The one Christian text written in Egypt around 1200 that looks south: it describes the kingdom of the Nubians with its king at Dongola, his churches, the eparch of Nobadia, the churches of Qasr Ibrim and the raid of Shams al-Dawla Turanshah in 1173, the kingdom of Alwa (Alodia) with its 400 churches and its capital Soba, and the Abyssinians with their king, their metropolitan sent from Alexandria, the church of Aksum and the Ark, as a Coptic churchman heard of them through the patriarchate. It also notes the Beja, the oases and the Christian remnants in the Maghreb. The Nubian and Ethiopian pages are second hand and sometimes a generation old, but they are the nearest thing to a 1200 witness for Makuria, Alodia and the Zagwe kingdom.
About this source
- Title
- Tarikh al-kana'is wa-l-adyira
- Author
- Abu al-Makarim (formerly attributed to Abu Salih the Armenian)
- Author's dates
- died 1208
- Written
- about 1177 to 1208; the core about 1200
- Language
- Arabic
- Covers
- the churches and monasteries of Egypt, with sections on Nubia, Ethiopia, the Red Sea, Arabia, Syria and the Maghreb, as of the author's lifetime
- Kind
- Geography
Evetts printed only the Paris portion (BnF arabe 307); the Munich manuscript, with the rest, was published by Samuel al-Suryani in 1984 to 1985 and is not in English. The attribution to Abu Salih the Armenian, the manuscript's owner, was corrected by Zanetti and den Heijer. Vantini's Oriental Sources reprints the Nubian passages.
Where to read it
Editions
- B. T. A. Evetts (ed. and tr.) with notes by A. J. Butler, The Churches and Monasteries of Egypt and some Neighbouring Countries attributed to Abu Salih the Armenian (Oxford, 1895), Arabic text with English translation of the Paris manuscript
- The same, another Internet Archive copy
- Samuel al-Suryani (ed.), Tarikh al-kana'is wa-l-adyira, 4 vols (Cairo, 1984 to 1985), the fuller Arabic text including the Munich manuscript (not freely online)
- Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cod. arab. 2570, the manuscript of the first part, digitised