Agapius of Hierapolis

Who is Agapius of Hierapolis?

Agapius son of Constantine was a 10th-century Arabic Christian writer, best known for his lengthy Kitab al-'Unwan. He was the Melkite bishop of Manbij.

He was a contemporary of the annalist Eutychius, also a Melchite. His history commences with the foundation of the world and runs up to his own times. The portion dealing with the Arabic period is extant only in a single manuscript and breaks off in the second year of the Caliphate of al-Mahdi.

For the early history of Christianity, Agapius made use uncritically of apocryphal and legendary materials. For the following secular and ecclesiastical history, he relied on Syriac sources, in particular the World Chronicle of the Maronite historian Theophilus of Edessa for the end of the Ummayad period and the beginning of the Abbasids. He made use of Eusebius's Church History only through an intermediary compilation of short extracts. This he supplements from other sources. He gives an otherwise unknown fragment of Papias; and a list of Eastern Metropolitans. He uses the lost History of Bardaisan, but many of his sources remain unknown.