Not later than the twelfth century a lengthy romance about the life and deeds of Alexander the Great, the so-called Pseudo-Callisthenes’ Alexandreid (which was mistakenly attributed to Callisthenes, the historian who accompanied Alexander on his campaigns), was translated from the Greek. The original historico-biographical background of the story about Alexander […]

In the eleventh to twelfth centuries a translation was made of the Byzantine epic about the adventures of Digenes Akritas. The Greek original is not extant. Only some fourteenth- to sixteenth-century copies have survived of a Greek poem about Digenes which evidently reflects an earlier version of the work.29 The […]

A translation of The Tale of Akir the Wise was also known in Kievan Russia. This tale originated in Assyro-Babylon in the seventh century B.C.32 The Tale tells of how Akir, counsellor to King Sennacherib of Assyria and Nineveh, receives Divine instructions to adopt his nephew Anadan. He brings him […]

Byzantine scholarship of the early mediaeval period was very closely bound up with theology. The world of nature, about which Byzantine scholars could obtain information both from their own observations and from the writings of the classical philosophers and naturalists, was seen primarily as living testimony to the wisdom of […]

The hехаёmeron was extremely popular in mediaeval Christian literatures. It was a treatise on the Bible story of how God created the sky, the stars, the heavenly bodies, the earth, living creatures, plants and man in six days (hence the name of the book). This treatise turned into a compilation […]

Whereas the hехаёmeron was about nature as a whole, from heavenly bodies to plants and animals, another work, The Physiologos, dealt primarily with living creatures, both real (the lion, eagle, ant, whale, elephant, etc.) and imaginary (the phoenix, the siren, the centaur), and a few plants or precious stones (diamonds, […]

The Christian Topography of Cosmas Indicopleustes was also known in Old Russia. Cosmas was a merchant who travelled to Egypt, Ethiopia and Arabia around the year 530. In spite of his nickname “Indicopleustes” (“sailor to India”), Cosmas appears not to have visited India itself and his information about this country […]

Let us now consider the original literature of Kievan Russia, i.e., that created by Russian writers. We already know that within a comparatively short time Russian writers became acquainted with a rich and varied translated literature. A whole system of genres was transplanted to new soil: chronicles, historical tales, vitae, […]

Scholars of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the present one believed that Russian chronicle-writing emerged as an imitation of Byzantine chronography. Yet the Byzantine chronicles were not used by Russian writers in the early stage of the development of Russian chronicle-writing. Moreover, most Russian chronicles are based on […]

The earliest extant chronicle compilation is The Tale of Bygone Years which is dated at about 1113. However, as Shakhmatov has proved, the Tale was preceded by other chronicle compilations. Among the facts which led Shakhmatov to the conclusion that marked the beginning of many years of enquiry in the […]