Recent Publication on Syriac Topics: 2021

Ahiqar: The Story of Ahiqar in its Syriac and Arabic Tradition

Team: Reinhard G. Kratz; Simon Birol; Aly Elrefaei

https://ahiqar.uni-goettingen.de/website/

The Story of Ahiqar in its Syriac and Arabic Tradition is a project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and hosted by both the Faculty of Theology of the University of Göttingen and the Göttingen State and University Library. It aims to index and make accessible the Ahiqar story in its Syriac and Arabic transmission branches.

The Historical Index of the Medieval Middle East

Team: Thomas A. Carlson; Jessica Mutter; Margaret Gaida; Liran Yadgar; McKenzie Cady

https://medievalmideast.org/

The Historical Index of the Medieval Middle East, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities or of Oklahoma State University, is a reference work to expand both scholarly and educated public understanding of a critical period of human history. HIMME provides a synthetic reference work identifying sources referring to particular people, places, and practices (such as jizya, the poll-tax paid by non-Muslims under Islamic rule). Its temporal scope is from 600 to 1550, and its geographical scope from al-Andalus in the west to Samarqand in the east, from Yemen in the south to the Caucasus in the north. Each entry corresponds to an individual person, place, or social practice, and lists the references to that entity which have been gathered so far. Rather than restricting its attention to sources in Arabic or any other single language, it deliberately incorporates sources from as many languages as possible. This will help the scholarly community quickly locate primary sources relevant for medieval Middle Eastern topics, and scholars may consider HIMME’s citations when deciding which languages to learn. The broader public will find brief identifications of the people, places, and practices, and references to translations of primary sources where available. The project is a work in progress, publishing its citations as they are collected, rather than waiting to publish an authoritative “final” reference work. Instead, HIMME will grow over time, becoming steadily more useful as it incorporates the references from additional sources.

HUNAYNNET: Transmission of Classical Scientific and Philosophical Literature from Greek into Syriac and Arabic

Team: Grigory Kessel; Rüdiger Arnzen; Nicolás Bamballi; Yury Arzhanov; Slavomír Čéplö

https://hunaynnet.oeaw.ac.at

The ERC project HUNAYNNET (Starting Grant ID 679083, 2016-2021) is the first attempt at compiling a digital trilingual and linguistically annotated parallel corpus of Greek classical scientific and philosophical literature and the Syriac and Arabic translations thereof. The impact of the Syriac tradition upon the Arabic translations has so far been acknowledged but not thoroughly explored. Compared with the extant body of Graeco-Arabic translation literature, the available Graeco-Syriac translations constitute just a small fraction of texts. The very availability of that relatively small group of texts in all three languages requires therefore comparative examination. The present corpus presents all and only those classical Greek scientific and philosophical works that are preserved in all three languages.

Presenting the Greek originals along with all extant Syriac and Arabic versions in aligned and digitally enhanced parallel columns, the present corpus enables the user to compare directly the terminology and phraseology of all versions, to spot at a glance corresponding passages in all three languages, to get an idea of the translator’s accurateness and reliability, to check textual disparities between the different versions, to assess the significance of the Syriac and Arabic versions for the critical establishment of the Greek texts, and to retrieve external lexicographical information on any word in any text. Furthermore, the present corpus will contribute to the still pending question as to which Arabic translations were made directly from the Greek and which were prepared on the bases of Syriac intermediaries.

Drawing on online lexicography and corpus linguistics, the full-text database is enhanced by a linguistic corpus management system providing various kinds of more specific lexicographical and linguistic search tools for all texts included in the present trilingual parallel corpus, such as word or phrase queries, frequency analyses, cross-linguistic concordances or word lists.

The two open-access databases thus create new instruments for multi-disciplinary studies of the history of the transmission of Greek scientific and philosophical literature in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. All these texts in all the formats available on this website are provided under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA) license.

The Manuscripts of St. Catherine’s Monastery on the National Library of Israel Website

In the late 1960s, with the permission of the Greek Orthodox Archbishop, the Jewish National and University Library carried out a survey of the manuscript collection at St. Catherine’s Monastery at Mt. Sinai in Egypt. Following this survey, and in accordance with the agreement made with the Archbishop, approximately 1600 manuscripts that had not been microfilmed in a previous expedition undertaken by the U.S. Library of Congress were microfilmed by the National Library of Israel.

This collection of microfilms has been recently digitized and put online by the Library. It includes black and white images of 1268 Greek, 107 Syriac and 303 Christian Arabic manuscripts, dating from the 12th century onward. The manuscripts can be viewed and downloaded for free. For access, use the keywords “Holy Monastery of St. Catherine at Mount Sinai Egypt” in the online Merhav catalog of the National Library:

https://merhav.nli.org.il/primo-explore/search?vid=NLI&lang=en_US

For general information on the collection, see

https://blog.nli.org.il/en/stcatherines/

https://www.nli.org.il/en/discover/manuscripts/saint-catherine