hmmlorientalia Some remarks—often with photos!—about manuscripts and the languages, literature, scholarship, and history of Christian culture in the Middle East.
Below is a simple sentence from the work known as The Capture of Jerusalem by the Persians in 614, by Antiochos Strategos (bibliography here). The Georgian version was first published by N. Marr in 1909 based on two manuscripts (Jer. 33 and A-70), but another copy (Bodl. Geo. 1) was discovered thereafter, and so the text was again edited and translated (into Latin) by Gérard Garitte as CSCO 202-203, and the Arabic version (two recensions) later appeared with a translation by the same scholar’s pen as CSCO 340-341, 347-348. Before Garitte’s work, excerpts of the Georgian text were translated into English and German by Conybeare and Graf, respectively.
Here is today’s sentence (§ 5.15), with Garitte’s LT:
ვაჲ ბოროტისმოქმედთა და რომელნი მახლობელ მათა იყვნენ.
Vae malefactoribus et iis qui propinqui illis erunt!
The Georgian sentence offers no difficulties, the vocabulary and the syntax both being very simple (but note the difference in case between ბოროტისმოქმედთა and რომელნი). The only words that may not be as readily known to beginners are:
ბოროტისმოქმედი evil-doer (< ბოროტი and მოქმედება)
მახლობელი someone close, friend, relative
In English, we might loosely say, “Damn evil-doers and their ilk!”
This short example may be worth memorizing: you never know when you’ll need to say, “Damn the malefactors &c.” in Old Georgian!
Select Bibliography
Conybeare, F.C. “Antiochus Strategos’ Account of the Sack of Jerusalem in A.D. 614.” English Historical Review 25 (1910): 506-13. [Text here.]
Graf, Georg. ”Die Einnahme Jerusalem durch die Perser 614 nach dem Bericht eines Augenzeuger.” Das Heilige Land 67 (1923): 19-29.
I continue with cataloging the collection of the Chaldean Cathedral of Mardin. In a very important manuscript, some other texts of which I hope to publish in the near future, I’ve come across a short work counting the years from Adam up to the mid-fifteenth century. I’ve just uploaded a document with both the Syriac text and an English translation here, and below just the translation is given.
CCM 20, f. 235r
The text comes from an East Syriac manuscript dated to 1770 AG (= 1458/9 CE), Chaldean Cathedral of Mardin (CCM) 20, ff. 235r-235v (olim Diyarbakır 106). Judging from the text itself, it is original to this manuscript (i.e. it’s not a copy). In its details for the years, I have not compared it with other similar texts in Syriac or other languages, but I offer it with an English translation simply as an example of how a fifteenth-century Syriac scribe looked back very briefly across human history as he saw it. In addition, Syriac students might find it to be a short and easy text, especially to practice their knowledge of Syriac numbers.
Translation
With God’s help I note down an index of the sum of years from Adam to today, [the years] sometimes defined, indicating the years of the Greeks. Our Lord, help me!
1 From Adam to the Flood there are 2242 years.
2 From the Flood to the building of the Tower [of Babel], 700 years.
3 From the building of the Tower to the promise [made to] Abraham, 500 years.
4 From the promise [made to] Abraham to the exodus from Egypt, 430 years.
5 [From that time to the time] of Moses, Joshua b. Nun, 67 years.
6 [From that time to the time] the kings, 524 years.
7 [From that time to the time] of the Babylon[ian captivity], 70 years.
8 From the freedom from Babylon to the crucifixion of our savior, 480 years.
9 From the crucifixion of our savior until the Persians ruled, 81 years.
10 From [the time] that the Persians ruled [f. 235v] until the Arabs [ṭayyāyē] ruled, 505 years.
11 From [the time] that the Arabs ruled to the year in which this book was noted down, 862 years.
12 The sum of all the years is 6950 years.
13 The years that the Persians ruled are 550 years.
14 The blessed lady Mary received the good news [i.e. the Annunciation] in the year 303 of the Greeks.
15 Our savior was born in the year 304.
16 He was baptized by John in the year 334.
17 He suffered, died, arose, and ascended to heaven in the year 337 of the Greeks.
18 From the ascension of our Lord to the year in which this book noted down, 1433 years.
Ended is the reckoning and numbering of the years from Adam to the year in which we are.
A friend of mine shared this documentary from BBC Persian on Prof. Ehsan Yarshater (b. 1920) and the amazing work of the Encyclopaedia Iranica (online here). It’s in Persian, but English subtitles are available. Knowing the background and looking behind the scenes of major research projects such as this — or the CAD, for another example, volumes of which, like the Encyclopaedia Iranica, have also for some time been freely available online — is not an opportunity to be missed even by those remotely interested in whatever field the project concerns. In this case, the field is the full breadth of Persian history, languages, literatures, and connections with cultures across a long time period. We can be very grateful that the Encyclopaedia is freely accessible online, rather than hidden behind extortionate tomes in perhaps too distant libraries to multitudes of would-be readers, so interested researchers of all kinds have an ever fruitful resource at their fingertips. But even more than on the Encyclopaedia itself, we get to hear firsthand from a hard-working and experienced scholar. Yarshater mentions his studies many years ago with W.B. Henning and Mary Boyce. I always enjoy seeing scholars’ workspaces, and we have that here, too. We hear him using Persian proverbs and reciting some lines of poetry. In his voice and memories we see an inspiring gentleman. These twenty-five minutes, then, will make for worthy time to anyone interested in Persian culture and intellectual biography.
Saint Mark’s, Jerusalem, 135 is dated Feb 1901 AG (= 1590 CE) and contains a copy of Bar ʿEbrāyā’s Candelabrum of the Sanctuary (Mnārat Qudšē). It was copied at Dayr Al-Zaʿfarān by Behnām b. Šemʿon b. Ḥabbib of Arbo. From a much later note immediately after the colophon we learn that this scribe was made metropolitan of Jerusalem in 1901 AG and died in 1925 AG. Who wrote this later note? None other than Ignatius Afram Barsoum (1887-1957; see GEDSH, 62, including a photo). On the following page, there are three more notes by Barsoum, all autobiographical.
Notes by Barsoum at the end of SMMJ 135.
English’d:
In the year 1913 AD I visited the tomb of the savior and I spent two months in our monastery, that of Saint Mark, while I — the weakest of monks and the least of priests, Afram Barsoum of Mosul, alumnus of the Monastery Mār Ḥnānyā [Dayr Al-Zaʿfarān] — was using the old books [there]. Please pray for me!
In the year 1918 AD, on the 20th of Iyyār, I was elected metropolitan of the diocese of Syria, Damascus, Ḥoms, and their environs, and I was named Severius Afram.
In the year 1922 AD I again returned to Jerusalem and I took part in the consecration of the myron with Patriarch Eliya III on the 18th of Ēlul.
Notes like this are important for at least two reasons. First, they remind us that books have had their readers throughout their individual histories, that is, we are usually not the first readers since the time of the author or scribe to examine and study a book; rather, readers make contact with, or meet, books here and there along the way, with ourselves just one node in that continuum, and some of those readers leave their marks, wittingly or not, in the books. Second, these notes are a kind of archival document, in this case for the future patriarch Barsoum and for some goings-on in Syriac Orthodox circles in the first quarter of the twentieth century, and anyone studying the region in this time period might find something of interest here and in similar places. Once again, we see manuscripts as unique objects with unexpected finds!
Saint Mark’s Monastery, Jerusalem, 48 is a big manuscript — 26.1x18x13.5 cm and about 600 folios — containing Dionysios bar Ṣalibi’s commentary on the Gospels, and a notable copy because it comes from only a century after the author’s death: the colophon (f. 588v) has the date Nisan 23, 1582 AG (= 1271 CE). Before the text itself begins on f. 1v, there is on the previous page a note in Garšūnī:
SMMJ 41, f. 1r
The note is not in the same hand of the manuscript’s scribe, and there is no explicit indication of its date, but it bears no marks of being recent. Here is a quickly done translation into English:
We found the date of this holy, venerated father, Mār Dionysios (that is Yaʿqub) bar Ṣalibi, recorded in the Chronicon [Ecclesiasticum] of St. Gregory Bar ʿEbrāyā, the fact that he was ordained bishop over Marʿaš by Athanasios the patriarch (that is, Yešuʿ b. Qaṭra). The ordination of Patriarch Athanasios was in the year 1450 AG (1138/9 CE), and the ordination of St. Dionysios bar Ṣalibi as bishop was in the year 1462 [AG, = 1150/1 CE]. This St. Dionysios was present at the ordination of St. Mār Michael the Great, Patriarch of Antioch, whose ordination was in the year 1478 AG [1166/7 CE] in the Monastery of Mār Barṣawmā. The eternal rest of St. Dionysios bar Ṣalibi was in Tešrin II [November] 1483 AG [= 1171 CE], and he was buried in the Church of the Virgin in Diyarbakır.
If you wish, you can read more about Dionysios bar Ṣalibi in:
Michael the Great’s Chronicle, Edessa-Aleppo Codex, ff. 349v-350v (outer columns; = pp. 701-703 in the Gorgias Press facsimile)
Bar ʿEbrāyā’s Chronicon [Ecclesiasticum] I 511-513, 559-561
Assemani, Bibliotheca Orientalis II 156-211
S.P. Brock, in GEDSH 126-127
The note above, which acknowledges Bar ʿEbrāyā as a source, apparently by an early reader, is a good example showing how manuscripts are not static objects serving merely as text-receptacles, but unique witnesses not only to this or that version of a particular text, but also to the scribes who copied them, their readers from generation to generation, and the communities that have curated them.
UPDATE: Thanks to Gabriel Rabo for pointing out a mistake in my translation due to eyeskip. It has now been corrected.
I recently stumbled upon the Dictionary of Georgian National Biography online, where interested people can find short biographical summaries about famous Georgians (or people from elsewhere who came to be associated with Georgia) from antiquity — even Medea, as the daughter of the king of Colchis, has an entry — to the present. It’s hardly in-depth, but on occasions where only basic information about this or that individual from Georgia is needed, it’s worth a look. Here are direct links to a few entries that might interest readers of this blog:
As vol. 4 of the Deutsche Aksum-Expedition appeared Enno Littmann’s Sabaische, Griechische und Altabessinische Inschriften (Berlin, 1913). Despite the book’s age and importance, I found no copy online, so, thanks to HMML staff, it’s now available at archive.org.
The frontispiece to The Library of Enno Littmann
Enno Littmann was one of the outstanding scholars of the Semitic languages, those of Ethiopia in particular, in the first half of the twentieth century. (The German Wikipedia article is not very long, and the English one is almost nothing more than a list of a few publications.) Edward Ullendorff, in his obituary for Littmann published in Africa, Oct 1958, p. 364 (and reprinted in his From the Bible to Enrico Cerulli, p. 194), concluded “Among the greatest éthiopisants of the present century, Guidi, Praetorius, Conti Rossini, Marcel Cohen, Cerulli, Enno Littmann’s name occupies a most honored place.” Littmann himself wrote an autobiographical sketch (“An meinem Grabe zu verlesen”), and it is published at the beginning of the catalog of his library: The Library of Enno Littmann, 1875-1958 (Leiden, 1959), with an introduction by his student, Maria Höfner. In addition, pp. 52-57 of Ernst Hammerschmidt’s excellent little book Äthiopistik an deutschen Universitäten (Wiesbaden, 1968) discuss Littmann’s activities and contributions. Incidentally, I have before referred to a brief book inscription by Littmann among HMML’s holdings.
There is a much more recent book that collects early Ethiopian inscriptions (E. Bernard, A. Drewes, and R. Schneider, Recueil des inscriptions de l’Éthiopie des périodes pré-axoumites et axoumites [Paris, 1991]), which is unfortunately not plentifully available, but in any case, Littmann’s work is not to be dismissed. He was an expert philologist and his judgement is always worth consideration. In his presentation of the inscriptions, there are black-and-white photographs, line drawings, transcription into a usual printed type — a presentation in Hebrew letters is included for the South Arabian inscriptions, and the Old Ethiopic material is given in both the South Arabian script and in (now vocalized) Fidäl —, German translation, and commentary. The book is beautifully typeset, something we see too little of these days! Anyone working on the history of Ethiopia in antiquity and late antiquity and anyone likewise interested in epigraphy generally or in the languages used in Ethiopia will find Littmann’s book, now almost a century old, still a worthwhile volume.
I was recently going through a manuscript that belongs to the Syriac Orthodox Archdiocese of Aleppo to hunt down a text for someone and I came across a very short, but interesting, piece, an image of which, with translation, I give below. It is a list of several people-groups or nations with their supposedly characteristic faults, and while, of course, this kind of thinking is eschewed today (at least in most public conversation), it offers a unique picture of how these nations were viewed. I am not aware of another witness to the text beyond this manuscript, in which, however, it is copied twice (ff. 191v and 193v), but it is unlikely that it was composed on the spot for this manuscript. Aside from knowledge of the existence of the named peoples, there are no indications of date of composition, but the list is relatively far-reaching, although one omission that comes to mind is the Chinese (ṣināyē; cf. Payne Smith, Thesaurus Syriacus, col. 3395).
Syr. Orth. Archd. Aleppo 61(m), f. 191v
Here is a rough first translation, not without some uncertainties. I have numbered each segment.
That you might know the bad characteristics that exist among the peoples of all the earth.
1. Hebrews: the characteristic of importunity, disobedience, and deceit.
2. Greeks and Romans: greed, pride, arrogance, and haughtiness.
3. Syrians: envy, hatred, disorderliness, and ???
4. Persians: shamelessness and lasciviousness.
5. Armenians: hiddenness, hypocrisy, lying, thievery, ignorance, and tyranny.
6. Egyptians: angry, zealous, roving (?), and low in skill.
7. Arabs (Ṭayyāyē): shedders of blood, lovers of killing, badness of desire, and irascibility.
8. Barbarians: ignorance and disorderliness.
9. Pagans: fraudulent, making nature a liar by altering [ways of] worship.
10. Indians: pride that comes with the wisdom of this world and healing through drugs and arrows.
11. Elamites: [overly?] loving modesty.
12. Brahmins: pure, holy, and perfect.
13. Iberians, i.e. Georgians: simple and lovers of flesh.
14. Russians: deprived of mercy toward people.
15. Nubians and Ethiopians: haters of clothing.
And a common [bad characteristic] for all humans is mortality.
Notes keyed to each segment:
1. The root ṭlm is known but the form as here is not in the lexica. Perhaps read ṭālomutā.
2. The last three words are synonyms for “pride.”
3. I’m not sure what ša/āwyutā da-l-rēšē means exactly.
5. Maṭšyutā: again, the root is known but the form, I think, unattested.
6. Up to this point only abstract nouns have been used, but beginning here there are also adjectives, plural to match the gentilic nouns.
9. Perhaps Romans 1 in view here.
10. On later meanings of “Elamite,” see Payne Smith, cols. 2866-2867. It probably means here some inhabitants of Mesopotamia.
12. For the proper name, see Payne Smith, col. 615.
I welcome comments, especially any remarks on the questions and improvements to the translation. Does anyone know of some other text like this, Syriac or otherwise?
UPDATE (Nov. 26, 2012): I have just come across another witness to the same text: CFMM 386, p. 279. There are no notable variants to speak of except for the lack of “i.e. Georgians” after “Iberians”. The main part of CFMM 386 is dated 1890 AG (= 1578/9 CE), but the part with the ethnic stereotypes is in a later hand at the end.
hmmlorientalia 