ByzReview: George the Synkellos' World Chronicle

Welcome to a new category of reviews that I am currently writing, one that I’m sure will both fascinate and excite everyone who has stumbled onto this blog by accident. These are my new Byzantine Book Reviews. Over the next year or two, I intend to read as many historical primary sources from the Later Roman empire (Byzantium) as I can access, writing a little review for each one in order to increase my own general knowledge on the subject as well as to get the word out on what is actually available for people to read. Much of our knowledge for history in general – not just for Byzantium – comes from the writings composed by contemporary people, or those who lived closer to the time than we ourselves do, and so close reading and analysis of such writings is essential for understanding them.* Of course these writings aren’t the only source available to us, and in order to gain any accurate picture of the past we must necessarily use other evidence that might be at our disposal – be it archaeological, artistic, architectural, and so on and so forth – but my interest here is in these writings themselves. This blog deals with literature, and so I shall be treating these sources largely as literature; or rather, as distinct written entities that can be read for their own merits. Generally speaking, these things are books, and they can be read as books. As such I will read them as books, and hopefully you will join me in this voyage.

                A few clarifications must be made. As one would expect, these books which were written by people living over a thousand years ago in the eastern Mediterranean were not written in modern English. The original texts are predominantly in archaic forms of Greek, and as I am still a long way off from being able to read my way through an entire Byzantine chronicle in its original language, let alone expect anyone else to follow me on such an undertaking, I shall be making use of the large number of English translations that are currently available. As I have outlined several times in previous reviews, a translation is just a translation, and is therefore a subjective interpretation of the original text by a translator or two. If you wish to understand the problems that can be caused by translation, just look at a translation history of the Bible. Anyway, with this caveat outlined, I shall be making use of English translations simply because it is my own native language, and I will trust that the translators themselves have done a good enough job. If you wish to find any of these texts in their original language, then the entire corpus of Byzantine writings, the 19^th century Bonn corpus (Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae) can be found on-line – for some bright spark thought to digitise and upload them on Google Books. You simply need the title, and you can download entire volumes for free. I suggest checking out the Wikipedia page for a little more background information: 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_Scriptorum_Historiae_Byzantinae

So. On to business. In this little examination of Later-Roman history through the eyes of the people themselves, I decided to start right at the beginning. Or rather, about halfway through. Let me explain. The Later-Roman empire was a product of two major world-views; the Hellenic, and the Judeo-Christian. In their world-view, the Byzantines looked to both the Iliad and the Bible. They trace their history back to the Exodus from the Egypt, and the Fall of Troy, and both King David and Alexander the Great feature large in their historical outlook. This odd mixture of the Judeo-Christian and the Pagan, which our first 'historian' George the Synkellos combines in his Universal History, shows the seriousness with which the Byzantines treated history. Unlike our own perceptions of history, the Byzantine idea made no distinction between "mythical" and "factual" events. In this curious Medieval mindset, the complete history of the world can be traced from the Creation, down a line of some 6,000 years to the chronicler’s own day, using the evidence provided by the Bible, by ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian king-lists, by old Greek and Roman sources, and by the work of previous Chroniclers.

The end result is a bewildering list of dates, generally ordered according to the Alexandrian World Era, which reckoned the Creation of the World to have taken place on the 25^th of March 5493 BCE. With 5493 BCE being Year 1 of the Alexandrian system, George the Synkellos lists the names and dates of the elderly Biblical patriarchs (who generally lived for many centuries at a time), calculating that the Flood in which Noah and his Ark were involved took place in Anno Mundi (Year of the World) 2242, that the Exodus took place in 3816, that Troy fell in 4329, that Rome was founded in 4752, that Alexander the Great became king of Macedon in 5156, and that Jesus was incarnated in exactly 5500. In the modern world we are so used to historical events being dated according to the Anno Domini system (or Common/Current Era) that we rarely consider how recently and arbitrarily these dates have been chosen, and to see history written about in a completely different way in these medieval chronicles can be rather confusing if one has never encountered it before. For instance, this year would be around the year 7523 (or hereabouts) if we used the Byzantine World Era system, but we’re so used to it being 2015 CE that a different system can be somewhat confusing.

George the Synkellos himself died in 810 CE. He was a monk, the synkellos** of the Patriarch of Constantinople Tarasios, and had lived through a time of severe religious upheaval (see: Iconoclasm) before he decided to compose a Universal History up to his own day. He was not the first person to attempt this, for the 6^th century John Malalas and the 7^th century Paschale Chronicle precede this, but even they drew on earlier precedents, on names such as Eusebius of Caesarea (4^th century) and Flavius Josephus (1^st century). Why I started with the Synkellos and not with Malalas I can’t fully explain, other than to say that the Synkellos is perhaps the only major Byzantine historian who doesn’t deal with Byzantine history. He died before he could bring his project to completion. He starts at the beginning of time and covers the next five-and-a-half-thousand years in a certain level of detail, but only managed to reach the beginning of the reign of the Roman emperor Diocletian (284 CE; still half a millennium short of his goal). Fortunately his attempt to chronicle all of the world’s history – as a resident of the Byzantine empire would understand it – did not die with him, and the loose thread left at the end of his chronicle would be picked up in a separate chronicle by his friend and admirer, Theophanes the Confessor. Between them, George the Synkellos and Theophanes the Confessor compiled one of the greatest and most valuable works of history of the Byzantine-Roman empire, and while Theophanes’ half of the work is undoubtedly the more useful to the historian, I would argue that it cannot properly be understood without first getting to grips with that of the Synkellos. It’s like tackling the sequel to a story before you immerse yourself in the first instalment. It might be possible, but it’s kind of missing the point.

The structure and writing style of George the Synkellos’ work is not the easiest to cope with, even if it has been translated into a language you know. Far from being a simple catalogue of historical data, this chronicle was written for the express purpose of dating the order of world events and arguing why such dates ought to be followed. George the Synkellos has no qualms about arguing with his sources, and in between his lists of events and kings he devotes huge amounts of parchment to setting out his disagreements. All of this is in aid of establishing that the incarnation of Jesus Christ took place in the womb, in the year AM 5500. At this time I myself barely understand these arguments, and if you have an interest in history rather than Biblical theology then this might wear you down as much as it did me.

After soldiering through these dull and rather aggressive tirades from the author, you will eventually come to brief lists of names of kings. Sons and grandsons of Noah, Egyptian and Mesopotamian kings, mythical Greek and Roman rulers, and Biblical judges, kings and high priests all find themselves arranged in handy lists with the length of their reigns (in years) and, on occasion, brief comments on their reigns. Much of this material is lifted from earlier writers, people who established their own chronologies, and this demonstrates how much a chronicler is dependent on pilfering earlier writers for their historical material. All of the entries for the king lists of Egypt are ransacked from the work of Manetho, a 3rd century BCE Egyptian priest is notable for having attempted to produce the only narrative history of this Ancient civilisation, but his work provides no real information beyond: “The first [king], Menes of This, reigned for 62 years. He was seized by a hippopotamus and perished.” And the lists for the subsequent thirty dynasties of Ancient Egypt proceed in this vein for the remainder of the time in which they are useful for the Synkellos. It can be repetitive and even a little hypnotic at times, and if you have no knowledge or desire to know the names and dates of these fragmentary and largely meaningless mythical and semi-legendary figures, then it might be even more of an annoyance than the Synkellos’ argumentative paragraphs. Not having much knowledge of Egyptian or Mesopotamian history, I cannot comment on the accuracy of the king-lists presented here for those nations, but there is little more to them than to comment that they exist in this Byzantine chronology. Manetho's work no longer survives except in these brief snippets, and as such they prove little more than that this ancient text once existed. They say depressingly little about the history of their respective civilisations, as the Synkellos focuses almost exclusively on the Biblical and Judaic narratives.

Only in the later pages do things become a tad more interesting and informative. When we arrive into the realm of actual history, the names, places and stories become more familiar to the historian, the narrative less keen to get bogged-down with theological bickering. The events of Alexander the Great’s successors jostling take place alongside the rise of Rome, and the Maccabean Revolt is recounted in all its juicy details. Of course, one could simply go back to better and more complete sources to find the same information that the Synkellos is using, but this whistle-stop tour of ‘History-According-to-the-Byzantines’ does have the advantage of putting all these events in some kind of order, applying dates to them, and placing them in the context of other world events. The story of the arrival of Jesus Christ takes on a more interesting light from that presented in the Bible, when we see the prior history of Israel and Jerusalem, the rise of the Herods, and the Roman dismemberment of the Hellenistic Kingdoms, and the historical aftermath of the rise of Christianity within the Roman empire. This last section of the chronicle is largely comprised of short paragraphs, covering anything from a single year to the entire reign of a specific Roman emperor – with fewer of the Synkellos’ own diatribes to bog down the reader. The shorter, more statement-driven nature of this last part of the Chronicle is much easier to cope with; much easier to dip in and out of, and fortunately sets up the formula that Theophanes the Confessor will carry on for the entirety of his own chronicle.

To conclude this first Byzantine book review, the Chronography of George the Synkellos is a weighty historical text that must be approached with caution. It contains nothing really about Byzantium, but if we remember that the Byzantines quite rightly considered themselves to the Christian successors of the Roman empire, then what this chronicle gives us is the story of the genesis of this strange nation. In this regard it can still be considered as an intriguing Byzantine text, and as the prequel to Theophanes the Confessor’s more relevant and easier-to-digest work it serves as the other half to a monumental work of Byzantine history. 
Read it
...or don’t read it.

* There is quite a lot of debate over the usefulness of narrative sources such as these. With the advent of post-modern theory, some arguments have been made that written sources tend to obscure our picture of the past, presenting only the author's opinions and other biases which he held in one particular moment in time rather than providing us with any accurate information about the past. As this is still not an academic blog, I will not be engaging with such arguments on anything more than a tangental level. My defence is that I hope to be building up a picture of Byzantine history as the Byzantines themselves may have viewed it, as shown by the number and variety of these curious historical sources which still exist for us.

**Synkellos: syncellus, or cell-mate of the Patriarch. Seems to me the Patriarch’s live-in subordinate.

Bibliozantium 1

The Chronography of George Synkellos: A Byzantine Chronicle of Universal History from the Creation. trans. W. Adler and P. Tuffin. Oxford. (2002).

Georgius Syncellus et Nicephorus CP. Volume 1.  L. Dindorf (ed.) Bonn (1829).