Georgios Choumnos

The Historical Palaea was composed in Greek (approximately in the 9th century) and found a broad reception in the Slavic world. The text was not only translated more than one time into Slavonic but also reworked in such texts as the apocryphal cycle of Abraham contained in many Southern Slavonic miscellanies. The reception in the Byzantine realm was probably more limited but there is at least one important exception: a poem written in the 2nd half of the 15th century by a Cretan Georgios Chumnos. A comparison between the cycle of Abraham and the relevant part of this poem (verses 579 to 1348) shows that there are many agreements between the cycle of Abraham and Chumnos against the text of the Historical Palaea as their common Vorlage (story of Melchizedek told through direct speech; omission of circumcision of Isaac and death of Sarah; inclusion of death of Abraham omitted in the Palaea; omission of several allusions to the New Testament and many other affinities). The article deals with the question about possible explanations of some of these – partly astonishing – similarities between the texts of two different traditions.