Although the database of the Lived Time project mainly includes documentary texts, literary texts that record dates and regular time-related events are included as well, since they may provide additional information on the experience of time, the timing of activities and how time is expressed. One such text is the Coptic Encomium on Bishop Pesynthios of Koptos, which is preserved completely in a manuscript dated 1005 CE at the British Library (edited by Sir Ernest Wallis Budge) and partly in a late seventh- or early eighth-century manuscript at the Coptic Museum (its edition is entrusted to me). Although the complete version is from a much later date than the period central to the Lived Time project, the fact that it contains the same anecdotes as the earlier version encouraged me to add some time-related details to the database. When processing the passage on the day on which Bishop Pesynthios passed away, I realized that the Julian date indicated in many recent studies is probably a year too late. If so, the bishop did not die in 632 but in 631.
According to the Encomium, the bishop died at sunset on “the thirteenth day of the month Epeiph of this fifth year”, that is, in a fifth indiction year (transl. Budge [1913]). Budge did not convert the date, but Walter Ewing Crum equated the fifth indiction year with the Julian years 631-632 (in 1914 and 1927). Gawdat Gabra Abdel Sayed was the first to propose an absolute date – July 7, 632 – in his dissertation Untersuchungen zu den Texten über Pesyntheus, Bischof von Koptos (569-632) (1984). This date features regularly in publications relating to the re-edition of the bishop’s correspondence (a Leiden-based project directed by Jacques van der Vliet and Florence Calament, in which I am involved as well), the edition of the Encomium (e.g. in my article of 2018) and the bishop’s functioning (my dissertation).
The appearance of an indiction year in an eleventh-century text version – copied at a time when the indiction system was no longer in use – implies that the time description is based on a centuries-old tradition and rightfully included in the Lived Time database. The conversion of the date to July 7, 632 was based on the implicit assumption that the indiction year started on Thoth 1, on the same day as the traditional Egyptian civil year, and that July was almost at the end of the indiction year. However, Roger Bagnall and Klaas Worp demonstrated that the start of the indiction year was subject to regional differences: in the Thebaid, it began on Pachon 1 or May 1 (also noted in this blog and an article by Sofie Remijsen and myself). Consequently, Epeiph came early in the indiction year and the recorded date actually converts to July 7, 631, which fell on a Sunday. This would certainly be true in the case of documentary texts. However, Bagnall and Worp have the impression that dates by indiction in literary texts are still linked to an era starting on Thoth 1. This hypothesis requires further study, but for the present, I accept the new date, based on the assumption that the recorded date goes back to an early version of the literary text that was composed in Western Thebes at a time when indiction years were increasingly used in documentary texts, that is, the late seventh or early eighth century.
Episcopal documents already confirm that Bishop Pesynthios was not a legendary saint but an actual historical person. Remarkably, not a documentary text or inscription but a literary source records a precise date of death, which enables scholars to better anchor him in a historical framework, less than a decade before the Arab conquest of Egypt.
I included the revised year of death in two recent articles (here and here) but have not yet fully discussed it in a scholarly publication, as it should ideally be included in the long-awaited edition of the Encomium.
Renate Dekker