In 1964, when Anthony Bryer and I both started teaching at Birmingham University, Syriac studies were generally considered to be little more than an appendage to Biblical Studies, and any idea of a journal or a conference specifically focused on them was unthinkable. Fifty years later the situation has changed dramatically for the better, although the number of universities (at least in Britain) where Syriac is taught has lamentably decreased.
Conferences devoted to Syriac studies are now regularly held in North America, several Europe countries, Lebanon and Kerala (India); furthermore there is a new appreciation among historians of the Late Roman Empire, Byzantium and the early Arab world that Syriac sources can sometimes offer important material. Moreover, there has also been an increasing awareness of the interconnected character of the world of Late Antiquity, brought about above all by Peter Brown's The World of Late Antiquity and other works. Two further books, in particular, could be singled out as having contributed to these shifts in perception. Firstly, Robert Murray's Symbols of Church and Kingdom (1975)Footnote 1 has led to a much better appreciation of early Syriac literature in its own right, and has brought about a revival of interest in the great fourth-century poet, Ephrem, and some of his successors, notably Jacob of Serugh, together with the possibility that their works may have been known to Romanos (who originated from Emesa in Syria). The second book is Patricia Crone and Michael Cook's Hagarism, whose stimulating and controversial character has had the (no doubt desired) effect of introducing into the study of early Islamic history the evidence of (often contemporary) non-Muslim sources – among which those in Syriac are prominent.
In this rapid survey of progress made in Syriac studies, I concentrate on the following select areas:Footnote 2 history, hagiography, philosophy and medicine, and law. To conclude, a brief glance at a few of the tools now available is given.
History
Until 1985, when Paul Alexander's translation of the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius was posthumously published, little attention had been paid to the Syriac original of this influential work.Footnote 3 Alexander and others had dated it to the mid seventh century, but it can now be firmly placed in the reign of Abdulmalik, c. 692, thanks to a series of studies, followed by an edition of the Syriac, by Gerrit Reinink.Footnote 4 Reinink had earlier re-edited an earlier Syriac apocalyptic text, a poem on the Alexander legend which must date from the reign of Heraclius.Footnote 5
A number of important Syriac chronicles covering the end of the fourth to the late eighth century are now available in well-annotated English translations in the Liverpool series Translated Texts for Historians. Earliest in coverage is the remarkable local Edessene chronicle dealing with the years 494–506, thus including the years of the Byzantine-Persian war of 502–6.Footnote 6 Written by a contemporary and generally known to scholars as the Chronicle of Pseudo-Joshua the Stylite, it is incorporated into the important late-eighth century Chronicle of Zuqnin, where it constitutes the second part. The third part, based on a lost section of John of Ephesus’ Ecclesiastical History, covers the years 489–578; two translations of this were published almost simultaneously, one by Witold Witakowski in the Liverpool series,Footnote 7 and the other by Amir Harrak as part of a more extensive translation, covering the fourth part as well which is especially detailed for the final four decades up to the author's time of writing (775/6).Footnote 8 Another important sixth-century source, the Chronicle of Pseudo-Zacharias Rhetor, is also now available in an English translation, excellently annotated by Geoffrey Greatrex; Footnote 9 the work, which was compiled in 569 and is preserved in a manuscript dated to c.600, draws in part on a translation of Zacharias Rhetor's Ecclesiastical History. Two further volumes of the Translated Texts for Historians contain reconstructed texts based on multiple sources; in his The Seventh Century in the West-Syrian Chronicles Footnote 10 Andrew Palmer, besides translating some shorter chronicles, pieced together from material common to the later Chronicles of Patriarch Michael and the Edessene chronicler ad annum 1234, parts of the lost early ninth-century chronicle by Patriarch Dionysius of Tel-Mahre. The same two later Syriac chronicles, together with the Greek Theophanes and the Arabic Agapius, provide the basis for Robert Hoyland's reconstruction of another important lost Syriac chronicle, that of Theophilus of Edessa, covering from the 590s to 767.Footnote 11 One further volume of the same series, by Adam Becker, contains translations of two East Syriac works connected with the famous School of Nisibis.Footnote 12
Several chronicles have been the subject of good critical monographs, notably the Chronicle of ZuqninFootnote 13 and that of Patriarch Michael;Footnote 14 a major study of the Syriac historiographical tradition, by Muriel Debié, has now been published.Footnote 15
At the time when Hagarism was published, the very miscellaneous Syriac sources of interest for seventh-century history were little known except to specialists. An initial attempt to isolate and bring these together was made in the second number of BMGS;Footnote 16 subsequently much more detailed and comprehensive surveys have appeared in Robert Hoyland's invaluable Seeing Islam as Others See it,Footnote 17 and (specifically on the Syriac materials) in the Appendix to Muriel Debié’s L’Écriture de l'histoire en Syriaque.
A history of the Syriac tradition as a whole remains to be written, and modern historical writing has either been confined to one or other Syriac Church, or to specific periods and topics. It is the Church of the East which has received most serious attention, with Christoph Baumer's The Church of the East Footnote 18 and David Wilmshurst's well-informed The Martyred Church.Footnote 19 For the period after c.1300, when there are virtually no narrative historical sources, Wilmshurst built up his account with the help of his earlier detailed study, The Ecclesiastical Organisation of the Church of the East,Footnote 20 based on the evidence drawn from some two thousand colophons in dated manuscripts. This earlier work was dedicated to the memory of Jean-Maurice Fiey OP, who had lived most of his life in Iraq and whose three-volume topographical history of the Syriac Christian communities in Iraq, entitled Assyrie chrétienne,Footnote 21 will long continue to be an invaluable resource. He followed this up with monographs on the East Syriac diocese of Nisibis and on the Christian communities of Baghdad under the Abbasids,Footnote 22 as well as several other smaller studies. Towards the end of his life Fiey also brought up to date, in a summary but most useful fashion, his fellow Dominican Michel le Quien's Oriens Christianus of 1740.Footnote 23
Recent years have seen renewed interest in the presence of the Church of the East in China, thanks in part to the discovery at Luoyang in 2006 of a second stele (in Chinese) from the Tang Dynasty, alongside the famous Xi'an stele of 781, and to the publication of a catalogue of the Syriac fragments, largely liturgical, from Turfan, now in Berlin.Footnote 24 Dating from the time of the Yuan Dynasty, the engaging Syriac History of Mar Yahballaha and Rabban Sauma has now received an excellent commentary by Pier Giorgio Borbone, together with French and Italian translations.Footnote 25 A welcome development has been a series of recent conferences in Salzburg which has brought about a welcome cooperation between Western and Chinese scholars in connection with some of this material.
For the West Syriac Churches, the most noteworthy studies have been devoted to the complex periods of their early emergence as separate Churches. For the Syrian Orthodox, Volker Menze's Justinian and the Making of the Syrian Orthodox Church Footnote 26 offers an illuminating account of the construction of a Syrian Orthodox identity. Many of the relevant sources for this period are in Greek but survive only in Syriac, and a notable study of the dossier of one of the main figures involved, Severus of Antioch, has been made by Fréderic Alpi.Footnote 27 The publication of some Syriac texts which turn out to be of Monothelete provenance has led to a re-examination of the mysterious emergence of the Maronite Church; this new material has now been put to good use in Harald Suermann's Die Grundungsgeschichte der Maronitischen Kirche.Footnote 28
For the later history of the Syrian Orthodox Church only a few monographs have appeared, most notably W. Hage's Die syrisch-jakobitische Kirche in frühislamischer Zeit nach orientalischen Quellen,Footnote 29 although in recent years there has been renewed interest in the Syriac ‘renaissance’ of the twelfth (alongside others!) and adjacent centuries, as witnessed by a collective volume entitled The Syriac Renaissance.Footnote 30 An attempt at haute vulgarisation, in the form of an illustrated narrative survey of the entire Syriac tradition, is offered in the three-volume The Hidden Pearl: The Syrian Orthodox Church and its Ancient Aramaic Heritage.Footnote 31
Monastic history, both East and West Syriac, has also received a considerable amount of attention. In the Church of the East the reforms of Abraham of Kashkar in the sixth century have been the subject to two good studies,Footnote 32 while the West Syriac developments are charted by Philippe Escolan in his Le monachisme syrien du IVe au VIIe siècle.Footnote 33 Two important monographs devoted to specific areas and topics are Andrew Palmer's Monk and Mason on the Tigris Frontier,Footnote 34 dealing with the early history of the still functioning Monastery of St Gabriel, and Cornelia Horn's Asceticism and Christological Controversy in Fifth-Century Palestine.Footnote 35
Hagiography
Although Paul Bedjan's seven-volume Acta Martyrum et Sanctorum provided a large repertoire of texts, many more Lives of Saints and Martyrs still remain to be edited. Among new Lives published within the last half century, two might be mentioned here, seeing that they have given rise to controversy;Footnote 36 these concern the Himyarite Martyrs and Maximus the Confessor. In 1971 Irfan Shahid published a second (anonymous) Letter reporting on the martyrdom of several Christians in Najran.Footnote 37 Clearly related somehow to the Letter of Simeon of Beth Arsham, published long ago by Guidi, Shahid regarded it as an earlier, and more fully informed, account, also by Simeon, further claiming that Simeon was also the author of the anonymous Book of the Himyarites. The interrelationship of the various documents concerning the martyrs of Najran, in several languages, along with their historical interpretation, is exceedingly complicated, and Shahid's reconstruction of their relationship has not been generally accepted, in particular his claim that Simeon was also the author of the Book of the Himyarites.Footnote 38
The hostile Life of Maximus the Confessor, of monothelete provenance, provides Maximus with a Palestinian, and not Constantinopolitan, origin and background.Footnote 39 At first most Byzantinists rejected the evidence of this intriguing and potentially important new source, but more recently there has been a wider acceptance that a Palestinian background to Maximus does indeed makes good sense.Footnote 40
Among his many publications René Draguet provided detailed editions of the early Syriac translations of two well-known Greek hagiographical texts, Palladius’ Lausiac History and Athanasius’ Life of Antony.Footnote 41 Although his view that the Syriac Life of Antony went back to a Copticizing Greek text (and so, not by Athanasius) has been refuted, his similar hypothesis for the earliest text form of the Lausiac History (with a different addressee) could be more plausible.Footnote 42 One further recently edited Life translated into Syriac, that of Makarios, is particularly remarkable, since its editor, Satoshi Toda,Footnote 43 has shown convincingly that it was translated, not from Greek, but from Coptic.
As with the historical texts, an important task has been to make Syriac hagiographies more accessible through translation. In the case of the Persian martyr Qardag, a translation appears as an appendix to a significant study by Joel Walker.Footnote 44 In other cases a fair amount of annotation may be provided,Footnote 45 or only minimal.Footnote 46 A rare literary study, concerning the two Syriac martyr acts of Simeon bar Sabba‘e (under Shapur II) and their relationship with the Greek account in Sozomen, and with other Syriac martyrdoms, was contributed by Gernot Wiessner,Footnote 47 who later turned his attention to the village churches of Tur ‘Abdin in south-east Turkey.
Among Fiey's many contributions to Syriac studies is his posthumous Les saints syriaques.Footnote 48 This listing is confined to saints of Syriac origin, and so does not include a large number of those who feature in the various calendars, and whose Lives are also available in Syriac. A full inventory of these, in the form of a Bibliotheca Hagiographica Syriaca, bringing Paul Peeters’ Bibliotheca Hagiographica Orientalis (1914) up to date, has been plannedFootnote 49 and partially executed, but never completed, since the funding ran out. Plans, however, to finish the work are under way in the United States.
Philosophy and Medicine
A certain number of Greek texts of philosophical character were translated into Syriac and/or commented upon. Earliest were a group of miscellaneous of works of ethical interest, in several cases transmitted in monastic circles. Considerably more important and influential were translations of, and commentaries on, certain works studied in the educational system of late Antique Alexandria, in particular Aristotle's Organon, together with Porphyry's Eisagoge. Three names prominent in this activity were Sergius of Resh‘aina (died 536), Paul the Persian, and a certain Probus (almost certainly sixth century). Translating (and revising earlier translations) continued into the seventh century in the West Syriac tradition, and then in the late eighth and ninth centuries numerous translations from Greek into Syriac, and thence from Syriac into Arabic were undertaken in the course of the Abbasid ‘translation movement’.
Although quite a lot of editing and study of philosophical texts had been done in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it is only fairly recently that this has been taken up again, above all by Henri Hugonnard-Roche, who has greatly clarified and advanced the subject in a whole series of articles, some of the most important of which are included in his collection La logique d'Aristote: du grec au syriaque.Footnote 50 Among the contents are several studies concerning the work of Sergius of Resh‘aina, in particular on his Introduction to Aristotle and to the Categories, and his Commentary on the Categories. Surprisingly, in view of their interest, it is only very recently that the former has been edited, translated and introduced in a Swedish doctoral thesis,Footnote 51 while an edition of the latter is finally in the course of preparation. Other recent editions for the first time are of the sixth-century versions of Porphyry's Eisagoge Footnote 52 and of the Categories,Footnote 53 and of an abbreviated translation by Sergius of Alexander of Aphrodisias’ On the Principles of the Universe.Footnote 54
A Letter by a certain Paul the Persian on Aristotelian philosophy, addressed to Khusrau I, has long been known, and several modern studies on it have been devoted to it, among them a monograph by Javier Teixidor.Footnote 55 A manuscript of a second Letter, on topics in the de Interpretatione, had been known for some time, but now Hugonnard-Roche has finally published it and indicated its interest.Footnote 56 Another author to whom he has turned his attention is Severus Sebokht, one of the most learned Syriac authors of the mid-seventh century and author of two Letters on Aristotelian logic, one of which he has edited.Footnote 57 Severus Sebokht also had an interest in astronomy, and wrote the first surviving treatise on the astrolabe; though much of this had been published long ago, an important missing section has turned up and has been published by Émilie Villey.Footnote 58
Tracing the trajectory of philosophical learning from Late Antique Alexandria to Abbasid Baghdad has long been a concern of scholars, only a few of whom have primarily been Syriacists. One Syriac scholar who has written illuminatingly on the topic is John Watt, many of whose relevant articles have been republished under the title Rhetoric and Philosophy from Greek into Syriac;Footnote 59 Watt was also the editor of the Fifth Book of Rhetoric (on poetry) by the ninth-century Anton of Tagrit.Footnote 60
The magnum opus of the thirteenth-century polymath Barhebraeus (Bar ‘Ebroyo), in the form of a commentary on works of Aristotle, entitled ‘The Cream of Science’, has never yet been published in full. Such a task is formidable, requiring skills in many different fields; nevertheless in recent years three Books of it have been edited and translated, that on Ethics, Economy and Politics by N. P. Joosse,Footnote 61 that on Minerals and Meteorology by Hidemi Takahashi,Footnote 62 and that on Rhetoric by John Watt.Footnote 63 Of other works by Bar ‘Ebroyo, a beginning has been made by Herman Teule of a critical edition of his Ethicon.Footnote 64 In the absence of full editions of this and several other works by this author, working texts published by the late Syrian Orthodox bishop of Central Europe, Julius Çiçek, can prove very serviceable.
Finally, it should be emphasized that many Syriac texts of philosophical interest, especially by authors of the ninth to thirteenth centuries, still remain to be edited and studied, and indeed much also remains to be done with texts already published.
It was evidently Sergius of Resh‘aina who was also the first person to translate Greek medical texts, and Hunayn ibn Ishaq, one of the greatest translators of the ‘translation movement’, indicated, in his list of Syriac translations of Galen,Footnote 65 quite a number done by Sergius; in common with the fate of many other medical texts in Syriac, only a few of these survive, though evidence of more is now gradually turning up in palimpsests, thanks to technological advances in imaging undertexts. Little known manuscripts in some Middle Eastern libraries may well also add to the small corpus of surviving texts; thus a Syriac translation of a work by the sixth-century iatrosophist Gessius has been identified by Gregory Kessel. The projected Corpus Medicorum Syriacorum, announced by Rainer Degen, has unfortunately not come to fruition, owing to Degen's death.Footnote 66
Law
As far as non-Syriacists are concerned, Syriac legal texts are of potential interest for their relationship to Greek and Roman law, on the one hand, or to Islamic law (and Sasanian) on the other. By far the most important Syriac legal text for the study of Late Antiquity is the so-called ‘Syro-Roman Law Book’, preserved in an exceptionally early manuscript (possibly fifth century). First published in 1880, it has received attention from a considerable number of historians of Roman Law over the years. Right at the beginning of our period it was the subject of a monograph by Walter Selb, and over the subsequent years he, together with Hubert Kaufhold, prepared a magnificent new edition, not only of the original text, but also of the various reworkings of it.Footnote 67 Selb also discovered a related text which he then published under the title Sententiae Syriacae.Footnote 68 Among his other publications are two valuable guides to Syriac canon law texts, one devoted to East Syriac texts, and the other to West Syriac ones.Footnote 69 Hubert Kaufhold, his co-editor for the Syro-Roman Law Book, has edited a number of further legal collections, notably those by John bar Abgare and Gabriel of Bosra.Footnote 70 The former is of particular interest in view of the influence it shows of Islamic law, while the latter preserves what seem to be the rules of a guild, perhaps belonging to the late Sasanian period.Footnote 71 Kaufhold also provided the Introduction to the facsimile edition of the earliest manuscript of the Nomocanon of ‘Abdisho‘ of Nisibis, the main canonist of the Church of the East.Footnote 72
For the West Syriac tradition of Canon Law Arthur Vööbus has provided an invaluable guide in his Syrische Kanonessammlungen,Footnote 73 together with his edition of an extensive collection of texts in a manuscript of 1204.Footnote 74
Tools and reference works
In recent years the earlier dearth of reference works specifically devoted to Syriac is being gradually remedied. Thanks to the initiative of George Kiraz, founder of the Gorgias Press, many new projects have been undertaken, the most important being The Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage.Footnote 75 Bibliographies of Syriac studies as a whole are available,Footnote 76 and in some cases of particular authors or topics;Footnote 77 Two journals specifically devoted to Syriac matters now exist, Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies, and the Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies; there are also several dedicated monograph series, notably Études syriaques and Monographs of the Peshitta Institute. It is indicative of the progress of Syriac scholarship that Alain Desreumaux's useful Répertoire des bibliothèques et des catalogues de manuscrits syriaques, published in 1991, is already in need of supplementation, subsequent catalogues of several important collections having appeared, notably those of Manchester, Paris, Deir al-Surian (Egypt), and of several Middle Eastern libraries (fortunately, some of these manuscripts have now been digitized by the Hill Museum Manuscript Library, Collegeville). Needless to say, there are now also many useful tools available on the Internet.Footnote 78
*
In the 1960s there was no contact between Syriac scholars in the West and those belonging to the various Syriac Churches. Happily this is no longer the case, and, to take just a single example, the present Chaldean Patriarch, Mar Louis Raphael Sako, is the author of the useful study Le rôle de la hiérarchie syriaque orientale dans les rapports diplomatiques entre la Perse et Byzance aux Ve-VIIe siècles.Footnote 79 Another excellent development is the active involvement today in Syriac studies of scholars from a far wider range of countries and backgrounds.Footnote 80
