Images of Emperors and Emirs in Early Islamic Egypt

Abstract

At some point in the seventh century, an artist in Egypt sat down to decorate a Sahidic Coptic manuscript containing books of the Old Testament.1 At the conclusion to the Book of Job, on the blank half page beneath, and under the bold Coptic title ‘Job the Just’ (written in the same hand as the preceding text), this artist decided to depict the eponymous hero alongside his three daughters – Hemera, Kasia, and Amalthaias. The subsequent sketches, all frontal and standing in a row, are striking. On the left Job himself, tall and nimbate, appears with a short, circular beard, and with curled hair protruding beneath an ornate diadem topped with a cross; he wears a paludamentum fastened at his shoulder with a brooch, a knee-length belted tunic beneath a cuirass, and short boots; and he bears in his right hand a staff or sceptre, and in his left a globe. To the right, the three daughters all wear full-length tunics with ornate girdles, all have earrings, and the two older, central, women have their hair in a snood; the other wears a crown.2 It has long been recognised that the group is presented in Roman imperial dress,3 and indeed this is appropriate, given that the preceding Coptic text, based upon the Septuagint, includes a final chapter calling Job the king of Edom (Jb 42:17d).4 The dating of the manuscript on palaeographical grounds, and thus also of the drawing which seems original to it, has ranged from the fifth to ninth centuries, but the imperial inspiration for the figures is suggestive of a date before, or soon after, the Arab conquest (640–642), when access to imperial portraiture of various kinds was far easier. Indeed, it seems that the artist has based his depiction of Job on a particular emperor: Heraclius (610–641).5 Prior to his predecessor Phocas (602–610), emperors are depicted beardless, and Heraclius, on his coins up to 629,