John the Deacon (Egyptian chronicler)

For other people named John the Deacon, see John the Deacon (disambiguation).

John the Deacon was a Monophysite Egyptian chronicler whose Life of the Patriarch Michael, finished c.768–70, is the most important source for the Christian Nubia in the first half of the eighth century.[1]

The later historian Sawirus ibn al-Muqaffaʿ made heavy use of it, and although John is one of the only sources for the time and place, he is not always reliable. For instance, he records a Nubian invasion of Egypt that reached as far as Fustat in 745, after the Egyptians refused to release Michael, Patriarch of Alexandria.[1] This event appears to be a conflation of a real invasion of Upper Egypt and the imprisonment and liberation of the patriarch, made to coincide with a known period of Coptic uprisings and consequent persecution at the instigation of the Caliph Marwan II.[1] John is the only source to describe the dynastic struggles that followed the death c.730 of Merkurios, whom he refers to as a "new Constantine".[1] He is the earliest source to mention thirteen kings ruling Nubia under the high king Kyriakos at Old Dongola.[2] He is also an early source for the Arab slave trade in Africans.

Notes

  1. 1 2 3 4 P. L. Shinnie (1986), "Christian Nubia", The Cambridge History of Africa: From c. 500 BC to AD 1050, J. D. Fage and Roland Anthony Oliver, edd. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 556–88.
  2. ↑ Louis V. Žabkar (1963), "The Eparch of Nubia as King", Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 22(4):217–19.
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