250 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 



ruler and patriarch over Egypt ' ; and the Ethiopic Synaxarium con- 

 tains the wo^'ds ' The Mukaukas, that is to say, the governor and 

 archbishop of Alexandria and all the land of Egypt.' 



3. In the Coptic life of Samuel of Kalamiin, of which a tenth- 

 centmy fragment is preserved in the Bodleian, and of which the 

 original would appear from internal evidence to have heen composed 

 before the death of Cyrus, a curious story is told of the patriarch's 

 visit to a monastery ; and incidentally he is described as TlK<L'ffXIOC 

 ^e^ce•a"TO^.pXHe^ICKO^.OC, or 'the laucMos, the false arch- 

 bishop.' In this Coptic word — if it be Coptic — haucMos Mr. Butler, 

 following Amelineau and Pereira, sees the original of the title 

 Mukawkis, The explanation is a case of ohscurum per obscurius, for 

 no satisfactory meaning has so far been found for kauchios ; and Mr. 

 Butler himself hazards three distinct conjectui'es — 'Caucasian,' 

 ' Cholchiaii,' and ' paederastian.' The obscurity of the meaning, 

 however, does not affect the argument; if kauchios be the original 

 of Mukawkis, then this Coptic document makes Mukawkis and Cyrus 

 one person. But it is far from certain that kauchios is the Coptic 

 original of the Arabic or Arabicized title Mukawkis. 



Supposing these translations to be accurate, and supposing the Mss., 

 which are chiefly late, to be faithful transcripts of early authoritative 

 documents — a matter which I am not qualified to decide — these 

 extracts taken together show that Cyrus and the Mukawkis were one 

 and the same person in the opinion of the writers. This can hardly 

 be contested. The only question is whether the writers were 

 authoritative. Severus was ignorant of Coptic, and not very trust- 

 worthy,* and he wrote late in the tenth century, later by a hundred 



* Butler, Arab Conquest, xiv, xvii. 



