The Chronicle of John of Nikiu: Coping with Crisis in Post-Roman Egypt

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 bishop’s 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.

Felege-Selam Solomon Yirga is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.