Coptica 15, 2016

82 Mark N. Swanson which the fourth piece was a certain Kitāb al-Barakhmānisiyyīn . The interpretation of this title had us temporarily stumped, although we soon realized that the Barakhmānisiyyīn were the Brahmans of India, and that the text was a version of the well-known story about Alexander’s meeting with these gymnosophistoi or “naked philosophers.” 3 What we were discovering in the library of the Syrian Monastery are instances of an enormous corpus of Alexander-material, first in Greek but then in all the languages of Mediterranean late antiquity, and from there to the languages of Europe, on the one hand, and those of the Islamicate world, on the other. 4 There is also a huge modern literature that attempts to make the various sources available, but more, to sort out the transmission histories of texts between all the languages involved. 5 What I am missing (or perhaps simply overlooking) in this modern literature, though, is reflection on some very simple questions. With respect to the religious literature of medieval Copts, for example, which stories do we find, and how can we categorize and make some sense of them? How do they function ? How did medieval Copts come to know them? Can we say anything about the contexts in which a monk, a priest, or a lay civil servant might become familiar with stories about Alexander the Great? 1. Alexander encounters a hermit prince This essay is a first attempt to address these questions, by way of three examples. The first comes from a set of Arabic homilies for the Sundays of Lent, attributed to St. Shenoute the Archimandrite and preserved in a manuscript in Paris (MS Paris, BnF ar. 4761). 6 Elsewhere I have argued that these homilies were not translations from Coptic but rather medieval Arabic compositions which are fascinating in their own right because of their imaginative use of biblical examples as well as extra-biblical material . 7 A case in point is the Homily for the Third Sunday in Lent, 3 See, conveniently, Richard Stoneman, ed., The Greek Alexander Romance (London: Penguin, 1991), 13, 131-33. 4 The complexity of this is nicely illustrated in a chart of the transmission history of the Alexander Romance of Pseudo-Callisthenes in Michael Pfrommer, Alexander der Große: Auf den Spuren eines Mythos (Mainz am Rhein: Philipp von Zabern, 2001), 20-21. 5 See, for example, Z. David Zuwiyya, ed., A Companion to Alexander Literature in the Middle Ages , Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition 29 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011). With respect to the Arabic Alexander tradition, see especially Faustina Doufikar-Aerts, Alexander Magnus Arabicus: A Survey of the Alexander Tradition through Seven Centuries: From Pseudo-Callisthenes to Ṣūrī , Mediaevalia Groningana New Series 13 (Leuven and Paris: Peeters, 2010). Specifically with regard to Alexander materials in the Copto-Arabic tradition, Sidarus, “Alexandre le Grand chez les Coptes” is indispensable. 6 I am grateful to Mr. Hany Takla for making a copy of the manuscript available to me. 7 Mark N. Swanson, “St. Shenoute in Seventeenth-Century Dress: Arabic Christian Preaching in Paris, B.N. ar. 4761 ,” Coptica 4 (2005): 27-42; for the Alexander story, see pp. 37-39.