Introduction to This Volume

How this book is arranged

This is the hundred and seventeenth volume of a series that gathers the writings of the early Church. It is an addendum, and it gathers two books of the churches of Egypt and Ethiopia. The first part is the History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church of Alexandria, from Saint Mark, in the two parts that tell the lives of the popes of Alexandria down to the ninth century. The second part is the Kebra Nagast, the Ethiopian book of the glory of kings, which tells of Solomon, the Queen of Sheba and their son Menyelek.

The introductions, the descriptions of the parts and the headings were prepared for SermonIndex with the help of artificial intelligence. The texts themselves are the translations, and were not rewritten.

Translations and texts

The English is that of older translators, nearly all of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and is printed as the website prints it. Most of these texts were read by machine from scanned books and have not been proofread against the printed pages, so a misreading may remain. Footnotes, and words in Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic and Latin, are left out of this book, as are the translators’ long introductions; the reader who wants them should go to the printed edition.

Dates and authorship

The History of the Patriarchs is ascribed to Severus of al-Ashmunein, a bishop of the tenth century, who wrote in Arabic from older Coptic sources and was continued by others. The Kebra Nagast was put into its present form in Ethiopia in the fourteenth century from older material. Both are mixed with legend, and the reader should not take either as a plain record of events.