HISTORY OF THE PATRIARCHS OF ALEXANDRIA, the title commonly used
for the principal text of Coptic historiography, which actually
bears the title Siyar al-Bi‘ah al-Muqaddasah, "Biographies of
the Holy Church." It is important to emphasize that this text,
which can be considered the official history of the Coptic
Orthodox Church, should be defined not as one book representing
a structural unity but rather as a tradition of historical
writing. In various epochs, Coptic authors have recorded the
history of their church and their country, each one of them
continuing the work of his predecessor. The early historians in
this series wrote in Coptic, and their successors from the
eleventh century on wrote in Arabic. The text as we know it
today consists thus partly of Arabic translations of Coptic
originals and partly of original Arabic works, and as a whole it
covers the history from the first to the thirteenth centuries.
Moreover, there are brief continuations of the History of the
Patriarchs that deal with the four