It’s a bit of a treasure hunt, nosing around in some of the minor language groups of the ancient world. You’re always looking for some text that will tell you a bit more about antiquity, give a bit more primary data than you get from the standard texts.
And what does every treasure-hunter need? A treasure map!!! Ideally you get a list of ancient authors and what they wrote, written in antiquity before lots of it was lost.
According to Georg Graf’s modern route-map, the Geschichte der arabischen christlichen Literatur, such a thing does exist for Arabic Christian literature. It’s by a chap called Abu’l-Barakat, and is a list of Arabic Christian literature, names and works.
It was published with a German translation by Wilhelm Riedel, Der Katalog der christlichen Schriften in arabischer Sprache von Abu’l-Barakat, in Nachrichten der K. Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen. Philologisch-Hist. Klasse, 1902 (Heft 5), pp. 636-706.
Interestingly volumes of this journal are online at Archive.org. But not, of course, this one.
Wouldn’t it be nice if this was online, in English?
I did a quick search at WorldCat and was only able to find one copy of Riedel’s work. It is currently in Munich. I’m sure there are more out there, however.
Here is the link
http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=au%3AAbu%CC%84+al-Baraka%CC%84t+ibn+al-Asa%CC%89d+Ibn+Kubr&qt=hot_author
Thank you for the link. I expect that others exist also.