Serapeum A serapeum is a temple or other religious institution dedicated to the syncretic Greco-Egyptian deity Serapis, who combined aspects of Osiris and Apis in a humanized form that was accepted by the Ptolemaic Greeks of Alexandria. There were s ...

and has been called an "iconic image ..in the history of Late Antique Alexandria"; the fragment has been used by historian Johannes Hahn to date the destruction of the Serapeum to 392 AD though this date has been criticised by Adolf Bauer, R. W. Burgess and Jitse H. F. Dijkstra as having little authority. In 1905, the Greek text of the Chronicle was published as ''Eine Alexandrinische Weltchronik'', edited together from papyrus fragments of the Golenischev Papyrus by

Josef Strzygowski Josef Rudolph Thomas Strzygowski (March 7, 1862 – January 2, 1941) was a Polish-Austrian art historian known for his theories promoting influences from the art of the Near East on European art, for example that of Early Christian Armenian archi ...

and Adolf Bauer with glass plates containing colored facsimiles of the illuminated fragments (see below). The fragments were obtained from

and reconstructed to form images of what the text may have looked like. The fragments of the Golenischev papyrus have since been mishandled and their quality is greatly reduced from when Strzygowski and Bauer reproduced them.

Text

The ''

Excerpta Latina Barbari The ''Excerpta Latina Barbari'', also called the ''Chronographia Scaligeriana'', is a late antique historical compilation, originally composed in Ancient Greek language, Greek in AD 527–539 but surviving only in a Latin translation from the late ...

'', a late 8th-century

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

chronicle, appears to be partly based on the Chronicle. Burgess and Dijkstra have conjectured that both texts are based on a common source composed of the ''Chronographiae'' of

Julius Africanus Sextus Julius Africanus (c. 160 – c. 240; Greek: Σέξτος Ἰούλιος ὁ Ἀφρικανός or ὁ Λίβυς) was a Christian traveler and historian of the late second and early third centuries. He is important chiefly because o ...

and the '' Liber generationis''.

Gallery

The following plates and captions adapted from :

References

Bibliography

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External links

{{Authority control 6th-century illuminated manuscripts Ancient Greece Egyptian papyri containing images History of Alexandria Illuminated histories Manuscripts of the Austrian National Library Antiquities of the Pushkin Museum Byzantine illuminated manuscripts