F. Briquel Chatonnet, M. Debié and A. Desreumaux, eds., Les inscriptions syriaques. Études syriaques 1. Paris: Paul Geuthner, 2004. Pp. 171. ISBN 2-7053-3759-8. Paperback. €40.
Andrew
Palmer
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
George A. Kiraz
James E. Walters
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Vol. 8, No. 2
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Andrew Palmer
F. Briquel Chatonnet, M. Debié and A. Desreumaux, eds., Les inscriptions syriaques. Études syriaques 1. Paris: Paul Geuthner, 2004. Pp. 171. ISBN 2-7053-3759-8. Paperback. €40.
https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/pdf/vol8/HV8N2PRPalmer.pdf
Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute,
vol 8
issue 2
Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies is an electronic journal dedicated to the study
of the Syriac tradition, published semi-annually (in January and July) by Beth
Mardutho: The Syriac Institute. Published since 1998, Hugoye seeks to offer the
best scholarship available in the field of Syriac studies.
Syriac Studies
Syriac Inscriptions
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[1] This is
a series of essays intended to make stimulating reading for
non-specialists, while not being intended exclusively for
them. A review for a journal of Syriac studies should
consider the book from the specialist’s point of
view. The French Académie des Inscriptions et
Belles-Lettres is to publish a series of volumes, arranged by
country or region, constituting a systematic edition of Syriac
inscriptions around the world: Recueil des Inscriptions
Syriaques, to be referred to as RIS. The
volume under review appears to be a survey of the inscriptions
to be edited in this collection. The several chapters
originated in papers presented by various scholars to a
conference held in Paris on 7 November 2003. The
contributors (in alphabetical order) are: A. Badwi, F. Briquel
Chatonnet, A. Desreumaux, M. Gorea, A. Harrak, F.
Helliot-Bellier, A. Kassis, W. Klein, P. Marsone, R. Niu, L.
van Rompay, J. Thekeparampil and J.-B. Yon. The map on p.
169 shows Asia, Cyprus and Egypt as the areas to be covered,
but on p. 51 reference is also made to two inscriptions in
Rome. No reference is made to the growing number of
inscriptions in the churches of the Syrian Christian diaspora
(see one example in paragraph 11 of this review). This
volume is also the first in a series of Études
syriaques to be published by the newly-founded
Société d’études syriaques, of which
the object is “the culture of Syriac-speaking Oriental
Christianities, whatever their confession”, including
“sacred scripture, theology, patristics, philosophy,
grammar, history, law, liturgy, astronomy, medicine, poetry and
graphic arts”, a list which, while it is probably
intended to include “everything which makes up the
cultural wealth of these communities”, happens to omit
architecture and archaeology (p. 11). Non-Christian
Syriac, though, is perhaps intentionally excluded.
[2] The
survey begins with Edessa, the home of the Syriac
dialect. Briquel Chatonnet and Desreumaux do mention
The Old Syriac Inscriptions of Edessa and Osrhoene by
Drijvers and Healey (1999) and the earlier work of Segal on the
pre-Christian Aramaic inscriptions, though they refer neither
to the extensive pagan inscriptions of Soghmatar, nor to the
Christian inscriptions collected from Qasr al-Banat by Max van
Oppenheim in 1899 and imperfectly published by B. Moritz in
Beiträge zu Assyriologie und semitischen
Sprachwissenschaft 7.2 (1913), 157-74. They outline
the history of Syriac epigraphy (pp. 15-17); distinguish two
types of inscriptions, those on sacred monuments and those
commemorating the death of clergy and “even of
women”—though it ought to added that these were
nuns (p. 18f.); and mention the regions of Commagene and
Armenia, on one side of Osrhoene, and Tur ‘Abdin on the
other (p. 19f.), before going on to discuss Syria (p. 21f.),
where Christian Syriac mosaic inscriptions have been found in
many of the ancient churches. (This reflects the
favourable conditions which have obtained in that country for
Christian archaeology.) There are even a couple of civic
inscriptions in Syriac, which means that language was used
beyond the religious sphere. These inscriptions tell more
about the past than just names and dates (p. 23f.): a lintel at
Zabad engraved in Syriac, Greek and Arabic is “the
earliest dated inscription in the Arabic language and
script”. On M. Gorea’s drawing one can make
out “in the year 823” (A.D. 511/2?). The
Alpha, though Greek, hangs on the right arm of the cross, Omega
on the left, a probably unconscious Semiticism. The
authors conclude “that Edessa seems to disappear rather
early from the corpus, whereas in Northern Syria the use of
Syriac in inscriptions increases from the fifth century
onwards”. This argument from the silence of
Christian Syriac epigraphy in Edessa ignores the manuscripts,
some of them produced before 600, which attest the continued
use of Syriac there. Many witnesses lie buried: who, then,
will be “astonished” (p. 24) that they do not
speak? The authors themselves regret that no systematic
archaeological research has been done in Edessa.
[3] The next
chapter, on the inscriptions of Lebanon, has a historical
introduction by Kassis with a map (pp. 29-31); a section on the
stone inscriptions by Yon (pp. 32-36); and a section on the
painted inscriptions (pp. 36-40), in particular the
twelfth-century paintings in the church of Mar-Tedros at
Bahdidat, which are presented by Badwi
with reference to the unpublished MA-dissertation of his
student Chadi Abi Abdallah (corrigenda: nos. 1-5 do
not correspond to nos. 1-5 in the figure and in no. 7 the
Syriac word for darkness is spelled with ‘Ayn instead of
Heth). Omitted from the survey,
perhaps because of its uncertain provenance—it turned up
on the antiquities market in Lebanon, but it refers to the era
of Antioch—, is a long and informative inscription
commemorating the construction of a bema, presumably of stone,
“in the year 653, in the computation of Antioch, in the
year eight” (note the phonetic transcription of the Greek
number as oghdo), that is between 1 October 604, when
the 653rd year after Julius Caesar’s grant of
autonomy to Antioch began, and 31 August 605, when Byzantine
Indiction VIII ended (B. Aggoula, “Studia Aramaica
III”, Syria 69, 1992, 391-422, includes, on pp.
401-6, a new edition with a translation in which E. Renhart,
Das syrische Bema, Graz, 1995, p. 53, places too much
faith). The era of Antioch is unlikely to have been used
so far south as Lebanon (the date 859 on the lintel-inscription
from Harb ‘Ara, in the extreme
North of Lebanon, is plausibly interpreted as Seleucid on p. 32
of the book under review, though, as can be seen from Plate
II.1, the era is not specified). The most interesting
stone inscriptions of Lebanon are those of the quarries of
Kamid al-Lawz, which show that men from Edessa and even further
afield (some were East Syrians) were quarrying here in 715
under the Caliph Walid.
[4] After
travelling from Northern Mesopotamia through Syria to Lebanon,
the survey arrives in the Holy Land. “Inscriptions
of travellers and émigrés” are found in
Acre, Galilee, Jericho, Bethlehem, Jerusalem, the Negev, Sinai,
Jordan, Cyprus and Rome. Desreumaux, the author of this
chapter, here announces his forthcoming publication of the
Syriac graffiti on the columns of the mediaeval porch of the
Holy Sepulchre. Those that are dated bear witness to the
continuation of the pilgrimage of Syrian Christians from
Northern Mesopotamia to Jerusalem during and after the
Crusading period. Having published papers on this
pilgrimage and on the relations of Syrian Christians with the
Crusader states, this reviewer was disappointed that these
inscriptions were not placed in their historical
context. See A. Palmer, ‘The History of the Syrian
Orthodox in Jerusalem’, Oriens Christianus, 75
(1991), 16-43, and id., ‘The History of the
Syrian Orthodox in Jerusalem, Part Two: Queen Melisende and the
Jacobite estates’, Oriens Christianus, 76
(1992), 74-94. We also learn of the recent discovery, in 2002,
of two eighth-century (?) inscriptions in the black desert of
Harrah, the first Syriac inscriptions to
be found in Jordan (they are to be published by M. Gorea) and
of the epigraphic evidence of an East-Syrian community on
Cyprus in the fourteenth century (p. 50).
[5] There
follows a chapter on the Syriac inscriptions of the Monastery
of the Syrians in Egypt which amply satisfies the
reader’s hunger for historical context. The
inscriptions illuminate the relationship between Dayr
al-Suryān and the city of Tagrīt, in Iraq, beginning
with the mirror-image memorial to the (Tagrītan) Patriarch
Cyriac (793-817), unique in Syriac and much earlier than
comparable inscriptions in Arabic, and the record of what may
have been the origin of the monastery in 819 (a suggestion:
might not the second letter in line 5, though it looks like a
Beth, be read as a Mim?). Van Rompay, the author,
questions the general validity of the statement that the
Syrians in Egypt regarded themselves as belonging to the Church
of Syria in the light of three prominent inscriptions of the
ninth and tenth centuries at that monastery which put the
Patriarch of the Coptic Church first, see H. Kaufhold,
“Kirchliche Gemeinschaft und Schisma im Spiegel syrischer
Schreibervermerke”, Oriens Christianus 85
(2001), 94-118. He points out that linguistic politics at
the monastery, where Coptic and Syrian monks dwelled side by
side, leaned towards Coptic in the ninth century and towards
Syriac in the thirteenth, from which time onwards
Kaufhold’s conclusion, which was based on colophons, may
indeed apply (p. 62). His closing reference to the
“radical uniqueness (unicité
radicale)” of the details on which inscriptions
oblige us to concentrate reminds this reviewer of that first
searching encounter with letters on stone, by which a hand long
dead grips the imagination and makes a new initiate in
history.
[6]
Harrak’s chapter on Iraq (pp. 75-106) is the longest in
the book, and the most systematic. He classifies the
abundant material into (A) liturgical, (B) funerary, (C)
commemorative and (D) historical inscriptions and divides each
of these groups into as many as nine sub-categories. The
category of liturgical inscriptions, also introduced (under
another name) by Briquel Chatonnet et al., is a
necessary one, certainly for modern inscriptions. Harrak
concludes his liturgical section with the following words:
“The great number of liturgical inscriptions and the
beauty of their calligraphy underline the fact that these
inscriptions hold in the Syriac Church the place occupied by
icons and statues in the Byzantine and Latin Churches; hence
their sacred character” (p. 87). This goes too far.
The devotees of an Eastern Orthodox icon or a Roman Catholic
statue light candles in front of the object of their devotion
and kiss it if they can. And even in a church where the
walls are covered with holy pictures, such as St.
Ephrem’s, Heilbronn, there may be a number of beautifully
calligraphed liturgical inscriptions.
[7] Among
the funerary inscriptions from Tagrīt Harrak documents the
use of phrases such as “May the Lord have pity on
So-and-so on the Day of Judgement!” (p. 88) and refers to
a similar inscription about two Tagrītans in the Monastery
of the Syrians in Egypt. The shared diction surely supports
Harrak’s claim that the latter inscription is also
funerary. This time it is surely Van Rompay who overstates
his case (p. 69): “Nothing indicates that these two
persons were dead at the time the inscription was
produced.” Harrak also examines the epigraphic
diction of building-records
. This
reviewer was pleased to read that
haddeth should not always be taken in its
literal sense of ‘renovate’, since it is sometimes
a euphemism for ‘rebuild’ (rebuilding churches was
forbidden under Islamic law). Compare already A. Palmer,
‘Corpus of inscriptions from Tūr cAbdīn and environs’,
Oriens Christianus 71 (1987), 53-139, at p. 95.
[8] The
following chapter on ‘Syriac and Manichean magic bowls of
Mesopotamian origin’, by Gorea, is marred by a number of
misprints and mistranslations: mryhwn
d’swt’ is read as “Lord of
healings” (p. 112), instead of “Lord of
doctors” (osawoto is the plural of
osyo) and psn
corresponds to nothing in the English translation quoted in
note 16 on p. 113. Nevertheless, this is a valuable
contribution. The next chapter, Hellot-Bellier, addresses
itself to ‘the contribution of Syriac inscriptions to our
knowledge of the history of the Christians of Urmia’, but
this contribution comes to so little that it is hardly worth
writing about (p. 122). One wonders what Wassilios Klein
could have done with the Syriac tombstones of Iran; his
interpretation of those published by Chwolson from finds in
Central Asia (650 of them in Kirghizstan) is a bold one,
carefully related to historical questions raised by other
sources. He concludes that the Black Death which ravaged
Europe in 1347-51 did not originate in China, as commonly
thought, for it arrived in China “a few years after
1338/9”, in which year (witness: the tombstones) it
decimated the sedentary population of Northern Kirghizstan and
made them unable to resist the wave of nomads. As a direct
result, Christianity disappeared from this region until the
Russians brought it back in the nineteenth century. Texts
vertically inscribed as if they were banners hanging from the
arms of the Cross (p. 132) appear elsewhere in a context of
near-despair, where a Christian community threatened with
extinction invoked this talisman of survival through
suffering. See A. Palmer, ‘The Messiah and the
Mahdi: History Presented as the Writing on the Wall’ in:
Polyphonia Byzantina: Studies in Honour of Willem J.
Aerts, ed. Hero Hokwerda and Edmé Smits and Marinus
Westhuis. Mediaevalia Groningana, 13 (Groningen, 1993),
45-84.
[9] Eight
lines of Uyghur writing are inscribed vertically below the arms
of a cross at Chifeng in Inner Mongolia, framed by a quotation
from the Aramaic (Pshītto) version
of Psalm 34:5:
hūr lwoteh w
sabar beh (“Look on Him and place your hope in
Him”) and the same words (also quoted in the Ehnesh East
Wall inscription) are found framing a cross above a lotus
flower in Beijing (p. 149). The rest of the paragraph on
Beijing in the chapter on the inscriptions of China by Niu,
Desreumaux and Marsone (p. 149) is too allusive to be
comprehensible. The references to the illustrations on
Plate VII in this chapter are unclear, not being given in the
same way as in other chapters. On p. 150 (just after
Sarah, Rebecca and Rachel have been referred to, without
comment, as “angels”) we read that Wu Wenliang,
beginning in 1928, collected a large number of inscribed
gravestones, but the bibliography includes no publication by
Wenliang. The authors are unaware of the project on the
Christian tombstones of Quangzhou which Sam Lieu, Ken Parry and
others have been working for some years now at Macquarie
University (See the interview they gave to Rachael Kohn on 5th
March 2003). This project, which enjoys wide academic
support, is funded by UNESCO as part of its Integrated Study of
the Silk Road programme. One of their findings is that God
is referred to in a number of Christian inscriptions of
Quangzhou as Buddha!
[10]
Buddhism came to China from India, so the name of Buddha offers
us a transition to Kerala, the south-western coastal state to
which the last chapter of the book, by Briquel Chatonnet,
Desreumaux and Thekeparampil, is devoted. After a brief survey
of Indian Church history the authors survey the inscriptions,
which are classified as records of building-work;
“inscriptions commémoratives” (records of
other historical events); altar-inscriptions and prayers; and
funerary monuments. This agrees, in the main, with
Harrak’s classification, though he coins the more compact
term “liturgical inscriptions” and (a possible
source of confusion) uses “inscriptions
commémoratives” of building-records,
distinguishing these from “inscriptions
historiques”. They go on to speak of the particular
interest of this corpus of sixty-two inscriptions, collected by
the authors in 1996, 2000 and 2002. There are no inscriptions
securely dated before the arrival of the Portuguese, though
there are some from before the Synod of Diamper (1599), which
already show Latin influence. Excessive pressure to conform to
Roman Catholic tradition led to an appeal to the Syrian
Orthodox patriarch in the seventeenth century (Oath of the
Coonan Cross, 1653), as a result of which contacts began to
take place between Kerala and Tur ‘Abdin, which gave
rise, in 1874, to a poetic inscription about the mission of two
envoys of the Patriarch of Antioch, one of whom died in 1685
and was buried in Kothamangalam. This is an example of the
Syriac renaissance of the nineteenth century, which is attested
by a number of inscriptions.
[11] The
authors also refer to inscriptions of the mid-twentieth century
in Trichur and even to one in Ayamkudi dated to the year 2000.
This makes it difficult to defend the omission from the book of
any reference to the late twentieth and early twenty-first
century Syriac inscriptions of Europe, the Americas and
Australia. Perhaps these should, after all, form a volume of
RIS? In the Syrian Orthodox church of St.
Ephraem in Heilbronn, Baden-Württemberg, for example,
there is a commemorative inscription on the front of the altar
(church bought from American Centre in 1995, sanctuary built
with donations from the Swirinoyo family of Bê Sallo
Makko and others and consecrated by Mor Dionysius Isa
Gürbüz in 2002), a eucharistic inscription (John
6:53) around the arch of the altar-niche, a more general
liturgical text (Psalm 26:6) around the archway of the Royal
Gate, a baptismal text (John 3:5) around the arch of the niche
on the south side in which the font is placed and a
commemorative inscription around the gûrno
itself, accompanied by the same baptismal text. The
chapter under review ends with a note on the scripts of Kerala
(compare A. Palmer, ‘The Syriac letter-forms of
Tūr ‘Abdīn and
environs’, Oriens Christianus 73, 1989, 68-89)
and these are illustrated by two drawings: one of the splendid
funerary inscription of Alexander de Campo at Kuravilangad
(A.D. 1687) in English, Syriac and Malayalam on p. 162 and one
of an inscription recording the construction of a doorway at
the west end of the Syrian Orthodox Church of Saint Thomas at
Mulanthuruthy in 1575.
[12] A
photograph of the latter inscription taken by Riccardo
Grassetti is printed in S. P. Brock and D. G. K. Taylor,
The Hidden Pearl, 3 (S. P. Brock and W. Witakowski):
At the turn of the third millennium: the Syrian Orthodox
witness (Rome, 2001), p. 116. This reviewer has seen
it and traced with his finger the original contours of the
writing, which were not accurately followed by the later
painter, who knew little Syriac. It is the painted
inscription which is drawn (inaccurately in line 5) on p. 158
of the book under review. For RIS a squeeze
should be made and photographed in a raking light which shows
only the contours in the stone. This is one of the
inscriptions allegedly showing Latin influence in the years
leading up to the Synod of Diamper (p. 164). That will be
disputed here. Here are three translations with the phrase to
be discussed here underlined:
En l’an mille cinq cent septante-cinq de la naissance
de notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ, au mois de teshrin
premier, le 9e jour, un dimanche, on a posé la porte du sanctuaire de
l’église Saint-Thomas + en kullam sept cent
cinquante-et-un ++. (Briquel Chatonnet et al.,
2004, p. 156f.)
In the year 1575 of our Lord Jesus Christ, on the 9th of the
month of October, a Sunday, this doorway was
set up for the nave of the church of St Thomas; by the
Kulam era, the year 751. (Brock et al., 2001,
p. 116)
In the year / (one) thousand and five / hundred and seventy /
and five [according to] (the era of) the birth / of our lord
Jesus / Christ, / in the month Teshrīn / Qdīm
thereof / on day : 9 : (for: “on day 9 thereof”?)
/ on (day) one in the week (i.e. Sunday) / (subject postponed
till the end) raised up (this) door /
for the prayer-hall of (this) church / the Holy Thomas
(subject of the verb “raised up”). / + Kullam
seven / hundred and fifty / and one. + + (Palmer, here)
As Briquel Chatonnet et al. have seen,
Brock’s passive “was set up” (representing
Olap-Taw-Taw-Qup-Yud-Mim) does not correspond to the
traces on the stone, where the reading
Olap-Qup-Yud-Mim is clear (it is confirmed by the
sense of touch). The translation must therefore be
“he raised up”, but who is the
subject? According to normal Syriac practice in all
centuries the subject is usually postponed until after the main
statement. A study of epigraphic diction in and around Tur
‘Abdin confirms this with specific reference to building
records: see A. Palmer in Oriens Christianus 72 (1988)
114-23. Shying away from the conclusion that Saint Thomas
is the subject, Briquel Chatonnet et al. translate
“on a posé”. The same study of
epigraphic diction shows that this would have been expressed
with a passive verb.
[13]
“Saint Thomas raised up a doorway/door for the prayer
hall of the church.” Supposing this is the correct
translation—and there is nothing to be said against it in
philology—how would contemporaries have understood this
strange statement? The Syriac tar‘o can
designate either a doorway or the door by which it is
closed. If it were the former, then we should have to
suppose that the church was built without a doorway on the west
side and that this was added in 1575, which seems
unlikely. The first readers would of course have been
aware that a human carpenter fabricated the door, but they may
have been willing to believe that Saint Thomas operated through
that human body. St Thomas is represented in the apocryphal
Acts of the Apostle Judas Thomas as the twin of Jesus,
who brought the Christian religion to India. He is the
Apostle of India and might well have been opposed, as such, to
St Peter, the Apostle on whom the Roman Catholic Church rested
its authority. Such an opposition, in the second half of
the sixteenth century, could have been regarded as dangerous by
that Church. Perhaps that explains the enigmatic nature of this
inscription: a forbidden patriotism is here encrypted. The
key to the code may lie in the Bible. In Chapter 10 of the
Gospel according to John Christ calls himself a doorway and
brands as “a thief” anyone who comes into the
sheepfold another way. Perhaps, then, our inscription is a
guarded way of saying, seventy-eight years before the Oath on
the Coonan Cross, that 'St Peter' (i.e. the Pope) is stealing
the sheep which belong to St Thomas? In any case, we
cannot translate ‘idto, followed, without a
d-, by the words qadisho tuma, as
“l’église Saint-Thomas” without
imposing a foreign idiom on the Syriac language, which is
perhaps why Briquel Chatonnet et al. speak of a Latin
influence on the diction of this inscription. Another solution,
much simpler, only occurred to me when it was too late to check
it by running my finger over the words once more: perhaps what
was originally written was qashisho, not
qadisho, and the door was erected by an ordinary human
priest called Thomas who may have doubled up, like St Thomas,
as a carpenter? For a carpenter-priest in Bsorino, a village of
Tur ‘Abdin, see A. Palmer, Monk and Mason on the
Tigris Frontier: The Early History of Tur ‘Abdin, University of Cambridge
Oriental Publications, 39 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990), microfiche 2, H: “The Book of Life:
Translations of the Narrative Sections”, p. 11.
[14]
Les inscriptions syriaques is a collection of
scholarly papers which form an eloquent, accessible
introduction to a subject otherwise difficult of access. It
makes no claim to exhaustiveness and indeed it is easy, as a
specialist, to find important omissions in it. It reveals the
scope of the planned Recueil des Inscriptions
Syriaques and amply justifies that project. Desreumaux
announced this new initiative more than ten years ago; see A.
Desreumaux and A. Palmer, “Un projet international: Le
recueil des inscriptions syriaques”, VI Symposium
Syriacum 1992, ed. R. Lavenant (Orientalia Christiana
Analecta 247; Rome, 1994) 443-47. One can see from the
volume under review that he has been the most active of all
those involved. He is to be congratulated warmly on what
he has achieved so far. If this review has been critical of
certain aspects of this survey, it is only because it is
important that the RIS itself should be in all
essentials immune to criticism and so a worthy monument to the
evident commitment of the contributors.