Category: Arabic Christian Literature

It’s raining books!

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A tap on the door, as I try to deal with the week’s post, and a neighbour bearing a parcel from Brepols.  Yes, it’s the remaining two fascicles of the Patrologia Orientalis of Agapius.  I wrote to them over the Christmas period, asking for them, and never heard back.  Prompt service indeed!

This brings to an end a week which has snowed books.  I mentioned Zamagni’s edition of Eusebius Gospel Questions yesterday; today it arrived — massively quick service that from Amazon.fr — and looks excellent.  I decided last weekend that I needed to read Catullus and Tibulus, for what they say about the Roman book trade.  On Monday I ordered an out-of-copyright Loeb; a couple of days later it arrived at work.  Together with a mail-order pack of 20 100w lightbulbs (used in every house in Britain but now removed from every shop), no day has gone by without a delivery. 

It’s frankly overwhelming.  I’ve been trying to read N. G. Wilson’s Scholars of Byzantium, and being distracted.  Wilson deals with the survival of Greek classical literature in the Eastern Roman Empire, to 1453 — and does it magnificently.  It’s a truly splendid book.  To read it is a liberal education, and if I could give copies to my friends and know that they would read it, I would.  It’s been brought back into print via a print-on-demand service; go and buy it!

The two fascicles of the PO are interesting to see.  One is a shiny new anastatic reprint of 2003, but very good quality.  The other has uncut edges, and yellowing paper, and looks like an original printing — almost a century old!  Evidently not many people ever wanted to buy Agapius!  In a way, isn’t it a privilege to be able to get them?  Isn’t it a blessing that Brepols keep these in print?  Good for them!

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Al-Majdalus translation completed

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Some may remember that I commissioned a translation of the Commentary on the Nicene Creed by al-Majdalus, an Arabic Christian writer of uncertain date and affiliation, but probably a 10th century Melkite.  The text has never been published, but I obtained a microfilm of a manuscript from Sainte-Joseph University in Beirut.

I wanted to make it accessible because he might mention a saying attributed to Zoroaster in it; “whoever does not eat my body and drink my blood, the same does not have salvation.”  This saying is from the collections of sayings attributed to pagan philosophers and predicting the coming of Christ.

It seems that the translator has almost completed the translation (he has also transcribed it), a couple of words aside.  I’m looking forward to reading it!  It does indeed include some sayings from Hermes and Aristotle of this kind, although not Zoroaster as far as I can see.

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Eusebius and Islam

Posted on by Roger Pearse

There are some things which are obvious, once they have been invented.  It took the genius of Eusebius of Caesarea to digest down into a tabular form of dates and events all the information about dates and events for Greece and Assyria and Persia and Rome — and the Hebrews — contained in the literature available to him.  But once this Chronicle of World History existed, running up until the 20th year of Constantine, every copyist would feel the urge to add extra lines on the bottom, to bring it up to date.  It’s sort of obvious, isn’t it?

To this obviousness we owe a mass of chronicles, not just in Greek but in Latin and Syriac.  One such continuator was James of Edessa, the 8th century scholarly West Syriac bishop who attempted to introduce Greek vowels into the Syriac script, and partially succeeded.  His continuation was composed in 692 AD.  

The text is lost, but portions of it remain.  The text of the 10th century World History of Michael the Syrian makes use of it verbatim in places, although not in tabular form.  Better still, a 10th/11th century Syriac manuscript from the Nitrian Desert, now in the British Library (Ms. Additional 14685) contains a substantial chunk of it, albeit in an abbreviated form.  It starts where Eusebius left off, and begins with a preface in which James discusses an error in calculation which he has found in Eusebius.  Then it goes into a set of tables.  Like the Armenian version of Eusebius (but unlike the original, or the Latin version), the columns of year numbers are positioned in the centre of the page, and events for those years written on either side.

I was looking around the web today for the ancient texts which mention Mohammed, and came across this site.  To my surprise this chronicle by James is one of the earliest mentions of Mohammed.  This has given impetus to me to put it online.  But how to do so?

E. W. Brooks published the Chronicle in Zeitschrift fur deutschen morgenlandischen Gesellschaft 53 (1899), p. 261-327.  He didn’t publish the preface.  He published the Syriac text, laid out in tabular form.  He followed it with an English translation, not of all the text, but of the wording (events) against each year.  He then republished it, this time with the preface, in CSCO Syr. 5, with a Latin translation of the lot in CSCO Syr. 6.  Both text and translation contained the tabular layout.

I’m not going to transcribe the Syriac, or the Latin.  I have already OCR’d the English, but there is a problem.  The Islamic website above rightly quotes three chunks of relevant information.  But… two of these are embedded in the table in the middle of the page, so not present in the English translation.  Anyway… don’t we want to see the proper layout?  I certainly would!

I think the solution will be to take the Latin translation, lay it out in HTML, and then substitute the English where it is available, translating the trivial bits of Latin where it is not.  It will be fiddly; but it will work.  Considering its importance, tho, something must be done.

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Anti-Islamic sites targeted by DoS attack

Posted on by Roger Pearse

It isn’t just bureaucrats trying to silence free speech online.  I learn today that the Jihad-watch and Islam-watch sites were subjected to a Denial-of-Service attack, to load them down with bogus traffic so that no-one could access them.  As yet the editors haven’t yet worked out precisely which post or comment the Moslem attackers were objecting to.

We do need better materials on Islamic origins online.  For one thing, how many of us can even name the primary sources for the life of Mohammed?  I can’t!

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Getting hold of manuscripts of the Arabic historian Al-Makin

Posted on by Roger Pearse

We all know that Shlomo Pines published an exotic version of the Testimonium Flavianum of Josephus, telling of the events of the life of Christ.  This he tells us he got from the 10th century Arabic Christian historian, Agapius.  But on closer reading, he says that he reconstructed the text of Agapius at this point using the 13th century Arabic Christian historian Girgis Al-Makin (George Elmacin).  This hasn’t ever been published, never mind translated. 

The text is in two halves, according to Georg Graf’s handbook, Geschichte der christlichen arabischen Literatur vol. 2, p.348-351.  The first half covers history to the reign of Heraclius, divided into 120 sections on ‘important people’.  The second half covers history from the Arab invasions to his own time.

I’d like to get a copy of a manuscript of this work, and see if I can get the portion on Jesus translated.   Graf tells us that there is a manuscript in the Vatican (Vat. ar. 169, 1686 AD, on ff. 1r-194r); another in the Bodleian Library in Oxford (Bodl. ar. christ. Nicoll. 47, 1 & 2 = Bodl. 316, 1646 AD), which also has a handwritten Latin translation of the end of part 1 and all of part 2; another in the British Library (or. 7564, AD 1280); another in Manchester (ar. 239, 18th century, but incomplete and breaking off at 1118/9 AD); another in Cairo (Coptic Museum Hist. 266, AD 1893); yet another in Cairo (Coptic Patriarchate Hist. 17, 18th century); one in the Sbath collection wherever that is now (Fihris 80 & 81); and finally one somewhere in the Orthodox Library in Aleppo between the wars, mentioned by L. Cheiko.

That sounds a lot – eight copies.  But the Vatican library is closed, and emails are being ignored.  The Bodleian is going through a greedy-nasty phase, and wants me to pay some enormous sum so they can make colour images for themselves but only supply low-grade monochrome images to me.  The microfilm of the British Library manuscript only covers part 2, and the leaves are said to be disarranged anyway.  The John Rylands Library in Manchester also demanded some huge and prohibitive sum for their partial manuscript.  Manuscripts in Cairo are inaccessible; a set of microfilms in the USA likewise, for practical purposes.  The location of the other two is really unknown.

Here we are in 2009; yet a researcher can’t get a copy of stuff held by state institutions.  This is a ridiculous situation, surely?

There are also manuscript copies of each half.  Perhaps the answer is to obtain some of these.  There are three of part 1 in Paris, for instance, and it should be possible to obtain copies, I would have thought. 

PS: The great thing about the Bibliotheque Nationale Francais is that they have scanned their catalogues and put them online.  A quick search, and I find that Mss. Arab. 294 and 295 should cover the whole text.  294 is 250+ folios in length, tho.  Less good is the prices demanded for colour digital images, which are basically free to make.  The prices are prohibitive, which is very silly.  I’ve been driven to ask for a duplicate of a microfilm in PDF form, for which they will charge 50 euros each (!).  Even that is a ridiculous price for what basically costs half an hour of staff time.  When will this ceaseless greed stop?

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More notes from Agapius

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’m still working on an English translation of Agapius.  I’ve now reached the overthrow of the Umayyad Caliphate, and the early Abbassid period.

In the year 14 of `Abdallah, the Magi revolted in Khorasan and shook the authority of `Abdallah-al-Mansour for this reason:

In a city of Khorasan which is called Far`is (?), there was a mountain from where much silver was taken.  30,000 workmen dealt specifically with the exploitation of this mine and the purification.  The workmen were Magi to whom the mountain had been ceded. A very rich mine was discovered there.  The Sultan wanted to take the mountain from them and give it to others.  They were opposed to the implementation of this project, and the Sultan struck a Magus.  Then they threw themselves on him and killed a great number of his soldiers. 

After that, the Sultan wrote with Mohammed-ibn-`Abdallah-al-Mansour who was in Ray, to tell him what had occurred.  The latter sent to him 34,000 soldiers who formed his vanguard;  then he went out, himself, against the Magi, at the head of 30,000 soldiers. 

The people who formed the vanguard arrived at the mountain where the mines and the Magi were;  they started the battle, but the Magi overcame them and made a very great number perish. 

Mohammed-ibn-`Abdallah, learning of the defeat of his soldiers, remained at the place where he was and sent a letter to `Abdallah-al-Mansour in which he made known to him the fate of his troops and the business of the mine.  He was then at the place which is called Arfasir(?),  and he spent the winter there. 

After winter had passed, he sent against the rebels a man called Hazim at the head of 40,000 soldiers. 

When he arrived near the rebels, (his soldiers) attacked them, overcame them, killed more than 20,000, made captive the survivors whom they sent to Mohammed-ibn-`Abdallah who was on the Tigris, opposite Baghdad.

No doubt the silver mines pretty much stopped working, after the workforce was killed or sent to Baghdad.

I was struck, while reading the section on the reign of the last Umayyad, Marwan II, and the early Abbassids, how much of this sort of thing is going on.  The rulers care nothing for the lands under their control.  The cities, inherited from the Roman empire, are routinely devastated in internal Arab quabbles, their inhabitants deported here and there.  Incessant raiding goes on.  Subjects are treated merely as sources of revenue.  There is no sense of a social contract between ruler and ruled; merely the exactions of a conqueror, even a century after the Arab conquest.

Here we see a successful industry destroyed at the whim of a remote despot.  Is it any wonder that the cities of the Roman East gradually declined and disappeared?  What motive was there to invest time or money, to develop civic pride, when capricious confiscation could see it all vanish in a trice? 

It is also interesting to see that Zoroastrianism was still active in whole communities, a century after the Arab conquest of Persia.

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Coptic monastic revival

Posted on by Roger Pearse

While I was in Egypt, I was interested to learn that the Coptic church has been undergoing a quiet revival over the last few decades.  This has centred on their monasteries, from which the Coptic Patriarch is always chosen.  By 1960, one of the most important monasteries, that of St. Macarius in the Wadi al-Natrun (the Nitrian Desert, or Scete) had only six frail old monks, and the building was in considerable disrepair.  Today it has 130.

Much of the credit belongs to the late Fr. Matta el-Meskeen.  He had created an independent monastic community in the Wadi al-Rayan during the 60’s.  In 1967 he and his dozen monks were ordered by the then Patriarch, Cyril VI – today widely considered a saint – to go to St. Macarius.  They did so, and Fr. Matta then revitalised the community, and began the current revival.  Monasteries are filling up with monks; men who have completed their military training, had a professional education, but have been drawn to the monastic life.  Abandoned monasteries are being reopened, although this has sometimes led to land disputes.  New monasteries are being built.

Books by Fr. Matta have been translated into several languages, and are available from the monastery here.

Fr. Matta was not always able to avoid politics.  As a senior monk in the church he was a natural candidate for patriarch, twice nominated and twice passed over.  As an important copt he was one of those consulted by President Sadat at the time when the Coptic Pope Shenouda III was sent into internal exile.  His closeness to Sadat meant that he was able to enjoy state protection, and to add land for cultivation to the St. Macarius monastery.  But the same factors meant that Shenouda’s supporters regarded him with suspicion, and attempts were made to find theological heresy in his books.  Such communal struggles are inevitable in this life, and should not detract from the immensity of his achievement.  He was able to find a way for Copts to reconnect with God in the modern world, and was the Lord’s implement to renew his people in a Moslem land. 

I have been unable to locate any English biography of him.  The Wikipedia article has several links which are helpful.

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Treasures of the Kaabah in Mecca?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’m still reading Agapius, and he relates how Yezdegerd, the last Sassanid ruler, was murdered at Merv by a miller while hiding from the Arabs.  The Arab commander, Sa`id, sent his head and crown to the Caliph Othman, who displayed his head on a pillar, and placed the crown in the Kaabah “where it is to this day.”

Is the crown of the Sassanids really still at Mecca today?

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Should we spit when we say “Abdullah”?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

My translation of Agapius has now reached the portions describing the Arab takeover of the Near East, and so is full of Arabic names.  This raises the question of how we should write them, in an English translation.  Do we write “Ali”, or “`Ali”, indicating the hawking sound with the funny-looking apostrophe?  Do we write “Abdullah” or “`Abd-allah”? 

Barbarous-looking names like `Abbad-ibn-`Asim weary the eye, and cause the reader to skip across the text.  Does this factor all by itself tend to explain why we halt the study of antiquity at the Arab conquest, despite the substantial continuity of culture into the early Islamic period?

Suggestions welcome!

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Some snippets from Agapius

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve been continuing to translate the world history of the Arabic Christian writer Agapius, and have come across some interesting bits in it.

The first of these records that the emperor Heraclius, after finally defeating the Sassanid Persians, took up residence in Edessa for a year.  While there, he discovered that bishop Qourrah (Cyrus) of Edessa was more or less illiterate and unable to read the gospels.  The emperor exiled the bishop to Cyprus, and told him to fix himself somewhere and to learn to read and to study the “questions” — theological issues — that he should be familiar with as a bishop.  It is interesting to find that such a senior ecclesiastic in the 7th century might be unable to read.

Another snippet describes the capture of Jerusalem by the Arab commander `Omar.  It records that the patriarch Sophronius met him, and found that his conqueror was wearing clothes made of wool which were filthy.  Conquered or not, this was too much for the embarassed patriarch, who offered to give him new clothes.  `Omar refused to let go of his own clothes, but after much arguing eventually submitted to having them washed! 

Agapius also records that one of `Omar’s first acts was to pass a law expelling all the Jews from Jerusalem, and that any who remained would suffer for it in their hair and their wallets.

I must say that I am enjoying reading through this largely unfamiliar material.  Some of it has clearly suffered from admixture with popular tales, in the centuries, but there is a surprising preponderance of historically reliable material in the Chronicle.

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