Pl. 1, Recto - Busts personifying the Roman months
The Alexandrian World ChronicleorChronographia Golenischevensis is an anonymous Greek chronicle compiled in Alexandria, recording history from Creation until the year 392 AD. The chronicle survives in the fragments of a c. 6th-century papyrus named the Golenischev papyrus, well known for its examples of early historical illumination.[1]
The Golenischev (or Goleniščev) papyrus is a fragmentary illuminated papyrus in which the Alexandrian World Chronicle is attested. It has been dated to various periods between the 5th and 8th centuries, though the consensus now dates the text to the c. 6th-century;[2] It has been conjectured that the papyrus belonged to a very wealthy patron, due to its lavish illustrations.[3] It has been named after the Russian Egyptologist Vladimir Golenishchev who obtained it at some point before 1901 from one 'Sheikh Ali' in Giza.[4]
The papyrus exists in 80 fragments of Alexandrian majuscule text[5] currently housed at the Pushkin Museum[6] 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.[7] The best preserved fragment (Pl. VI verso) depicts Pope Theophilus atop the Serapeum and has been called an "iconic image [...] in the history of Late Antique Alexandria";[8] the fragment has been used by historian Johannes Hahn to date the destruction of the Serapeum to 392 AD[9] though this date has been criticised by Adolf Bauer, R. W. Burgess and Jitse H. F. Dijkstra as having little authority.[10]
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 and Adolf Bauer with glass plates containing colored facsimiles of the illuminated fragments (see below). The fragments were obtained from Vladimir Golenishchev and reconstructed to form images of what the text may have looked like.[11] The fragments of the Golenischev papyrus have since been mishandled and their quality is greatly reduced from when Strzygowski and Bauer reproduced them.[12]
The Excerpta Latina Barbari, a late 8th-century Latin chronicle, appears to be partly based on the Chronicle.[13] Burgess and Dijkstra have conjectured that both texts are based on a common source composed of the c. 221 ChronographiaeofJulius Africanus and the c. 205 Liber generationis.[14]
The following plates and captions adapted from Bauer & Strzygowski 1905:
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