The Camel and the Founding Legend

Why does the shrine of St. Menas stand where it stands, on an arid shelf of the Mareotis desert with no harbour, river, or road to recommend it? The tradition answers with a story: the relics of the martyr, carried (per the legend) back toward Egypt, were borne on a camel that, at a certain spot in the desert, would go no further — kneeling, or refusing to rise — and the saint’s choice was read in the beast’s refusal, so that the shrine was founded on the place the camel marked. This file reports that founding legend as the tradition attests it, named to its source and never asserted as documented history; sets out its variants and its function as an aetiology that explains the burial site retrospectively; and traces the camel-motif into the celebrated iconography of the saint between two camels.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox / Coptic (Great Martyr; Wonderworker)

A Founding Legend, Not a Record

The story told here is a tradition, not a chapter of documented history, and the methodological discipline of this collection requires that it be reported as such. Under METHODOLOGY.md §3.5, hagiographic claims are not certified as historical fact; they are pinned to the sources that attest them and reported as what those sources say. The founding-by-camel legend is a textbook case: it is a tradition preserved in the Coptic Menas material, edited and translated by James Drescher in his Apa Mena of 1946 — the standard collection of the Coptic Passio and Miracles — and it is from that body of tradition, not from any contemporary record of the shrine’s foundation, that the camel-story comes (Drescher, Apa Mena, 1946). Throughout what follows the legend is reported as the legend: “the tradition relates,” “the Passio attests,” “according to the Coptic texts.” It is offered as an account of what the faithful have held about the founding of their shrine, not as a reconstruction of how the shrine in fact came to be.

This caution is not a slight on the saint or his cult. The cult is the firmest thing in the entire dossier — the excavated pilgrimage-city is in the ground, and it testifies beyond reasonable doubt to a vast and early veneration of Menas at this spot (see The Great Pilgrimage City; The Historical Core). What is soft is not the existence of the shrine but the story of its founding: the narrative that explains, after the fact, why the tomb is where it is. That is the proper object of source-critical care.

The Translation of the Relics

The founding legend presupposes the translation of the martyr’s relics to Egypt. According to the dominant tradition, Menas — a soldier of the Rutilian legion, associated with Cotyaeum in Phrygia — was martyred during the Great Persecution, and his body was afterward brought back toward Egypt, to be buried in the Mareotis desert southwest of Alexandria (Drescher, Apa Mena, 1946; see The Passio). The Egyptian-versus-Phrygian question that underlies this translation — whether Menas was an Egyptian whose relics were carried home, or a Phrygian martyr whose body was translated to Egypt, or whether two distinct Menas-traditions have here been conflated — is a live dispute treated in its own place, and the detail is deferred there. [Disputed: the dominant Coptic tradition makes Menas an Egyptian whose relics were translated home to the Mareotis (Drescher, *Apa Mena*, 1946); an alternative makes him born and/or martyred at Cotyaeum in Phrygia, the relics translated to Egypt thereafter, and some scholars hold the Egyptian and Phrygian figures to be distinct saints conflated in the tradition (Papaconstantinou, *Le culte des saints en Égypte*, 2001; Atiya, ed., *Coptic Encyclopedia*, 1991, s.v. "Menas the Martyr, Saint"); the question is treated in Sections 02 and 05] (see The Passio; The Miracle Collections).

What matters for the founding legend is that the relics were, by the tradition, in transit — being carried across the desert — when the decisive event occurred. The camel-story is precisely a story about the end of a journey: about how the body, borne toward or across Egypt, came to rest at the one particular spot where the shrine was raised.

The Camel That Would Go No Further

The core of the legend is simple, vivid, and of a recognizable type. The relics of the martyr were loaded upon a camel (in some tellings, camels) for transport across the Mareotis. At a certain place in the desert, the animal halted and would go no further: it knelt, or it refused to rise, or it could not be made to move on, however it was urged (Drescher, Apa Mena, 1946). The refusal was read as a sign — the saint’s own choice of his resting-place, declared through the beast that bore him. Where the camel stopped, there the body was buried; and there, over the grave the camel had marked, the shrine of Abu Mena was founded (Drescher, Apa Mena, 1946; cf. Grossmann, “Abu Mina,” in Atiya, ed., Coptic Encyclopedia, 1991).

The legend exists in variant forms, and the variants should be named rather than smoothed over. [Disputed: the founding-by-camel tradition is a legend, not documented history, and survives in variant tellings — the camel **kneeling** at the spot, the camel **refusing to rise**, the camel that **would go no further** however urged — all to the same effect: the animal's halt is read as the saint's choice of his burial place, and the shrine is founded there (Drescher, *Apa Mena*, 1946); the story functions retrospectively, explaining both the location of the tomb and the saint's distinctive iconography (the two camels), and is pinned to the Coptic Menas tradition rather than asserted as the historical manner of the shrine's foundation (Drescher, *Apa Mena*, 1946; Papaconstantinou, *Le culte des saints en Égypte*, 2001)]. The differences among the tellings — kneeling, refusing to rise, halting — are differences of detail within a single, stable motif: the beast that bears the holy body chooses, by stopping, the holy ground.

The Motif and Its Type

The camel-legend belongs to a well-attested type in hagiography: the aetiological foundation legend, in which the site of a shrine is explained by a sign given through an animal or a miraculous immobility of the relics. The pattern — a holy body that cannot be moved past a certain point, or a beast that halts and will not go on, taken as the saint’s election of the place — recurs across the cult of relics, and its function is always the same: to answer the question why here? with the authority of the saint’s own will rather than the contingency of human decision (on the wider genre of holy place and pilgrimage, Frankfurter, ed., Pilgrimage and Holy Space in Late Antique Egypt, 1998). To recognize the type is not to dismiss the legend but to read it rightly. Such stories are not, in the main, records of how shrines were founded; they are the way a community articulates the conviction that its holy place was chosen by the saint and not merely selected by men.

For Abu Mena the why here? is an unusually pressing question, because the site is so unpromising. There is no natural reason for a great city to stand on that waterless desert shelf — no port, no river, no junction (see The Great Pilgrimage City). The camel-legend supplies the missing reason: the place was not chosen for any worldly advantage but marked by the saint himself, through the camel that would go no further. The legend, in other words, does exactly the explanatory work an aetiology is meant to do — it grounds an otherwise inexplicable location in a sacred act of election.

A Retrospective Explanation

It is important to see the direction in which the legend works: it explains backward. The shrine existed; the tomb was venerated; the city grew; the iconography developed. The founding-by-camel story accounts for all of this after the fact, supplying an origin-narrative that makes sense of what was already there. This is the ordinary logic of a foundation legend, and it is why such legends cannot be used as evidence for the events they purport to describe. The camel-story tells us, reliably, what the Coptic tradition came to believe about the founding of Abu Mena; it does not tell us, and cannot tell us, how the relics actually came to rest there (Drescher, Apa Mena, 1946; Papaconstantinou, Le culte des saints en Égypte, 2001).

The retrospective character of the legend is most visible in its tie to the iconography. The story does not merely explain the location of the tomb; it explains the image of the saint — the orant figure flanked by two crouching camels — that the shrine itself produced and broadcast across the Mediterranean. A legend that accounts for an established image is, almost by definition, secondary to it: it grows up to interpret a motif already in circulation. The camel-tale and the camel-iconography are bound together, each reinforcing the other, and both are best read as expressions of a developed cult rather than as windows onto its origin.

The Two Camels in the Iconography

The most famous product of Abu Mena is the stamped terracotta pilgrim flask — the ampulla — that carried the shrine’s blessing across three continents, and its standard image is unmistakable: St. Menas standing in the orant posture of prayer, arms raised, flanked on either side by a crouching camel (Kaufmann, Die Menasstadt, 1910; see The Menas Flasks). The two camels are the saint’s invariable attribute, the sign by which his image is recognized from Egypt to Britain to the Rhineland. Whatever the precise relation of legend to image, the two are mutually illuminating: the founding-by-camel story explains why camels attend the saint, and the camels on the flasks keep the story in view wherever the blessing is carried (Kaufmann, Die Menasstadt, 1910; see The Saint Between Two Camels).

Whether the legend generated the iconography or the iconography prompted the legend is not finally determinable, and the honest position is that they developed together within the cult. [Disputed: the relation of the founding-by-camel legend to the two-camel iconography is one of mutual explanation rather than established priority — the legend accounts for the camels in the image, while the prominence of the camels on the ampullae kept the legend alive; the iconographic motif may equally reflect the camel's role as the beast of desert transport that brought pilgrims and goods to the Mareotis shrine, independent of any single founding-tale (Kaufmann, *Die Menasstadt*, 1910; Grossmann, "Abu Mina," in Atiya, ed., *Coptic Encyclopedia*, 1991)]. The fuller treatment of the image, its possible origins, and its meaning belongs to Section 08 (see The Saint Between Two Camels).

Reading the Legend Rightly

The right way to hold this material is the way the collection holds the Passio as a whole. The founding-by-camel legend is a genuine and venerable part of the Menas tradition, preserved in the Coptic texts, beloved of the faithful, and woven into the very image of the saint. It is also a foundation legend of a familiar type, working retrospectively to explain why the shrine stands where it stands and why the saint is shown between two camels — and it is therefore not a record of the shrine’s actual founding, but a tradition about it (Drescher, Apa Mena, 1946; Papaconstantinou, Le culte des saints en Égypte, 2001; and on the method, Reading the Menas Tradition).

To say so is to honour the legend by reading it as what it is. The cult of Menas needs no embellishment from a literal camel; the excavated city already establishes a veneration of extraordinary depth and reach (see The Great Pilgrimage City). The camel-story is the cult’s own account of its origin — the faithful’s conviction that the holy place was chosen by the saint, declared through the patient beast that bore him and would go no further. Reported as the tradition attests it, pinned to the Coptic sources, and read as the aetiology it is, the legend keeps its proper place: not among the documented facts of the shrine’s history, but among the things the Church remembers and tells about why its great wonderworker rests where he rests.

References

Drescher, James. Apa Mena: A Selection of Coptic Texts Relating to St. Menas. Cairo: Société d’archéologie copte, 1946. (Edition and translation of the Coptic Passio and Miracles, including the translation of the relics and the founding-by-camel tradition.)
Grossmann, Peter. “Abu Mina.” In The Coptic Encyclopedia, ed. Aziz S. Atiya, 8 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1991. (The shrine, its foundation over the tomb, and the cult’s development.)
Kaufmann, Carl Maria. Die Menasstadt und das Nationalheiligtum der altchristlichen Aegypter. Leipzig: Hiersemann, 1910. (The excavation of the shrine and the corpus of pilgrim ampullae bearing the saint between two camels.)
Frankfurter, David, ed. Pilgrimage and Holy Space in Late Antique Egypt. Leiden: Brill, 1998. (The genre of holy place and foundation, and the pilgrimage context of Egyptian saints’ shrines.)
Papaconstantinou, Arietta. Le culte des saints en Égypte des Byzantins aux Abbassides. Paris: CNRS, 2001. (The documented cult of Menas; the identity and origin questions underlying the translation legend.)
Atiya, Aziz S., ed. The Coptic Encyclopedia. 8 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1991. (Articles on Menas the Martyr and on Abu Mena; the Egyptian-vs-Phrygian and conflation questions.)