Abstract

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Gǝʿǝz is a Semitic language of the Ethiopian Semitic group, first attested as the official language of the kingdom of Axum, and eventually used as liturgical, literary, and administrative language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and of the post‐Axumite medieval and premodern Christian polities in present‐day Ethiopia and Eritrea. The corpus of Gǝʿǝz texts consists of a few original epigraphic texts, translations from Greek in Late Antiquity and from Arabic since medieval time, and original literary and documentary texts from the medieval to the modern time.

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New documents written in Ethiopic have come to light in a manuscript discovered in Ethiopia in 1999. These documents not only shed important light upon the literary and cultural history of the Aksumite civilization, but are also of great significance for the history of Christianity in Egypt. The collection transmitted by the manuscript includes the Ethiopic version of a lost Greek History of the Episcopate of Alexandria, which was formerly known primarily from Latin excerpts transmitted by the Codex Veronensis LX (58), passages by the historian Sozomenus, and other less important witnesses. This paper examines certain features of an apocryphal List of Apostles and Disciples and looks more extensively at the structure of the History, its ideological tendencies, and the lists it preserves of Egyptian bishops appointed by bishops Maximus (264-282), Theonas (282-300?), and Peter (300?-311) of Alexandria