Download PDF | [Routledge Worlds] Daniel King - The Syriac World, Routledge_ Ashgate 2018.
895 Pages
THE SYRIAC WORLD
The Syriac World represents the most marvellous resource, not just for specialists in Syriac studies but also for scholars and students of global history and religion. Covering the broadest possible range of relevant topics, it brings together cutting-edge research by acknowledged experts, and succeeds in being both immensely learned and accessible. There is generous provision of maps, illustrations, and appendices, and the detailed bibliographies allow readers to pursue topics still further. A considerable achievement on the part of the editor, this volume will be an invaluable addition to private libraries as well as a must for institutions.’ – Alison G. Salvesen, University of Oxford, UK
This volume surveys the ‘Syriac world’, the culture that grew up among the Syriacspeaking communities from the second century CE and which continues to exist and flourish today, both in its original homeland of Syria and Mesopotamia, and in the worldwide diaspora of Syriac-speaking communities. The five sections examine the religion; the material, visual, and literary cultures; the history and social structures of this diverse community; and Syriac interactions with their neighbours ancient and modern. There are also appendices detailing the patriarchs of the different Syriac denominations, and another appendix listing useful online resources for students. The Syriac World offers the first complete survey of Syriac culture and fills a significant gap in modern scholarship. This volume will be an invaluable resource to undergraduate and postgraduate students of Syriac and Middle Eastern culture from antiquity to the modern era.
Daniel King (Research Fellow, Cardiff University, UK) is a scholar of Syriac who specialises in the history of Syriac philosophy and its contribution to the progress of knowledge. His research is principally concerned with examining how the Syriac tradition adopted and adapted to its own environment the heritage of Greek Christian thought and ideas, and how it was able to translate large numbers of Greek texts into a new and distinctive idiom. He has a special interest in all aspects of the history of translation and currently works in East Africa advising and consulting on the translation of the Bible into the vernacular languages of the region.
CONTRIBUTORS
Shafiq Abouzayd of The Oriental Institute, University of Oxford, UK, is Chairman of the ARAM Society for Syro-Mesopotamian Studies and editor of the ARAM Periodical. He is also a priest in the Maronite Church. Nathanael Andrade is an associate professor of ancient history in the Department of History at Binghamton University (SUNY), USA. His books include Syrian Identity in the Greco-Roman World (2013) and The Journey of Christianity to India in Late Antiquity: Networks and the Movement of Culture (2018). He has also published numerous articles and chapters on the Roman Near East, the city of Palmyra, Late Antique Christianity, and Roman contact with central, south, and east Asia. Françoise Briquel-Chatonnet is Senior Researcher in Centre national de la Recherche Scientifique, France. She is a specialist of the Levant in the first millennium BC as well as of Syriac culture and texts. Her main focus is on script and writing, inscriptions, and manuscripts. Her main publications are Manuscrits syriaques. Bibliothèque nationale de France (manuscrits entrés depuis 1911, nos 356–435). Aix-en-Provence, bibliothèque Méjanes. Lyon, bibliothèque municipale. Strasbourg, Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire. Catalogue (1997); Recueil des inscriptions syriaques. Vol. 1. Kérala (with A. Desreumaux and J. Thekeparampil, 2008); and (with M. Debié), Le monde syriaque. Sur les routes d’un christianisme ignoré (2017).
Sebastian P. Brock is Emeritus Reader in Syriac Studies and Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, UK. His main research interests lie in Syriac literature, including translations from Greek, in the pre-Islamic period. Publications include The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of St Ephrem; A Brief Outline of Syriac Literature; and four volumes in the Variorum Reprints; he is the editor and main author of The Hidden Pearl: The Syrian Orthodox Church and Its Ancient Aramaic Heritage. Aaron Michael Butts is Assistant Professor in the Department of Semitic and Egyptian Languages and Literatures at the Catholic University of America, USA. He specialises in the languages, literatures, and histories of Christianity in the Near East, including Arabic, Ethiopic, and especially Syriac. He recently published Language Change in the Wake of Empire: Syriac in Its Greco-Roman Context (2016) and (with Simcha Gross) The History of the ‘Slave of Christ’: From Jewish Child to Christian Martyr (2016). He is also associate editor of Aramaic Studies. Thomas A. Carlson is Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern History at Oklahoma State University, USA. He researches the social and cultural dynamics of religious diversity and change in the pre-modern Middle East. His Christianity in FifteenthCentury Iraq (2018) explores what it meant to be Christian in a late mediaeval ‘Islamic’ society, including social relationships across religious boundaries, and the theological, ritual, hierarchical, and historical dimensions of belonging. His next book will explore Islamisation over the period 1000–1500 CE. Touraj Daryaee is the Maseeh Chair in Persian Studies and the Director of the Dr. Samuel M. Jordan Center for Persian Studies at the University of California, Irvine, USA. He works on the history of ancient Iran and Zoroastrianism. His latest book is the King of Seven Climes (2017). He is also the editor of the Oxford Handbook of Iranian History, 2012, as well as Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire (2009).
Muriel Debié is Professor of Eastern Christianities at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris (EPHE-Sorbonne, Paris Sciences et Lettres), France, and was in residence in the United States as a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton while writing this chapter. She is a specialist of Late Antique Studies, especially Syriac, more particularly Syriac historiography. She is author (with F. BriquelChatonnet) of Le monde syriaque. Sur les routes d’un christianisme ignoré (2017). Michael J. Decker is Maroulis Professor of Byzantine History and Orthodox Religion at the University of South Florida, USA. He writes on the economy and society of the Late Antique and mediaeval Near East. Major publications include The Byzantine Dark Ages (2016), The Byzantine Art of War (2013), and Life and Society in Byzantine Cappadocia (with J. E. Cooper, 2012). Mark Dickens is a cultural historian of Central Asia and the Middle East who specialises in the interaction between Syriac Christianity and the inhabitants of Central Eurasia (particularly the Turkic peoples) in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. He has co-authored a catalogue of Syriac manuscripts from Turfan and published articles on the Church of the East, Syriac gravestones and other inscriptions from Central Asia, various Christian texts from Turfan, and extracts from Syriac Chronicles on interactions with Turkic peoples. Holger Gzella is Professor of Hebrew and Aramaic at Leiden University, the Netherlands. He focuses on the historical-comparative study of Hebrew and Aramaic in its linguistic and cultural environment, especially the evolution of Aramaic as a scribal language from the Ancient Near East to Late Antiquity. Most recently, he wrote A Cultural History of Aramaic (2015) and edited the Aramaic volume of the Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (2016).
Theresia Hainthaler is Honorary Professor for Christology of the Early Church and theology of the Christian East, Philosophisch-Theologische Hochschule Sankt Georgen, Frankfurt, Germany. Since 1994, she has led the project ‘Christ in Christian Tradition’ founded by the late Aloys Grillmeier SJ (1910–1998), a collaborator and co-author since 1986. She was editor and reviser of the Christ in Christian Tradition volumes and of their English, French, and Italian translations. She has been involved in many ecumenical dialogues with the Syriac Churches, with the Assyrian Church of the East, and with Eastern Orthodoxy. Her numerous publications, besides the Christ in Christian Tradition volumes, include Christliche Araber vor dem Islam (2007); Wiener Patristische Tagungen IV–VII; Einheit und Katholizität der Kirche (2009); Heiligkeit und Apostolizität der Kirche (2010); Für uns und für unser Heil. Soteriologie in Ost und West (2014); and Sophia. The Wisdom of God – Die Weisheit Gottes (2017). Susan Ashbrook Harvey is Willard Prescott and Annie McClelland Smith Professor of Religion and History at Brown University, USA. She specialises in Syriac and Byzantine Christianity, and her scholarship has ranged widely across issues of women, embodiment, and lay piety, studied in contexts of asceticism, monasticism, hagiography, liturgy, hymnography, and domestic and civic religion. Most recently she coedited with Margaret Mullett Knowing Bodies, Passionate Souls: Sense Perception in Byzantium (2017). Her major monograph, Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination, was reissued in paperback in 2015. John F. Healey is Professor Emeritus at the University of Manchester, UK. His research has focused upon Aramaic and Syriac Epigraphy; the history of the alphabet; and religion in the Roman-Period Near East. His numerous publications include The Nabataean Tomb Inscriptions of Mada’in Salih (1993), The Religion of the Nabataeans (2001), Aramaic Inscriptions and Documents of the Roman Period (2009), and, with H.J.W. Drijvers, The Old Syriac Inscriptions of Edessa and Osrhoene (1999).
Geoffrey Herman is a researcher at the Scholion Mandel Interdisciplinary Research Center in the Humanities and Jewish Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. His research focuses on the interaction between Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians in the Sasanian Empire. He has published extensively on the history of religious life in the Sasanian era. Among his recent publications are A Prince without a Kingdom: The Exilarch in the Sasanian Era (2012); Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians: Religious Dynamics in a Sasanian Context (2014); and Persian Martyr Acts under King Yazdgird I (2016). Erica C. D. Hunter is Head and Senior Lecturer in Eastern Christianity, and also cochair of the Centre of World Christianity, at the School of Oriental and African Studies, UK. She has a particular interest in the heritage of Christianity in Iraq. Between 2004 and 2013 she convened the highly successful annual Christianity in Iraq Seminar Day series. She is the editor of The Christian Heritage of Iraq: Collected Papers from the Christianity of Iraq I-V Seminar Days. Florence Jullien is a researcher at the CNRS, France. She specialises in the study of Syriac Christianity and monasticism in the East. She has notably published Apôtres des confins. Processus missionnaires chrétiens dans l’empire iranien (Res Orientales 15) in 2002, as well as the following volumes in the CSCO: Les Actes de Mâr Mâri. Aux origines de l’Eglise de Perse (2003), Le monachisme en Perse. La réforme d’Abraham le Grand, père des moines de l’Orient (2008), and L’Histoire de Mār Abba, catholicos de l’Orient. Martyres de Mār Grigor et de Mār Yazd-panāh (2015).
She has also edited Les Monachismes d’Orient (2011) and Eastern Christianity: a Crossroads of Cultures (2012), as well as many articles on these problems. Grigory Kessel is Research Fellow at the Division of Byzantine Research of the Institute for Medieval Research, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria, and Research Fellow at the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, University of Manchester, UK. He specialises in the study of the literary heritage of Syriac Christianity with particular attention to its manuscript tradition. Besides manuscripts, his publications deal with Syriac medical and monastic texts, as well as bibliographic research. He is a participant in a number of cataloguing projects, including the Sinai Palimpsest Project and those of the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library. At present he is a principal investigator on the European Research Council Starting Grant Project, Transmission of Classical Scientific and Philosophical Literature from Greek into Syriac and Arabic, and holds a Wellcome Trust Research Fellowship in Humanities for an editorial project, The ‘Syriac Epidemics’ – Reception and Transmission of Classical Medicine in the East. Geoffrey Khan is Regius Professor of Hebrew at the University of Cambridge, UK. His research interests include various fields of Semitic philology. His book publications include studies of Neo-Aramaic dialects, mediaeval traditions of Biblical Hebrew, and Arabic papyrology. He is conducting a major project that aims to document the endangered North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic dialects, some outcomes of which include his books A Grammar of Neo-Aramaic. The Dialect of the Jews of Arbel (Brill, Leiden, 1999), The Neo-Aramaic Dialect of Qaraqosh (2002), The Jewish NeoAramaic Dialect of Sulemaniyya and Ḥalabja (2004), The Neo-Aramaic Dialect of Barwar. 3 vols. Vol. 1 Grammar. Vol. 2 Lexicon. Vol. 3 Texts. (2008), The Jewish Neo-Aramaic Dialect of Urmi (Gorgias, Piscataway, 2008), The Jewish Neo-Aramaic Dialect of Sanandaj (2009), and The Neo-Aramaic Dialect of the Assyrian Christians of Urmi. 4 vols. Vol. 1 Grammar: Phonology and Morphology. Vol. 2 Grammar: Syntax. Vol. 3 Lexical Studies and Dictionary. Vol. 4 Texts. (2016). Widad Khoury is Scientific Director of Archaeological Missions, DGAM, Damascus, Syria. She holds a degree in architectural engineering from the Faculty of Civil Engineering, Damascus. She has worked at the Aga Khan Foundation and has taught at the Department of Architecture as well as conducting Syrian archaeological missions at the Department of Excavations and Archaeological Studies, DGAM, Damascus. She has published a variety of articles on the ecclesiastical architecture of Late Antique Syria. Daniel King is formerly Lecturer, now Research Fellow, in Syriac Studies and Semitic Languages, Cardiff University, UK. His research is principally concerned with examining how the Syriac tradition adopted and adapted to its own environment the heritage of Greek Christian thought and ideas, and how it was able to translate large numbers of Greek texts into a new and distinctive idiom. He has published an edition of The Earliest Syriac Translation of Aristotle’s Categories (2010). He has a special interest in all aspects of the history of translation and currently works in East Africa. Jonathan Loopstra teaches and researches in the fields of Early Christianity and the religious culture of the Near East, with a particular focus on Syriac-speaking Christianity. His publications include Job: The Syriac Peshitta Bible with English Translation (2016) and An East Syrian Manuscript of the Syriac ‘Masora’ Dated to 899 CE (2014–2015). He received a PhD from The Catholic University of America, a Master of Studies from Oxford University in Syriac Studies, and a Master of Arts in Church History from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.
Emma Loosley is Associate Professor of Theology and Religion at the University of Exeter, UK. She researches the relationship between early Middle Eastern, particularly Syrian, Christianity and its material culture, with a special interest in how early ritual shaped ecclesiastical architecture. She is currently exploring the relationship between Syria and Georgia in Late Antiquity in order to understand the diffusion of Syrian culture northwards into the Caucasus. Her works on later and contemporary Christian issues and publications include The Architecture and Liturgy of the Bema in Fourth- to Sixth-Century Syrian Churches (2012), Messiah and Mahdi: Caucasian Christians and the Construction of Safavid Isfahan (2009), and (edited with Anthony O’Mahony) Christian Responses to Islam and Muslim-Christian Relations in the Modern World (2008), Eastern Christianity in the Modern Middle East (Routledge, 2009). Volker Menze is Director of the Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies and Associate Professor in the Department of Medieval Studies at Central European University, Hungary. He works on Late Antique ecclesiastical, political, and religious history, and has published Justinian and the Making of the Syrian Orthodox Church (Oxford University Press, 2008) and, together with Kutlu Akalın, John of Tella’s Profession of Faith: The Legacy of a Sixth-Century Syrian Orthodox Bishop (2009). David A. Michelson is Associate Professor of the History of Christianity at Vanderbilt University, USA. He is the author of The Practical Christology of Philoxenos of Mabbug (2015) and is currently preparing a monograph on the theology of reading in Syriac asceticism. He is the general editor of Syriaca.org: The Syriac Reference Portal and co-editor, with Thomas A. Carlson, of The Syriac Gazetteer, an online geographical dictionary of Syriac places. Heleen Murre-van den Berg is Professor of Eastern Christian Studies and Director of the Institute of Eastern Christian Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen, and Director of NOSTER (Netherlands School for Advanced Studies in Theology and Religion). She teaches and publishes in the field of Eastern Christian Studies, with a special interest in the Syriac tradition from 1500 onwards. Among her recent publications are a monograph, Scribes and Scriptures: The Church of the East in the Eastern Ottoman Provinces (1500–1850) (2015), and an edited volume (with S. R. Goldstein-Sabbah), Modernity, Minority, and the Public Sphere: Jews and Christians in the Middle East (2016). Michael Penn is Teresa Hihn Moore Professor of Religious Studies and Classics at Stanford University. He researches Syriac Christian reactions to Islam, computer-assisted paleography, and Syriac manuscript culture. Penn’s first book, Kissing Christians: Ritual and Community in the Late Ancient Church, was published in 2005 by the University of Pennsylvania Press. In 2015 he published two books on Christian-Muslim relations: Envisioning Islam: Syriac Christians in the Early Muslim World and When Christians First Met Muslims: A Source Book of the Earliest Syriac Writings on Islam.
István Perczel is professor of Byzantine and Eastern Christian studies in the Department of Medieval Studies at Central European University, Hungary. He has researched extensively on Neoplatonist and Patristic philosophy (especially the pseudo-Dionysian corpus) and on Malayalam texts. In 2000 he initiated the digitisation and cataloguing of the manuscript collections of the Saint Thomas Christians of Kerala, finally allowing scholars to write the history of these Indian communities. His publications include a co-edited volume, The Eucharist in Theology and Philosophy (2005); The Nomocanon of Metropolitan Abdisho of Nisibis: A Facsimile Edition of MS 64 from the Collection of the Church of the East in Thrissur (2009); The Hymns of Divine Loves of Symeon the New Theologian (in Hungarian: 2010); a co-edited volume, Christianity in Asia: Sacred Art and Visual Splendour (2016); a series of studies on the pseudo-Dionysian corpus, Origenism, and Neoplatonism and also on Indian Christianity and the Indian manuscript collections, including ‘Classical Syriac as a Modern lingua franca in South India between 1600 and 2006’ (2009); and ‘Garshuni Malayalam: A Witness to an Early Stage of Indian Christian Literature’ (2014). The material digitised in India will be published online by Hill Museum and Manuscript Library, Collegeville, USA, and the catalogues are forthcoming.
Adrian Pirtea has recently completed his PhD in Byzantine Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, with a thesis on the ‘spiritual senses’ in Greek and Syriac Christian mysticism. His main research interests include Classical Byzantine and Syriac literature, Oriental Christian mysticism, philosophy and science in Late Antiquity, Gnosis, and Manichaeism. He has held research fellowships at the Warburg Institute (London) and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (Paris), and has published several articles in the field of Patristic Studies. Ute Possekel is Lecturer in Syriac at Harvard Divinity School, USA. She is author of Evidence of Greek Philosophical Concepts in the Writings of Ephrem the Syrian (1999) and has published articles on diverse topics in Syriac Christianity, especially on Ephrem and Bardaiṣan. She is currently editing the treatises of Thomas of Edessa. Jeanne-Nicole Mellon Saint-Laurent is Assistant Professor of Historical Theology at Marquette University, USA. She is the author of Missionary Stories and the Formation of the Syriac Churches (2015) and, with Kyle Smith, of The History of Mar Behnam and Sarah: Martyrdom and Monasticism in Medieval Iraq (2018). She is also a co-editor of Qadishe and the Bibliotheca Hagiographica Syriaca Electronica, two databases on Syriac saints and their lives (www.syriaca.org/q/index.html; www.syriaca.org/bhse/index.html). Michal Bar-Asher Siegal holds the Rosen Family Career Development Chair in Judaic Studies at The Goldstein-Goren Department of Jewish Thought, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. A scholar of rabbinic Judaism, her work focuses on aspects of Jewish-Christian interactions in the ancient world. Her book Early Christian Monastic Literature and the Babylonian Talmud (2013) compared Christian monastic and rabbinic sources. She has also published on topics such as the Syriac version of Ben Sira, the Mishnah, and tannaitic Midrashim. Her forthcoming book will focus on narratives of heretics in the Babylonian Talmud. Hidemi Takahashi is Professor at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo, Japan. He is a researcher in Syriac Studies. His publications include Aristotelian Meteorology in Syriac: Barhebraeus, Butyrum sapientiae, Books of Mineralogy and Meteorology (2003), and Barhebraeus: A Bio-Bibliography (2005), in addition to papers on the history of Christianity in China. David G. K. Taylor is Associate Professor of Aramaic and Syriac in the Oriental Institute at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Wolfson College, UK. His primary research interests are in Syriac language, history, and literature; Aramaic dialects; and multilingualism and diglossia in the Late Antique Near East. He is currently working on new editions of the Old Syriac Gospels, and is completing the first two volumes of an edition of the sixth-century Syriac psalm commentary of Daniel of Ṣalaḥ. Fr Baby Varghese is Professor of Syriac and Liturgical Studies at the Orthodox Theological Seminary, Kottayam, India, and Saint Ephrem’s Ecumenical Research Institute (SEERI). He is also Priest of the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church, Kottayam. He researches in the fields of the History and Theology of Syriac Liturgy and the History and Christology of the Syriac Churches. His publications include Les onctions baptismales dans la tradition syrienne (1989), West Syrian Liturgical Theology (2004), The Anaphora of St James: History and Theology (2016), together with numerous translations of Syriac liturgical commentaries by Moses Bar Kepha, Dionysius Bar Salibi, John of Dara, patriarch John I, George Bishop of the Arabs, and the Nomocanon of Bar Hebraeus. John W. Watt is Honorary Research Fellow at Cardiff University, UK. His research interests in Syriac literature cover both its Late Antique and later phases, with a particular focus on the impact of Greek culture in the Syriac sphere. Among his publications are the commentary on Aristotle’s Rhetoric by Bar Hebraeus, published as Aristotelian Rhetoric in Syriac: Bar Hebraeus, Butyrum Sapientiae, Book of Rhetoric (2005), and, with Frank Trombley, The Chronicle of Pseudo-Joshua the Stylite (2000). Several of his articles are collected in his Rhetoric and Philosophy from Greek into Syriac (2010).
Dorothea Weltecke is Professor of Mediaeval History II, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, Germany, having previously held the Chair in Mediaeval History at the University of Konstanz. She specialises in the comparative history of religious diversity, the history of the Latin and Oriental churches, and the history of religious deviance. Her main publications include Die «Beschreibung der Zeiten» von Mōr Michael dem Großen (1126– 1199) (Peeters, 2003), «Der Narr spricht: Es ist kein Gott». Atheismus, Unglauben und Glaubenszweifel vom 12. Jahrhundert bis zur Neuzeit (Campus-Verlag 2010), Geschichte, Theologie, Liturgie und Gegenwartslage der syrischen Kirchen (ed., Harrassowitz, 2012), and (with Johannes Pahlitzsch and Michael Marx) Östliches Christentum in Geschichte und Gegenwart (ed., special issue of Der Islam, 2011). Robert J. Wilkinson was formerly Research Fellow of Wesley College, Bristol, and visiting Fellow in Theology at Bristol University, both UK. He specialises in early European Syriac studies. In addition to several articles, in 2007 he published a pair of monographs in this field: Orientalism, Aramaic and Kabbalah in the Catholic Reformation and The Kabbalistic Scholars of the Antwerp Polyglot Bible. His most recent monograph, Tetragrammaton: Western Christians and the Hebrew Name of God, was published in 2015.
David Wilmshurst was Academic Editor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong from 2008 until his retirement in July 2016. He is an ecclesiastical historian, with a particular interest in the history of the Church of the East. His main publications include The Ecclesiastical Organisation of the Church of the East, 1318–1913 (2000), The Martyred Church: A History of the Church of the East (2011), and Bar Hebraeus, The Ecclesiastical History: An English Translation (2016).
Dietmar W. Winkler is Professor of Patristic Studies and Ecclesiastical History and the Director of the Center for the Study of the Christian East at the University of Salzburg, Austria. He specialises in the heritage of the Christian East which includes the Greek, Syriac, Coptic, and Armenian traditions and combines knowledge of patristic texts with a close familiarity with current ecumenical thinking and developments in dialogue. Among others, he is the editor of the Pro Oriente Studies in Syriac Tradition. His latest books include Winds of Jingjiao. Studies in Syriac Christianity in China and Central Asia (ed. with Li Tang, 2016) and (ed.) Syrische Studien (2016).
Philip Wood is Associate Professor at the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations, Aga Khan University, UK, where he teaches History. He researches Christians in the Middle East c. 400–900. He has written two monographs: We Have No King but Christ. Christian political thought on the eve of the Arab conquests (c. 400–585) (2010) and The Chronicle of Seert. Christian Historical Imagination in Late Antique Iraq (2013). He is currently working on a third monograph on the Jazira in the first Abbasid century (c. 750–850). Helen Younansardaroud (PhD Semitic and Arabic Studies, Freie Universität Berlin), was formerly Lecturer in Classical Syriac, and has authored (with Albrecht Berger) Die griechische Vita des Hlg. Mamas von Kaisereia und ihre syrischen Versionen (2003) and Der neuostaramäische Dialekt von Särdä:rïd (2001).
INTRODUCTION
From its origins in Mesopotamia to its continuing development among a worldwide diaspora, the history of Syriac cultures and literature stretches widely across time and space. Conveying a range of nearly two millennia with its diversity of cultural contact from Asia to Africa to Europe and beyond is an inescapable challenge for geographers of Syriac cultures. It is impossible for traditional printed maps to exhaustively represent this extent. At the very least, one would need an entire atlas. Accordingly, the aim of these maps is more modest. Their primary purpose is to illustrate geographically the themes of this book, reflecting in a small way the current state of research on the historical geography of Syriac cultures. By extension, these maps offer a general, but abbreviated, cartography of Syriac cultures and their geographic contexts. As an aid for readers, this introduction explains the design principles of these maps and offers references for additional resources.
The study of Syriac cultural geography is only in its beginning stages. It is hoped that the maps will spur further research. In particular, they are being released under an open license that will allow them to be widely used and re-published. Selections of sites for inclusion in these maps has been guided foremost by the visualisation needs of individual chapters rather than by an attempt to be comprehensive or representative of the most important locations. The editor, David Michelson, and the cartographer, Ian Mladjov, solicited suggestions from all chapter authors and prepared a series of maps to collectively illustrate the themes of the volume as a whole. The majority of the maps are diachronic. Not all of the places listed together on any single map were in existence or of historical significance at the same time. The decision to reflect multiple eras on the same map was necessitated by the wide chronological coverage of the chapters in this book and the space constraints of the printed volume. For reasons of simplicity, all of the maps depict modern topography including the present courses of rivers and deltas rather than historically changing river beds and coastlines. This diachronic design helps the reader to situate historical locations relative to modern geography. Students and researchers in search of greater detail than these maps can provide are referred to a number of resources for historical geography which have been used in preparing the maps. The most recent and comprehensive source for Syriac geography is The Syriac Gazetteer (Carlson and Michelson 2014).
The Syriac Gazetteer is an online reference work continually updated by Syriaca.org and a part of the burgeoning scholarly field of digitally ‘enriched gazetteers’ (Berman, Mostern, and Southall 2016: 5). The editor and cartographer are especially grateful to Thomas A. Carlson, co-editor of The Syriac Gazetteer, for his essential and varied assistance in the production of the maps. A number of other digital gazetteers were also indispensable in the creation of the maps. Whenever possible, coordinates for plotting locations were derived from Pleiades: A Gazetteer of Past Places (Bagnall et al. 2017), the iDAI.gazetteer (Deutsches Archäologisches Institut 2017), and the Digital Atlas of the Roman Empire (Åhlfeldt 2015–17). The combined ‘linked open geodata’ of these gazetteers are accessible through the Pelagios Commons project’s Peripleo search tool (Pelagios Commons 2017; Simon, Isaksen, Barker, and de Soto Cañamares 2016). These online resources represent the rebirth or resurgence of the genre of ‘gazetteer’ as an essential geographic research tool for ancient and mediaeval historians in the digital age (Berman et al. 2016, 23). The print maps published here have been prepared following the emerging standards for digital scholarship in historical geography. In particular, all place labels on the maps have been keyed to the unique identification numbers assigned to individual places in The Syriac Gazetteer. A place name index is provided on pages 824 ff. This index also contains cross-references to the corresponding numeric identifiers (e.g. Edessa is identified as ‘http://syriaca.org/place/78’).
These identifiers not only allow for disambiguation of homonyms but also direct the reader to further information online through The Syriac Gazetteer and Peripleo. In technical terms, these unique identifiers are formatted as URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers). Following best practice for publishing linked data on the internet, the URIs of The Syriac Gazetteer also function as URLs (Uniform Resource Locators), or in common parlance ‘web addresses’. By following these URLs, readers may find coordinates, additional name forms (including in Syriac script), and further bibliography related to each place. In short, readers are encouraged to use the maps published in this book in close conjunction with the index since the URIs link to a number of other relevant scholarly publications.
The design and compilation of these maps has also relied heavily on the materials which served as the basis of The Syriac Gazetteer, especially the Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage (GEDSH) and the maps created for it by the Ancient World Mapping Center at the University of North Carolina (Brock, Butts, Kiraz, and Van Rompay 2011: 471–80). The sources used for the GEDSH maps have also been consulted, especially the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World (Talbert 2000) and the relevant volumes of the Tübinger Atlas des Vorderen Orients (TAVO) (Sonderforschungsbereich 19 “Tübinger Atlas des Vorderen Orients” 1977–94). These resources were compared with the recently published volume on Syria of the Tabula Imperii Byzantini (TIB) (Todt and Vest 2015). In constructing new maps, several other regionally focused geographic and cultural reference works were consulted including the work of T. A. Sinclair on Eastern Turkey (1987), the Encyclopaedia Iranica, the Encyclopedia of Islam (EI2 and EI3), and the Digital Dictionary of Buddhism (Kotyk 2017). A number of classic publications in Syriac studies also provided essential material for the maps, especially the works of the Syrian Orthodox patriarch I. A. Barsoum (2003), Ernst Honigmann (1951), and J. M. Fiey (see most notably 1965, 1993). These works remain invaluable for the study of Syriac cultural geography, but the exponential growth of Syriac studies in the last two decades now necessitates that they be used only in tandem with more recent literature (Brock 1995). For the Church of the East in Mesopotamia and the Iranian plateau, the maps published here rely heavily on the work of David Wilmshurst (2000, 2016) and Florence Jullien (2008, 2015) and also benefitted from brief personal communications with those same scholars. The map of Neo-Aramaic dialects (see also page 267) was based on the personal direction of Geoffrey Khan and drew in part upon the dialect database he has prepared (Khan 2017).
The above resources notwithstanding, it should be noted that the study of Syriac historical geography is very much in its infancy. For some regions (such as the Arabian peninsula and Central Asia), the maps published here are among only a handful of maps ever printed which focus on the history of Syriac cultures and literature in those areas. Because the historical geography of Syriac Christianity in Arabia and the Gulf has only begun to receive scholarly attention, the summary scholarship of R. A. Carter offered a useful starting point (Carter 2008; see the literature review in Bonnéric 2015). Because of the lack of previous scholarship and the number of languages involved, the maps of Central Asia, East Asia, and India would not have been possible without the extensive suggestions, revisions, and editorial assistance of Thomas A. Carlson, Mark Dickens, Daniel King, István Perczel, and Hidemi Takahashi (all errors of course remain the responsibility of the editor). In addition, recent publications by Li Tang and D. W. Winkler (Tang 2002; Tang and Winkler 2009, 2013), Takahashi (2013), William Tabbernee (2014), T. H. F. Halbertsma (2015), Dickens (2015), P. G. Borbone and P. Marsone (2015) were consulted as well as the administrative atlas of Kerala published as a result of the 2011 census of India (Gopala Menon, Singh, Rastogi, and Chandramouli 2012). Many of these Asian historical locations remain poorly documented in the archaeological literature. When coordinates could not be found in scholarly sources, preliminary data was collected from ‘crowd-sourced’ databases such as Geonames, Wikimapia, and Wikipedia. In all of these cases, however, the coordinates were also visually verified or corrected by the editor or the cartographer based on satellite imagery. For these difficult-to-plot locations, the editor is particularly grateful to the cartographer, Ian Mladjov, for his skill and determination in ensuring accuracy of the locations. As noted above, the history of Syriac cultures is marked by the breadth of its contact with other cultures and languages, e.g. Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Latin, Malayalam, Mongol, Persian, Turkic, and more. One challenge in the preparation of these maps has been to achieve some limited uniformity in labels across so many languages. In general, the transliteration guidelines of the Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary have been used (GEDSH 2011: x).
These guidelines were also adopted by The Syriac Gazetteer and thus are now the prevailing standard for Syriac place names. To facilitate usage, names with widely accepted English spellings, or having a form commonly used in Syriac scholarship, have been retained as exceptions to the rules (e.g. Edessa, Dailam, or Navekath). Otherwise, labels derived from Syriac have been Romanised according to the transliteration system of GEDSH, which for proper nouns requires representing š with sh and not marking long vowels. Gemination is generally not marked. In labelling places, preference has been given to Syriac transliteration rather than Arabic or Persian (thus Dinawar not Dīnavar). For Romanisation of other Middle Eastern languages, the transliterations system of the International Journal of Middle East Studies has largely been followed. Here again, deference has been shown to English usage and common forms, hence some names have been vocalised with Persian rather than Arabic vocalisation (e.g. Hormuz). Chinese names have been rendered using the pinyin system but without tone marks. Modern place names in India are listed as they appear in the official atlas of the 2011 census (Gopala Menon et al. 2012). In some cases, deference to popular spelling in the Romanisation of Malayalam has meant varying usage of u/oo, y/j, etc. In several cases, exceptions or inconsistencies may also be found on account of the particular needs of the chapter concerned or requests made by authors in this volume. In particular, the Neo-Aramaic labels on the ‘Map of Neo-Aramaic Usage’ reflect the transliteration style found in the corresponding chapter rather than following the above systems. Labels for physical features are marked in italics (e.g. Tigris R.). Labels for regions have been set in capital letters (e.g. in full capitalisation: BETH QAṬRAYE).
These labels include provinces, states, and ecclesiastical jurisdictions, such as dioceses where boundaries may have fluctuated over time. When a diocese shares a name with a city, however, only the city and not the region is listed (e.g. Beth Lapaṭ). For simplicity, types of settlements are not differentiated (e.g. villages, cities, monasteries). Uncertain places are indicated either by a hollow point (for uncertain coordinates) or by a question mark appended to the label (for uncertain names). When a place has been known by widely varying names, alternate names may be listed separated by ‘/’ (e.g. Martyropolis/Maipherqaṭ). The ‘/’ is also used in a few cases to attach the name of a containing region in order to clarify homonymous settlements (e.g. Yinchuan/ Xingqing/Ningxia). To conclude, it should be noted that monographs and articles on Syriac topics have often lacked maps due to the scarcity of available maps. While the maps published here are only a first step towards correcting this scholarly gap, these maps have been expressly designed to address this problem through the use of open-access licenses. All of the maps published in this volume are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. They may be freely re-used, reproduced, and re-published with proper attribution to the map editor (David Michelson) and the cartographer (Ian Mladjov) along with the publication details of this volume.
In addition, high-resolution digital files of the maps will be permanently available for reuse through the digital repository of the Jean and Alexander Heard Library at Vanderbilt University. Finally, the editor would like to note that credit for the creation of these maps is shared with the cartographer, Ian Mladjov of Bowling Green State University, who not only plotted the locations and labels but also researched unidentified locations and suggested the inclusion of many relevant places. His cartography was accomplished using Global Mapper software to plot the raw data and projection, and using CorelDraw for the final design. Once the maps were completed, additional proofreading was undertaken by Stephanie Fulbright, Julia Liden, Elizabeth LeFavour, Will Potter, and Charlotte Lew of Vanderbilt University, to whom the editor is also extremely grateful.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق