Miaphysite
ca. 640 C.E.
The Chronicle ad 640 is a lengthy Miaphysite text that starts with the birth of Adam and continues to the opening years of the Islamic conquests. It does not present these events in anything close to chronological order, even though it often refers to specific years or indictions, fifteen-year periods that Byzantine chroniclers often used. Its rapid transitions between disparate lists of disasters, bishops, biblical characters, ecclesiastical councils, topography, and military campaigns have led some scholars to characterize its author as completely insane and others to hypothesize an ingenious method to his madness. Regardless of their view on how he organized the Chronicle ad 640, most scholars have been impressed with the author’s knowledge of the early seventh century. For example, in regard to the Byzantine-Persian wars, Byzantine and Armenian sources corroborate the majority of the early seventh-century battles and dates that the Chronicle ad 640 lists.
This makes it particularly unfortunate that the author devoted only a few sentences to the Arabs and their conquests. Nevertheless, because these lines come from a man whom most scholars believe was contemporary with the events he described, they remain especially valuable. Most see the Chronicle’s reference to a battle near Gaza as an allusion to the Battle of Dāthin, the earliest military clash between Arab and Byzantine forces. Several scholars also cite the Chronicle ad 640 as the first non-Muslim reference to explicitly speak of Muḥammad by name (although, in truth, the Chronicle ad 637 is arguably a better candidate). It is also notable what the chronicler omits. Despite a reference to military battles and civilian casualties, the author provides no explicitly religious explanation for these events. Unlike in later texts, here the conquests are neither a punishment for Christian sin nor a harbinger of the world’s imminent end. So too the dearth of space the author dedicates to discussing the Arabs suggests that at least some of their contemporaries did not yet see the Islamic conquests as a world-changing event.
The Chronicle ad 640 appears in a unique copy preserved in British Library Additional 14,643. The codex has lost ten of its first eleven folios but afterward remains complete. The extant text of the Chronicle ad 640 takes up the first fifty-six of these sixty surviving folios. It is followed by a short caliph list now known as the Chronicle ad 724. The manuscript’s last pages contain a brief colophon in the handwriting of the original scribe and some hymns added by a later hand. On paleographic grounds, William Wright estimated that this manuscript was written in the mid-eighth century. Ernest Walter Brooks published an edition of the text in 1904.
Several details enable a fairly secure dating of this Chronicle, especially its entries that speak of the Islamic conquests. Its last dated entry is from about 635/36. The only allusion to a time later than that is a brief reference to the emperor Heraclius’s having reigned for thirty years. This would correspond to 640. The author also ends a list of Byzantine emperors with Heraclius but does not mention his death, which occurred in 641, nor the accession of any subsequent emperors. This all suggests that Heraclius was still alive when the Chronicle was written and points to a composition date around 640.
Most scholars believe that the scribe who produced British Library Additional 14,643 copied down an already completed chronicle and then simply added an eighth-century caliph list immediately afterward. According to this view, what is now called the Chronicle ad 640 represents a fairly unified, almost completely preserved single-author work, all of which is securely dated to the mid-seventh century. Recently, however, James Howard-Johnston has argued for a more complicated transmission history. He suggests that, far from simply copying down an earlier work, the mid-eighth-century scribe of BL Add. 14,643 composed a new one (what we erroneously call the Chronicle ad 640) from five different sources, only one of which was written around 640. For this reason, Howard-Johnston refers to the work found in BL Add. 14,643 not as the Chronicle ad 640 but rather as the Chronicle ad 724. If he is correct, this would have important implications for the overall structure and literary history of the Chronicle. Fortunately, the text’s brief references to the Islamic conquests occur in the section of the work that all modern scholars, including Howard-Johnston, date to circa 640.
As several parts of the Chronicle defend an explicitly Miaphysite Christology and view of history, the theological affiliation of its author is quite obvious. In the section translated below, the author makes a brief reference to the death of the doorkeeper Simon, the brother of Thomas the priest. Because Simon plays no other role in the narrative, many suggest that the Chronicle’s author is none other than this Thomas. As a result, the Chronicle is sometimes called the Chronicle of Thomas the Presbyter.
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In the year 945 [634 C.E.], the seventh indiction, on Friday, February the fourth, at the ninth hour, there was a battle between the Romans and the Arabs of Muḥammad in Palestine, twelve miles east of Gaza. The Romans fled. They abandoned the patrician Bryrdn, and the Arabs killed him. About [[148]] four thousand poor villagers from Palestine—Christians, Jews, and Samaritans—were killed, and the Arabs destroyed the whole region.
In the year 947 [635/36 C.E.], the ninth indiction, the Arabs invaded all Syria and went down to Persia and conquered it. They ascended the mountain of Mardin, and the Arabs killed many monks in Qedar and Bnātā. The blessed Simon, the doorkeeper of Qedar, the brother of Thomas the priest, died there.