The Chronology

Notes

Interspersed among the father-son chains that are its principal feature, the Great Stemma contains several other classes of data where the purpose is not at first clear:

A register where the names of all the patriarchs from Adam to Abraham are repeated, with added text, taken from the Book of Genesis, stating the age of each man when his first son was born and when he died. Each patriarch thus appears twice on the chart: in a roundel, with his children, and again at the centre of the page. In the alpha and epsilon manuscripts, the latter text appears in a box with a semicircular top;
Mysterious roundel sequences containing words that are obviously not personal names, such as "under alien control", or "at peace", or containing names of enemies of the Israelites, such as Cushan-rishathaim;
Sequences of names which are not father-son linked, such as the line of Judges of Israel or the series of dictators who seized power in the Northern Kingdom (Samaria) by coup. None of these persons are portrayed as ancestors of Christ;
Completely foreign persons also appear, such as all the early kings of Rome and short snippets of a Persian king list and a Roman emperor list.

All of this material is familiar from a quite different kind of literary genre, the Christian chronology of the world, as written by several authors in the Patristic period.

Late Antique chronography was a science which almost entirely ignored physical evidence and instead relied on literary evidence, constructing a history of the world by harmonizing various ethnic histories. The Christian variant of this science was based on an assumption that there was no such thing as pre-history and that the world's beginning was already a matter of historical record in the Old Testament of the bible. It attempted to synthesize a timeline by integrating Roman, Greek and Egyptian chronicles with the biblical story.

The chronology integrated into the Great Stemma is less complete than some Late Antique works that have come down to us, but there is enough there for us to infer the overall structure and to understand the intentions of its anonymous author.

Since it seems safe to assume that both the chronology and the stemma were integral parts of the same document from its beginning, date evidence about the chronology can also be adduced as date evidence about the stemma too.

This serves our ultimate purpose of discovering how long ago stemmatic diagrams were in use as an accepted part of writing and reading in western civilization.

We have already noted that the document contains only short snippets of non-Jewish dynasties. An accompanying text explains why: these are merely presented to establish synchronisms among the various historical timelines. A synchronism is a statement that two events occurred at the same time, such that a western king went to war with an eastern king. Matching names in this way allows the historian to bring the separate ancient chronicles into "sync" when other scales, such as years, are unknown.

The Roman-king section in the document's chronography is the largest of these snippets and is particularly interesting because it contains a distinctive, non-official account of the origins of Rome. The official version, which is found in the writings of Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus and was presumably chiselled in a now-lost lost panel of the Fasti Capitolini in Rome, proposes that Rome had seven kings spanning a period of 244 years before it became a republic in 496 BCE.

The version in the Great Stemma proposes for this period eight kings, adding in a five-year reign by a Sabine ruler, Titus Tatius. This version extends the reign of Ancus by four more years and reduces the reign of Servius by eight. The Great Stemma thus arrives at a non-standard sum of 245, not 244 years for the monarchy. The Liber Genealogus concurs with some but not all of this calculation while arriving at the standard sum of 245. The LG manuscripts all attribute 41 years to the reign Titus Tatius. This must be a scribal error, since it disrupts the stated total, and the Great Stemma's number, eight, is surely the original value.

None of the Great Stemma manuscripts transmits this peculiar chronology perfectly, but its gist can be found by collating several of the versions:

Roda	Plutei	Millan	Gerona	St Sever	Yrs	Liber Genealogus	Yrs	Livy/ Dionysius Account	Yrs
In Roma regnavit prior Romulus annos XXVIII	In Roma regnavit priur Romulus annos XXXVIII	In Roma regnavit prior Romulus annos XXXta VIIIto	In Roma regnabit prior Romulus annos XXXVIII	In Roma regnavit prior Romulus anis XXXVIII	38	Ipsi enim primo regnaverunt Romae simul annis XXXVIII.	38	Romulus (- 716 BCE)(37 plus one year interregnum)	38
Titus Tacius rex Savinorum annos V	Titus Tacitus rex Sabinorum annos V	Itus Tacius rex Sabinorum annos quinque	Titus Tacius red Sabinorum annos V	Titus Tacius rex Sabinorum annos quinque	5	post hos Titus Tatius dux Sabinorum regnavit annis quadraginta unu.	41 (5)	Titus Tatius, Sabine king and co-ruler with Romulus for five years	0
Numa Pampilius annos XIII	Numa Pamphilius annos XLIII	Numa Pompilius annos XXXta IIo	Numma Pamfilius annos XLIIII	Numma Pamphilius anos XIIII (XLIII?)	43	dehinc Numa Pompilius annis quadraginta tribus.	43	Numa Pompilius (-674 BCE)	43
Tullius Ostillius annos XXII	Tullus Hostilius annos XXXII	[omitted]	Tullus Ostibus annos XXXIII	Tullius Hostilius annos XXXIII	32	Tullius Hostilius ann. XXX duobus.	32	Tullus Hostilius (-642 BCE)(see Dion. Hal. 4.35.1; Livy I.31, 5-8)	32
Ancus Martius Philiphus annos XXVIIII	Ancus Martius Philippus annos XXVIII	(A)ncus Martius Philippus annos XXXta VIIIto	Ancus Martius Philipus [rest omitted]	Ancus Marcius Philippus annos XXVIII	28	Anchus Marchus Filippus annis XXVIII.	28	Ancus Martius (616 BCE)	24
Tarquinius Priscus annos XXXVIIII	Tarquinius Priscus annos XXXVIII	Tarquinius Priscus annos XXXta VIIIto	Tarquinus princeps annos XXXVIII	Tarquinius Priscus annos XXXVIII	38	Tarquinius Prischus annis XXX octo; cuius anno sexto regni a Nabuchodonosor rege Hierusalem ostenditur captivari.	38	Tarquinius Priscus (-579 BCE)	38
Servius Tullius de serva natus sed ingenua annos XXVI	Servius Tullius des serva natus sed ingenta annos XXVI	Servius Tullius de serva natus sed ingenua.. annos XXXta VIIIta	Servius Tullius de serva natus sed ingenua annos XXXVI	Servius Tullius de serva natus sed ingenua annos XXXVI	36	Servus Tulius serva natus annis XXXVI.	36	Servius Tullius (-535 BCE)	44
Tarquinius Superibus annos XXV	Tarquinius Superbus annos XXV	Tarquinius Superbus annos XXV	Tarquinius Supervus anos XXV	Tarquinius Superbus annos XXV	25	Iam tunc Romani magnificabantur regnante Tarquinio Supervo, qui fuit Romanorum rex octavus ab urbe condita et regnavit annis XXIIII.	24	Tarquinius Superbus (-496 BCE)	25
Fiunt in uno anni CCXLV	Fiunt in unum annos CCXLV	Quot fiunt in unum anni CCXV	Fiunt in unum omnes ... orum anni CCXV	Fiunt in unum omnes istorum anni CXV	245		244		244

We presume that this antithesis is based on a literary source archived somewhere outside of Rome itself, since it markedly differs from the official history of the empire engraved in stone, but we cannot yet offer any suggestion as to what that source was. The Liber Genealogus employs the same dissenting framework. Mommsen's text of the latter brings the sum of the years of the Kings of Rome back to the standard 244 by subtracting a year from the last king, Superbus, but in every other respect it matches the Great Stemma chronography.

It is easier to trace the source of another chronographical section, that dealing with the Persian Empire. This is most likely to be the 5th century BCE history of Herodotus. A notable detail here refers to the short reign of Bardiya, whose name was rendered into Greek as Smerdis. Bardiya, who ruled about 522 BCE, was either a son of the Achaemenid ruler Cyrus or an imposter claiming to be the son. Some accounts claim the imposter Bardiya was himself a victim, being manipulated by a man named Gaumata who exercised the real power. The next Achaemenid ruler, Darius I, seized power in a coup. Herodotus portrays the Smerdis period in fanciful style, saying it was a plot by two brothers belonging to the Magi priestly caste, one of whom was the imposter and the other of whom held the reins. Magi were supposedly mutilated in those times by having their ears cut off, Herodotus says, and the double was unmasked by pulling off his turban.

The Great Stemma labels this strange reign as the rule of "two twins for eight months". Zaluska considers the Latin term "gemini" or twins to refer to the two Magi usurpers, since they were brothers. However other chronicles actually do use the words Fratres Magi, and it is more likely that the Great Stemma author used "gemini" to denote the real Smerdis and the pseudo-Smerdis (the usurper) being alike in appearance. [*]cf. Gelzer, Heinrich. Sextus Julius Africanus und die Byzantinische Chronographie, II.13 (1885)..

The unsolved mystery attached to this entry is the fact that it is spread across two roundels. In some manuscripts, the word menses (months) is transferred to the second roundel. In others, the second roundel is left blank. Why the second roundel is there cannot be satisfactorily explained. There is no gap in the reigns, as Darius clearly succeeded Bardiya/Smerdis. It may perhaps be that the roundels are conceived as heads or "polls" and that two are here to represent the duo gemini, but that does not seem to be a convention anywhere else in the Great Stemma document.

In its biblical sections, the chronology does not appear to conform exactly with the work of any known Christian chronographers of the Christian period. (The anonymous Liber Genealogus, which does harmonize with the Great Stemma on many points, is not a chronographical work. It contains only the most rudimentary of time scales.)

The science of chronography had a path of development that is traceable through the writings of Theophilus of Antioch, Clement of Alexandria, Julius Africanus, Hippolytus (of Rome?) and Eusebius of Caesarea. The Great Stemma would appear most sympathetic to the theories of Julius Africanus if it were not for the fact that it utterly rejects that writer's explanation of the dual ancestry of Christ.

The second Kenan is omitted in the Great Stemma. This is an ancestor inserted by the Septuagint Genesis (and consequently by the Gospel of Luke) between Arpachshad and Shelah after the Great Flood [*]Luke 3:36.. In this respect, the chronography concurs with that of Julius Africanus and several others [*]This is a point of conflict with the Liber Generationis (... vicit Cainan ann. CXXX et genuit ...), the Chronicon anni p. Chr. 334 (... Cainan CXXXI genuit Sala), the Excerpta latina Barbari (Cainan centum treginta) and the Liber Chronicorum (Cainan fuit annorum CXXX...)..
A contradiction which would have implied that Methusaleh survived the Great Flood (which would be odd, since he was not aboard Noah's Ark) is cured by altering the year of Lamech's begetting from Methusaleh's 167th to his 187th year [*]LXX Genesis 5:25 gives the number 167. This amendment is explained in the text on logical grounds. A few other chronographers such as Julius Africanus also give the crucial age as 187. Julius Africanus and the Great Stemma author may have based their view on this vexed issue, the so-called aporia, on an independent examination of Hebrew scripture.
The Judges Period is explained according to a chronology tradition with roots in the Septuagint account which attempts to explain the 450-year period referred to in Acts 13:20. All the periods where there was no judge are explained as being times without any Israelite ruler. Julius Africanus established key features of this tradition, including three episodes of Allophyle domination (rule by foreigners) and one "Peace Period" (which is a common device in chronologies to cover periods which a chronographer cannot otherwise explain). As a result, the Great Stemma contains roundels that do not represent a person, but merely spans of time. However none of our manuscripts transmit all the three Allophyle episodes: they reduce them all to just one interval between Abdon and Samson.
The One Year of Samera is perhaps the oddest of the insertions. This is a peculiarity known from a very early Christian chronography, by Theophilus of Antioch in his Apologia ad Autolycum [*]In effect, Judges 3:31 is placed after Judges 16:31, with the name Shamagar altered to Samera. The issue is summarized in a note by Nestle, Eberhard. "Samgar". Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft, 32 (1912) 152. Julius Africanus recognized the One Year of Samera [*]Iulius Africanus Chronographiae: The Extant Fragments. Wallraff, Martin (ed). Berlin: de Gruyter. 2007. T40. The Liber Genealogus also accepted it. Though later chronographers tended to regard the Year of Samera as an error, like many errors, it developed a life of its own. Gelzer's book (above) mentions other works where this variant rears its head again centuries later. Beta recensions of the Great Stemma restore Shamgar to the earlier position in the series.

The most remarkable graphic feature of the chronology is its use of arches to represent the passage of time. Arches and arcades are such a commonplace feature of medieval manuscripts that many scholars devote more attention to discussing their architectural styles than to considering why they are employed in the first place to organize text. Doubtless, there are some cases where an arch is employed as little more than a decorative device, heightening the importance of a passage and giving it a monumental setting, just as we might do nowadays with a bordered box. In a few cases, an arch invites the reader to use an ancient mnemonic method which organized information in the mind's eye in the rooms and niches of an imaginary building.

But in the case of a chronography, the arch has an altogether different purpose: it surely graphically represents spans of time. The figure that must have inspired the succession of time-arches was not the arcade of a marketplace or a cloister, but the arches of a stone bridge or aqueduct as it spans a valley. To acquire a sense of this figure as it was originally conceived, avoiding anachronism, we have to shake off symbol-laden, medieval attitudes to page decoration and look at these multi-span bridge drawings with the more pragmatic eye of Late Antiquity. It seems more than likely that the original author's own version of the Great Stemma would probably have employed unadorned arches, and that the flourishes are an accretion by later copyists.

It is notable that the arches are only employed to signify very long time spans of a hundred or more years: this raises the possibility that the arches may have once even been drawn to scale, narrower or wider according to shorter or longer spans of years. Follow this link to a drawing of how the timeline might perhaps have originally looked.

[to be continued]

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