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Christianity's First Centuries in Africa |
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| The Arrival of Christianity in Africa By Thelma K. Thomas |
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 figure 6  figure 7  figure 8 |
Alongside the plan of Roman Alexandria, I
show a fragment from a Greek manuscript called The Alexandrian World
Chronicle, from the seventh
or eighth century. [figure
6]
It depicts the fourth-century Patriarch Theophilus
in Alexandria standing triumphantly among the ruins of the pagan
temple called the Serapeum, which was destroyed at his bidding
during antipagan persecutions. Christian chronicles assume an emphatically
Christian point of view. This chronicle is also centered on Alexandria.
We
should keep in mind that to a great extent, paganism and Christianity
coexisted during this period of transition, sharing the same
physical world, the same material and visual culture. So, in
Egypt, we find examples of the same forms of decorations for
tombs, sculpted niches, utilizing on the one hand pagan imagery
(the birth of Aphrodite) and on the other, Christian (shown here
is a fragment from such a niche, of angels bearing a cross within
a wreath). [figure
7] Perhaps the same artisans created tombs for both
pagans and Christians. For contemporaries, the duality between pagan and Christian was not always exactly oppositional. For example, Christians were entering into the pre-existing pagan landscape and coming to terms with it as much as they were changing it. In Western Thebes, for example, some monks took up pharaonic tombs for their cells, precisely because the demons they chose to fight were strongest there. However, Christian holy sites, loca sancta, gradually transformed the landscape. Christianity’s holy sites are places where God manifested himself, or where Christ or other holy persons lived, where martyrs witnessed their faith as and until they were put to death, even places that received items associated with holy persons or holy events. By the fourth century, there was a veritable pilgrimage industry at Jerusalem, linked to holy sites around Palestine, in Sinai and in Egypt. An architecture of Christian shrines marked the new Christian landscape, to accommodate Christian holy places and the pilgrims who flocked to them, just as the architecture of churches accommodated eucharistic and other liturgical celebrations. The pilgrimage site of Saint Menas, near Alexandria, began as the place where the saint’s body was discovered and grew, over the fifth and sixth centuries, into a vast city for pilgrims. The heart of that city is shown in this plan. [figure 8] The pilgrimage industry was the economic basis for the city called Menapolis, the city of Menas. The flask, now in the collection of my museum, the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, was a pilgrim’s token from the site, a souvenir to be taken home for its continued blessings. Such flasks, easily identifiable by the image of Saint Menas, have been found across the breadth of the late Roman and early Byzantine empires. |
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