SYRIAC LITERATURE
T he literature of Syria, as known to us at the present day, is, with the exception of translations from the Greek and some other languages, a Christian literature. The writings of the Syrian heathens, such as the so-called Sābians (see Sabians) of Harrān, which were extant, at least in part, even in the 13th century, seem to have now wholly disappeared. The beginnings of this literature are lost in the darkness of the earliest ages of Christianity. It was at its best from the 4th to the 8th century, and then gradually died away, though it kept up a flickering existence till the 14th century or even later. We must own —and it is well to make the confession at the outset— that the literature of Syria is, on the whole, not an attractive one. As Renan said long ago, the characteristic of the Syrians is a certain mediocrity. They shone neither in war, nor in the arts, nor in science. They altogether lacked the poetic fire of the older—we purposely emphasize the word—the older Hebrews and of the Arabs. But they were apt enough as pupils of the Greeks; they assimilated and reproduced, adding little or nothing of their own. There was no Al-Fārābī, no Ibn Sīnā, no Ibn Rushd, in the cloisters of Edessa, Ken-neshrē, or Nisibis. Yet to the Syrians belongs the merit of having passed on the lore of ancient Greece to the Arabs, and therefore, as a matter of history, their literature must always possess a certain amount of interest in the eyes of the modern student. The Syrian Church never produced men who rose to the level of a Eusebius, a Gregory Nazianzen, a Basil, and a Chrysostom; but we may still be thankful to the plodding diligence which has preserved for us in fairly good translations many valuable works of Greek fathers which would otherwise have been lost. And even Syria’s humble chroniclers, such as John of Ephesus, Dionysius of Tell-Mahrē, and Bar-Hebraeus, deserve their meed of praise, seeing that, without their guidance, we should have known far less than we now know about the history of two important branches of the Eastern Church, besides losing much interesting information as to the political events of the periods with which their annals are occupied.
As Syriac literature commences with the Bible, we first briefly enumerate the different versions of Holy Scripture.
The most important of these is the so-called Pĕshīttā (mappaktā pĕshīttā), “the simple” or “plain version," the Syriac vulgate. This name is in use as early as the 9th or 10th century. As to the Old Testament, neither the exact time nor place of its translation is known; indeed, from certain differences of style and manner in its several parts, we may rather suppose it to be the work of different hands, extending over a considerable period of time. It would seem, however, as a whole, to have been a product of the 2d century, and not improbably a monument of the learning and zeal of the Christians of Edessa. Possibly Jewish converts, or even Jews, took a part in it, for some books (such as the Pentateuch and Job) are very literally rendered, whereas the coincidences with the LXX. (which are particularly numerous in the prophetical books) show the hand of Christian translators or revisers. That Jews should have had at any rate a consultative share in this work need not surprise us, when we remember that Syrian fathers, such as Aphraates, in the middle of the 4th century, and Jacob of Edessa, in the latter half of the 7th, had frequent recourse, like Jerome, to the scholars of the synagogue. To what extent subsequent revision may have been carried it is not easy to say; but it seems tolerably certain that alterations were made from time to time with a view to harmonizing the Syriac text with that of the LXX. Such an opportunity may, for instance, have been afforded on a considerable scale by the adoption of Lucian’s text of the LXX. at Antioch in the beginning of the 4th century (see Septuagint, vol. xxi. p. 669). On all these points, however, we know nothing for certain, and may well repeat the words of Theodore of Mopsuestia in his commentary on Zephaniah i. 6: ηρμηveυτaι Sè ταΰτα eis μev την Σύρων παρ’ 0τoυ δή πoτe' ουδέ yàp tyvωστaι μjlχpi τηs τi∣μepov oστιs πoτl ovros iστιv.
The canonical books of the Old Testament according to the Pĕshīttā are substantially those of the Hebrew Bible. In the' Massoretic MSS. (see below), whether Nestorian or Jacobite, the books of Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah are passed over, and in the Nestorian the book of Esther also. But, on the other hand, it must be noticed that all these books are cited by Aphraates, and that they all appear in the Codex Ambrosianus. Of the Chronicles there is a MS. of the 6th century in the British Museum, Add. 17104. Esther appears in a volume of equal age (Add. 14652) as one of the constituent parts of the “Book of Women,” the others being Ruth, Susanna, Judith, and the history of Thecla, the disciple of St Paul, which last is excluded from Biblical MSS. The oldest dated MS. of any portion of the Old Testament at present known to us is Add. 14425 in the British Museum (Gen., Exod., Num., Deut.), transcribed at Āmid by a deacon named John in 464. The deutero-canonical books or apocrypha, translated by different hands from the Greek, are nearly the same as in the LXX. The Codex Ambrosianus, for example, contains Wisdom, the Epistle of Jeremiah, and two Epistles of Baruch; the Song of the Three Children, Bel and the Dragon, and Susanna; Judith, Siracides or Ecclesiasticus; the Apocalypse of Baruch; the fourth book of Esdras; and five books of the Maccabees, the fourth being the history of Samona and her sons, and the fifth Josephi de Bello Judaico lib. vi . To these must be added from other MSS. the first or third book of Esdras, the book of Tobit, and the prayer of Manasses. Of the first book of the Maccabees two recensions are extant, as far as chap. xiv. 24. The book of Tobit presents the text of the LXX. as far as chap. vii. 11.
The canonical books of the New Testament are the four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles (to which are annexed the three catholic epistles, viz., James, 1 Peter, and 1 John), and the fourteen epistles of St Paul. The shorter apostolic epistles, viz., 2 and 3 John, 2 Peter, and Jude, and the Apocalypse of St John, were rejected by the early Syrian Church.
As to the Pĕshīttā version of the Gospels (P), a variety of critical questions arise when we consider it in connexion with two other works, the Dia-tessarδn of Tatian (T) and the Curetonian Gospels (Sc). Tatian, the friend of Justin Martyr, afterwards counted a heretic, composed out of the four Gospels a work which received the title of Τό δt,a τεσσάρων eυayyl∖ιοv, in Syriac more briefly Dia-lcssaron, or Evangelion da-Mĕḥallĕṭē, “the Gospel of the Mixed.” It is a subject of controversy whether Tatian wrote this work in Greek or in Syriac, and whether he compiled it from the Greek Gospels or from a previous Syriac version. According to Zahn and Baethgen, the author’s language was Syriac, his sources Greek. They hold that this was the only Gospel in use in the Syrian Church for nearly a century, but that about the year 250, under the influence of Western MSS. of the Greek text (see Westcott and Hort, The New Testament in the Original Greek, Introd., §§ 118, 214), a version of “the Separate Gospels,” Evangelion da-Mĕpharrĕshē, was introduced. The translator, according to Baethgen, made use of T as far as he could; and of this text Sc is, in the opinion of these scholars, the solitary survival in our days. The evidence for this view does not, however, appear to be conclusive. It seems that a Syriac version of the four Gospels, as well as of the other parts of the New Testament, must have existed in tho 2d century, perhaps even before the version of the Old Testament. From this Tatian may have compiled his Dia-tessarōn, or he may have written that work in Greek and others may have done it into Syriac. Be that as it may, T certainly gained great popularity in the early Syrian Church, and almost superseded the Separate Gospels. Aphraates quoted it; Ephraim wrote a commentary upon it; the Doctrine of Addai or Addaeus (in its present shape a work of the latter half of the 4th century) transfers it to the apostolic times; Rabbūlā, bishop of Edessa (411-435), promulgated an order that “the priests and deacons should take care that in every church there should be a copy of the Separate Gospels (Evangelion da-Mĕρharrĕshē), and that it should be read”; and Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus (423-457), swept up more than two hundred copies of it in the churches of his diocese, and introduced the four Gospels in their place: τά των τeττάpωv ευayyελιστωv ἀvισyαyοv εύαyyελιa. The result of these and similar well meant efforts is that not a single copy of T has come down to our times.-25a, Luke ii. 1-39. Ciasca’s copy is now (1887) in the hands of De Lagarde, who has published a few pages of it in Nachrichten von der königl. Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, 1886, No. 4, pp. 150-158. According to De Lagarde, the text is that of the ordinary Pĕshīttā. ] Both Aphraates and Ephraim, however, made use of the Separate Gospels. The former seems to have employed a text which Baethgen calls a slightly revised form of Sc (op. cit., p. 95); we would rather speak of it as a revised form of the old Syriac Gospels of the 2d century. The latter made use of a more thorough Edessene revision, closely approaching in form to, if not identical with, P (Baethgen, p. 95; Zalin, p. 63). Our oldest MSS. of P are, however, more than a hundred years later than Ephraim’s time. We cannot, therefore, expect very important textual results from the collation of even such MSS. as Add. 14470, 14453, 14459, ff. 1-66, and 17117, in the British Museum, all of which may be safely ascribed to the latter part of the 5th or the beginning of the 6th century. Early in the 5th century Rabbūlā, bishop of Edessa, the friend and correspondent of Cyril of Alexandria, occupied himself with “translating the New Testament out of the Greek into the Syriac, because of its variations, exactly as it was.” This probably means, as has been suggested by Nestle, that undertook a revision of the Syriac text according to a Greek MS. or MSS. in his possession, that is to say, still further assimilated P of that day to a Greek (possibly, from his connexion with Cyril, Alexandrian) text. We do not as yet know, however, whether this revision was merely a private effort, or what influence, if any, it exercised on the history of P; more likely it was a first step in the direction of the Philoxenian version (see below). The result of these successive revisions as regards Sc has been that it survives in but one mutilated codex, and that written at comparatively so late a date as 450-470, —a phenomenon which has its parallel in the case of the Itala codex c of the Gospels, copied in the 11th century. The greater part of this volume is in the British Museum (Add. 14451); but there are three leaves of it in the royal library at Berlin, forming the flyleaves of the MS. marked Orient. Quart. 528. Crowfoot’s attempt to retranslate Sc into Greek is a failure (Fragmenta Evangelica, 1870-72); Baethgen’s work (Evangelienfragmente, &c.) will perhaps be found more satisfactory.
The scholars of the Monophysite branch of the Syrian Church were, however, by no means satisfied even with the revised text of P, and demanded a yet more accurate reproduction of the Greek text in use among them. Accordingly Aksĕnāyā or Philoxenus, bishop of Mabbōgh (485-519), undertook to satisfy this want, and with the assistance of his chorepiscopus, Polycarp, produced a literal translation of the whole Bible in the year 508. This seems at first to have met with considerable approval; Moses of Aggēl, for example, who flourished from 550 to 570, refers to the version of the New Testament and of the Psalms evidently as the standard work of the day. But it was in its turn superseded by two later revisions, and MSS. of it are now very rare. Portions of Isaiah survive in the British Museum, Add. 17106, ff. 74-87, and the text of the Gospels in the codex A. 2, 18 of the Biblioteca Angelica at Rome, of the 11th or 12th century, and perhaps also in the Beirūt (Beyrout) MS. described by the Rev. Isaac H. Hall. At the beginning of the 7th century the work of retranslation and revision was again taken in hand by the Monophysites, the scene of their labours being the different convents in the neighbourhood of Alexandria. There, in the years 616-617, Paul, bishop of Tellā dhĕ-Mauzĕlath or Constantina, undertook a version of the hexaplar text of the LXX. at the request of the patriarch Athanasius I. Of parts of this many MSS. are extant in the British Museum and the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris, and the Biblioteca Ambrosiana at Milan possesses the second volume of a codex of the entire work, which has been reproduced by photo-lithography under the direction of Ceriani. This version not only exhibits the asterisks and obeli of Origen’s text of the LXX., but the marginal notes contain many readings of the other Greek translators, which have been largely utilized by Field in his noble work Origenis Hexaplorum quae supersunt (2 vols., Oxford, 1875). At the same time and place the New Testament of Philoxenus was thoroughly revised by Thomas of Harkel or Heraclea, bishop of Mabbogh, who, being driven from his diocese, betook himself to Alexandria and worked there in the convent of St Antony at the Enaton (or Nine-mile-village). This version comprises not only all the books contained in the Pĕshīttā but also the four shorter epistles. The lapse of another century brings us to the last attempt at a revision of the Old Testament in the Monophysite Church. Jacob, bishop of Edessa, undertook, when living in retirement in the convent of Tell-Addā or Teleda, in 704-705, to revise the text of the Pĕshīttā with the help of the Greek versions at his disposal, thus producing a curious eclectic or patchwork text. Of this work there are but five volumes extant in Europe, four of which came from the Nitrian Desert and form parts of a set which was written in the years 719-720. It would seem, therefore, never to have attained popularity.
One other version remains to be noticed, namely, that used by the Christian population of the Malkite (Greek) Church in Palestine, written in an Aramaic dialect more akin to the language of the Jewish Targums than to that of the Pĕshīttā. A lectionary containing large portions of the Gospels in this dialect was described by Assemani in the catalogue of the Vatican library, studied by Adler, and edited by Count Fr. Miniscalchi Erizzo under the title of Evangeliariwm Hierosolymitanum (2 vols., Verona, 1861-64). It was written in a convent at a place called Ābūd, not very far from Jerusalem, in the year 1030, and the scribe claims to have copied sundry other service-books for the use of his church (see Assemani, op. cit., p. 102). Fragments of other evangeliaria have been published by Land, from MSS. at London and St Petersburg, in his Anecd. Syr., iv. pp. 114-162, 213-222; of the Acts of the Apostles, p. 168; and of the Old Testament (translated from the Greek), pp. 103-110, 165-167, 222-223. According to the same authority (p. 231), the calendar in the Vatican MS. must have been drawn up about the middle of the 9th century. Few, if any, of the extant fragments appear to be of older date. Nöldeke places the origin of the version in the 4th or 5th century, certainly not later than 600 (loc. cit., p. 525).
All the above revisions of the text of the Syriac Bible according to the Greek are, as we have seen, the work of Monophysites, with the single exception of the last, which proceeded from the Malkites. The Nestorian community obstinately adhered to the old Pĕshīttā, and the solitary attempt made to introduce a revised text among them seems to have been an utter failure. Mār-abhā I., a convert from Zoroastrianism, who was catholicus from 536 to 552, went to Edessa, studied Greek there under a teacher named Thomas, and with his help translated the whole of the Old Testament into Syriac, and perhaps also the New. This statement rests on the authority of the author of the Kilāb al-Majdal (Māri ibn Sulaimän, about the middle of the 12th century, supplemented and abridged by 'Amr ibn Mattā of Tirhān, who lived towards the middle of the 14th century), of 'Abhd-īshō', bishop of Nisibis (died 1318), and of Bar-Hebraeus (died 1286); and there appears to be no reason to doubt their word.
Before quitting the subject of the versions of Holy Scripture we must devote a few words to the Massoretic MSS. of the Nestorians and Jacobites. In the year 1721 Assemani made mention in the Bibliotheca Orientalis (ii. 283), on the authority of Bar-Hebraeus in the Ausar Raze, of a “versio Karkaphensis, hoc est Montana, qua videlicet incolae montium utuntur.” About the meaning of these words scholars disputed, and some searched for MSS. of the alleged version, but in vain. At last, N. Wiseman (afterwards cardinal), guided by the light of another passage in the Bibliotheca Orientalis (ii. 499, 500, No. xxii.), recognized in Cod. Vat. eliii. a copy of what he believed to be the Karkaphensian version. Later researches, more especially those of the Abbé Martin, have corrected these errors. The MSS. of the Karkaphensian tradition, of which there are ten in our European libraries, are now known to contain a philological and grammatical tradition of the pronunciation and punctuation of Holy Writ and sometimes of other writings. Syria was rich in schools and colleges; most of its towns possessed institutions where instruction was given, more especially to students of theology, in the reading and exposition of the Greek and Syriac Scriptures and their commentators. Such were the great “Persian school” of Edessa, which was destroyed, on account of its Nestorian tendencies, in 489; the school of Nisibis; of Mahōze near Seleucia; of the monastery of Dōr-Kōni or Dair-Kunnā; of the monastery of Ken-neshre or the Eagles’ Nest, on the left bank of the Euphrates, opposite Jerābis; of the Dairā 'Ellāitā, or monastery of St Gabriel and St Abraham, at Mosul; and many others. Every such school or college had its teachers of reading and elocution, mahgĕyānê and makrĕyāne (or makeryäme), who taught their pupils to pronounce, add the vowel-points, and interpunctuate correctly, before they were passed on to the higher classes of the eskolāye' bādhoke or mallĕphāne, that is, the professors of exegesis and doctors of theology. The more difficult words and phrases of Scripture were gradually collected and written down so as to form “collectanea,” lukkāte dha-shĕmāhe, or “fasciculi,” kurrāse dha-shĕrnāhe, and the union of these composed a kĕthābhā dha-kĕrāyāthā, or “book of readings,” in which it was shown by means of vowel-points and other signs how each word was to be pronounced and accentuated. One such volume in the British Museum (Add. 12138, dated 899) represents the work of a Nestorian student in the convent of Mär Gabriel at Harrān; but the other MSS. extant in the different libraries of Europe are of Jacobite origin and have a common source, the scholastic tradition of the convent of Karkaphethā, or “the Skuli,” at the village of Maghdal or Mijdal near Resh-'ainā or Räs-'ain. Such are, for example, Cod. Vat., No. clii., now cliii., described by Assemani (Catal., iii. 287) and Wiseman 9 Horae Syr., p. 151); Cod. Paris, Ancien fonds 142, described by Zotenberg (fatal., p. 30, No. 64) and Martin (Tradition Karkaphienne, p. 36); Cod. Brit. Mus. Add. 7183, described by Rosen (Catal., p. 64, No. xlii.), and 12178, described by Wright (Catal., p. 108). From these and similar MSS., as well as from the words of BarHebraeus, it appears that the Karkephāye were the monks of the convent of Karkaphethā; that they were Westerns or Occidentals, therefore Jacobites; and that one of their chief authorities, if not the actual originator of the compilation, was Jacob bishop of Edessa. Accordingly, the marginal notes indicate various readings from Syriac MSS., from the LXX., and from the Harklensian version, as well as from different fathers and teachers. To the collection of words and phrases from the Pĕshīttā version is added in several of these MSS. a similar, though shorter, collection from the Harklensian version and from the principal works of the Greek fathers which were read in translations in the schools, followed by tracts on different points of orthography, grammar and punctuation.
We have spoken above (p. 824) of the deutero-canonical books of the Old Testament. Other apocrypha may now be noticed more briefly; e.g., Ps. cli. (in the hexaplar version of Paul of Telia); the Parva Genesis, or Liber Jubilaeorum, a fragment of which has been edited by Ceriani (Monumenta, vol. ii. fasc. 1, p. ix.); the Testament of Adam; the History of Joseph and Âsyath (Asenath), translated by Moses of Aggel; the History of Sanherib, his Vizir Ahikār or Hikār, and his Disciple Nädhän. Many similar books exist in Arabic, some of them probably translated from lost Syriac originals. The names of Daniel and Ezra “the scribe” are prefixed to late apocalyptic works, and even to almanacs containing prognostications of the weather, &c. The list of apocrypha of the New Testament is also tolerably extensive. We may mention the Protevangelium Jacobi ; the Gospel of Thomas the Israelite, or of the Infancy of our Lord; the Letters of Abgar and our Lord; the Letters of Herod and Pilate; prayers ascribed to St John the Baptist; the Transitus, Assumptio, or K oιμηoις Beatae Virginis, extant in four or five redactions; Acts of the Apostles, such as St John, St Philip, St Matthew and St Andrew, St Paul and Thecla, and St Thomas; the Doctrine of St Peter; and the Apocalypse of St Paul. Others of these apocrypha are extant in Arabic, but the Syriac originals have not yet been recovered. To these may be added such works as the Didlascalia Apostolorum, edited (anonymously) by P. de Lagarde in 1854; extracts from the Constitutiones Apostolorum, ascribed to Clement, in the same editor’s Reliquiae Juris Eccles. Antiq., pp. 2-32, 44-60; and the Doctrina Apostolorum, in Cureton’s Ancient Syriac Documents, pp. 24-35, and in Reliquiae Juris Eccles. Antiq. (under the title of Doctrina Addlaei), pp. 32-44.
Into a description of the service-books of the Syrian Church in its different sects—Nestorians, Jacobites, Maronites, and Malkites —we cannot here enter. The bare enumeration of the various psalters, lectionaries, missals, &c., would far exceed our present limits. The oldest Syriac psalter in our European collections is not earlier than 600 (Brit. Mus. Add. 17110), and the series of lectionaries commences with the 9th century. Of anaphorae or liturgies it would be easy to specify some sixty. The oldest of all is a fragment of the anaphora of Diodorus of Tarsus (in the British Museum, Add. 14699, ff. 20, 21), of the 6th century, which has been edited and translated by Bickell.
Besides the versions of Holy Writ and other works enumerated above, the literature of Syria comprises a vast amount of matter, interesting not merely to the Orientalist but also to the classical scholar, the theologian, and the historian. Some portions of this literature we must now endeavour to pass under review.
The long series of Syrian writers is headed by the name of Bar-Daisān or Bardesānes, “the last of the Gnostics.” He was born at Edessa on 11th July 154, and seems to have been the son of heathen parents of rank. Of the manner of his conversion to Christianity, and how he came to deviate from orthodoxy, we are uninformed. Part of his life he spent at the court of Edessa; then he betook himself as a missionary to the rude mountaineers of Armenia, and finally settled down in the fortress of Anium, where he probably remained till his death in 222. He wrote, we are told, a History of Armenia, which Moses of Chorene used in a Greek translation; Hypomnemata Indica, compiled from the oral information which he obtained from an Indian embassy passing through Edessa on its way to the Roman court; and polemical treatises against the polytheism of the heathens and the dualism of Marcion. He and his son Harmonius were poets, and their hymns were greatly admired and imitated. Even Ephraim could not help admitting their merits, whilst he reviled them. Of these works, however, only a few fragments have been preserved by later writers. The famous dialogue ∏ ερὶ εἱμαρμένης or De Fato, which the voice of antiquity has unanimously ascribed to Bardesānes, was in reality composed by his disciple Philip, and doubtless presents us with an accurate account of his master’s teaching. The Syriac title is Kĕthābhā dhĕ-Nāmōsē dh'Athrawāthā (The Book of the Laws of the Countries).
Of Simeon bar Sabbā'ē (“the Dyers’ Son”), bishop of Seleucia and Ctesiphon, and Millēs, bishop of Susa, we know little beyond the fact of their martyrdom in the great persecution of the Christians by Shābh ō r or Sapor II., which began in 339-340. Simeon is said by 'Abhd-îshô' to have written “epistles,” which seem to be no longer extant. To him are also ascribed sundry hymns, and a work entitled Kĕthābhā dh'Abhāhāthā (The Book of the Fathers), which, according to Sachau, treats of the heavenly and earthly hierarchy. The writings of Milles are stated by 'Abhd-
isho' (loc. cit.) to have been “epistles and discourses (mēmrē) on various subjects”; but of these time has also robbed us.
The name of Jacob (or St James) of Nisibis is far more widely, known. As bishop of that city he was present at the council of Nicaea. He lived to witness the outbreak of war between the Romans and the Persians, and is said to have delivered the city by his prayers from the latter power. He died in the same year (338). To him has been ascribed, on the authority of Gennadius of Marseilles and of the ancient Armenian version, a collection of homilies, the Syriac text of which has only been recovered and published within the last few years. George, bishop of the Arab tribes, writing to a friend in the year 714, is aware that the author was a certain “Persian sage,” hakkimā Phārsāyā, and discusses his date and position in the church, but does not think of identifying him with Jacob of Nisibis. Later writers are better informed. Bar-Hebraeus knows the name of Pharh ā dh as the author;. 'Abhd-îshô' gives the older form of Aphrahat or 'A φραάτης ; and ∣ he is also cited by name by Elias of Nisibis "(11th century) in his Chronicle. The real author of the twenty-two alphabetical Homilies and the separate homily “On the Cluster” is now, therefore, known to have been Aphraates, a Persian Christian, who took the name of Jacob, and was subsequently famous as “the Persian sage.” He was probably bishop of the convent of Mär Matthew near Mosul, and composed his works, as he himself tells us, in the years 337, 344, and 345, during the great persecution under Sapor II.
A junior contemporary of Aphraates was Ephraim, commonly called Ephraem Syrus, “the prophet of the Syrians,” the most celebrated father of the Syrian Church and certainly one of its most voluminous and widely read writers. He was born of heathen parents at Nisibis, but became the pupil of the bishop Jacob, and finished his education at Edessa. The incidents of his career are too well known to need recapitulation here. His death took place in June 373. His works have been largely translated into Greek, Armenian, Coptic, Arabic, and Ethiopic. They consist of commentaries on the Scriptures, expository sermons, and a vast mass of metrical homilies and hymns on every variety of theological subject. Many of these last are composed in his favourite seven-syllable metre, in stanzas of different length; but he frequently used other metres and mixed strophic arrangements. Of Ephraim’s commentaries on the Old Testament but little has reached us in the original Syriac. Most of what has been published in Ephraemi Opera Syr., vols. i. and ii., is derived from a large Catena Patrum, compiled by one Severus, a monk of Edessa, in 861. Of his commentary on the Dia-(essarδn, preserved only in an early Armenian translation, we have spoken above (p. 825). In the same language there is extant a translation of his commentary on the Pauline epistles. Vol. ii. of the Roman edition contains some exegetical discourses (pp. 316-395), the number of which has been largely increased by Overbeck (S . Ephraemi Syri, &c., Opera Selecta, pp. 74-104). In the same work will be found two of the discourses against early heresies addressed to Hypatius and Domnus (pp. 21-73; comp. Wright, Catal., p. 766, col. 2), two tracts on the love of the Most High (pp. 103-112), and the epistle to the and by Perkins, Journal of the American oriental Society, viii. p. 182 sq. ; reprinted in the Journal of Sacred Literature, January 1865, p. 372 sq. monks who dwelt in the mountains (pp. 113-131). Of metrical writings the same book contains (pp. 339-354) the hymns against Julian the Apostate (pp. 1-20), and the conclusion of the hymns on Paradise (wanting in the Roman ed., vol. iii. 598). Other metrical homilies were published by Zingerle; but far more important, as having a real historical interest, are the Carmina Nisibena, or “Hymns relating to the City of Nisibis,” edited by Bickell in 1866. " These poems, which deal in great part with the history of Nisībis and its bishops and of adjacent cities (such as Anzīt or Hanzīt, Edessa, and Ḥārrān), were composed, according to Bickell (Introd.', p. 6 sq.), between the years 350 and 370 or thereabouts. A large quantity of hitherto unpublished matter is also contained in Lamy, S. Ephraemi Syri Hymni et Sermones, vol. i., 1882, and vol. ii., 1886,— e.g., fifteen hymns on the Epiphany, a discourse on our Lord, several metrical homilies (in particular for Passion week, the Resurrection, and New or Low Sunday), hymns on the Passover or unleavened bread (De Azymis) and on the Crucifixion, acts of Ephraim from the Paris MS. Ancien fonds 144, commentaries on portions of the Old Testament, other metrical homilies, and hymns on the nativity, the Blessed Virgin Mary, Lent, &c. The so-called Testament of Ephraim has been printed in the Opera Graeca, ii. pp. 395-410 (with various readings at p. 433), and again by Overbeck (op. cit., pp. 137-156).
Notwithstanding his vast fecundity and great popularity as a theological writer, Ephraim seems not to have had any pupils worthy to take his place. In the Testament we find mentioned with high commendation the names of Abhā, Abraham, Simeon, Mārā of Aggēl, and Zenobius of Gĕzīrtā, to whom we may add Isaac and Jacob. Two, on the other hand, are named with decided reprobation as heretics, namely, Paulonas (Παuλωvας ) or Paulinus (Παuλωvoς ) and Arwadh or Arwat. Of these, Abhā is cited by later writers and compilers as the author of a commentary on the Gospels, a discourse on Job, and an exposition of Ps. xlii. 9. Paulonas or Paulinus is probably the same who is mentioned by 'Abhd-īshō' as having written “madhrāshē or metrical homilies, discourses against inquirers, disputations against Marcion, and a treatise concerning believers and the creed.” Zenobius, who was deacon of the church of Edessa, according to the same authority, composed treatises against Marcion and Pamphylius (?), besides sundry epistles. He was also the teacher of Isaac of Antioch, of whom we shall speak shortly.
Better known than any of these disciples of Ephraim are two writers who belong to the close of this century and the beginning of the next, Balai and Cyrillōnā. The date of Balai or Balaeus, chorepiscopus (as it seems) of the diocese of Aleppo, is fixed by his being mentioned by Bar-Hebraeus after Ephraim, but before the time of the council of Ephesus (431). Acacius, bishop of Aleppo, whom he celebrates in one of his poems, must therefore, as Bickell says, be the same Acacius who had a share in converting Rabbūlā to Christianity, and died at an extreme old age (it is said 110 years) in 432. His favourite metre was the pentasyllablc, which is known by his name, as the heptasyllabic by that of Ephraim, and the twelve-syllable line by that of Jacob of Sĕrūgh. Some of his poems have been edited by Overbeck in the often cited collection S. Ephraemi Syri, &c., Opera Selecta, pp. 251-336, namely, a poem on the dedication of the newly built church in the town of Ken-neshrīn (Kinnesrīn), five poems in praise of Acacius, the late bishop of Aleppo, the first and eighth homilies on the history of Joseph, specimens of prayers, and a fragment on the death of Aaron. Cyrillōnā composed a poem “on the locusts, and on
(divine) chastisement, and on the invasion of the Huns,” in which he says: “The North is distressed and full of wars; and if Thou be neglectful, O Lord, they will again lay me waste. If the Huns, O Lord, conquer me, why do I seek refuge with the martyrs? If their swords lay me waste, why do I lay hold on Thy great Cross? If Thou givest up my cities unto them, where is the glory of Thy holy Church? A year is not yet at an end since they came forth and laid us waste and took my children captive; and lo, a second time they threaten our land that they will humble it.” Now the invasion of the Huns took place in 395, and this poem must have been written in the following year (396). The few remaining writings of Cyrillōnā
, composed in various metres, have been edited by Bickell in the Z.D.M.G., xxvii. p. 566 sq., and translated by him in Thalhofer’s Bibliothek, 41, pp. 9-63. Bickell is inclined to identify this Cyrillōnā with another writer of the same period, 'Abhsamyā, a priest of Edessa, Ephraim’s sister’s son and a pupil of Zenobius; but his reasons do not seem to us sufficient. The Chron. Edess. (Β.O., i. 401) states that 'Abhsamyā composed his hymns and discourses on the invasion of the Huns in 404; and Dionysius of Tell-Maḥrē (B.O., i. 169) speaks of him in the year 397. Bar-Hebraeus is less precise as to the date: after mentioning the death of Chrysostom (in 407), he adds that about this time Theodore of Mopsuestia died (429) and 'Abhsamyā flourished, who “composed many discourses in the (heptasyllabic) metre of Mär Ephraim” on the invasion of the Huns. That 'Abhsamyā may have taken the name of Cyrillōnā at his ordination is of course possible, but it seems strange that none of these three writers should have mentioned it, if such were the case. On BarHebraeus’s statement regarding the metre which he used in his discourses we do not insist; he might easily make a mistake in such a matter.
During the latter part of the 4th century, too, there lived in the island of Cyprus the abbot Gregory, who appears to have been sent thither from some monastery in Palestine as the spiritual head of the Syriac-speaking monks in the island. He cherished friendly relations with Epiphanius, afterwards bishop of Salamis or Constantia (367-403), and a monk named Theodore. To these are addressed several of his discourses and letters; others are general exhortations to the monks under his charge. The discourses seem to be only portions of a work on the monastic life, which has not come down to us in a complete form, the “book” mentioned by 'Abhd-īshō' in B.O., iii. 1, 191. In the letters he addresses Epiphanius as an older man speaking with authority to a younger; it is to be presumed, therefore, that they were written before Epiphanius became bishop.
With the 5th century commences the native historical literature of Syria. Previous to this time there existed martyrologies and lives of saints, martyrs, and other holy men, drawn up, in part at least, to meet the requirements of the services of the church. Such are, for example, the ancient martyrology in a manuscript of 411; the Doctrine of Addai, in its present shape a product of the latter half of the 4th century; the Hypomnemata of Sharbēl ; and the Martyrdoms of Bar-samyā, Bishop of Edessa, and the Deacon Ḥabbībh, which all belong to about the same period. This sort of legendary writing was carried on to a much later date. The History of Beth Sĕlōkh and its Martyrs, for instance, can hardly have been composed before the 6th century, if so early; and the Acts of März must be still later. No larger collection of such documents had, however, been attempted before the time of Mārūthā, bishop of Maiperkat, 3θ a man of much weight and authority, who was twice sent by the emperor Theodosius II. on embassies to the Persian monarch Yazdegerd I., and presided at the councils of Seleucia or Ctesiphon, under the catholics Isaac and Yabh-alāhā respectively. He is said, too, to have been a skilful physician. To him 'Abhd-īshō' assigns the following works, —“A book of martyrdoms, anthems and hymns on the martyrs, and a translation of the canons of the council of Nicaea, with a history of that council.” The last named of these he undertook at the request of Isaac, catholicus of Seleucia, who died in 416. The canons which pass under his name are those of the council of Seleucia in 410. But his great work was the Book of Martyrs, containing accounts of those who suffered for the Christian faith under Sapor II., Yazdegerd I., and Bahrām V., to which he prefixed two discourses on the glory of the martyrs and on their torments. One of these narratives claims to have been recorded by an eye-witness, Isaiah, the son of Ḥadhbō (or Hadhabhū), of Arzan (Άρζανηνή), one of the Persian king’s horsemen. Portions of this work survive in the British Museum in MSS. of the 5th and 6th centuries, as well as in some of later date both there and in the Vatican. They have been edited by S. E. Assemani in the first volume of the Acta Sanctorum Martyrum, 1748. The commentary on the Gospels mentioned by Assemani is really by Mārūthā, the maphriān of Taghrīth (Tekrīt), who is also the author of the anaphora or liturgy. Of him we shall have occasion to speak afterwards (see p. 838 infra). It is possible too that some of the above-mentioned Acts may belong not to the work of Mārūthā but to that of Aḥā, the successor of Isaac in the see of Seleucia, who likewise wrote a history of the Persian martyrs and a life of his teacher 'Abhdā, the head of the school in the monastery of Dōr-Ḳōnī or Dair-Ḳunnā (where the apostle Mārī was buried).
About this time evil days came upon the Christian church in Syria. Paul of Samosata, Diodore of Tarsus, and Theodore of Mopsuestia had paved the way for Nestorius. The doctrines of these writers were warmly espoused by many of the Syrian theologians; and the warfare raged for many years in and around Edessa, till it ended in the total destruction of the great Persian school by the order of the emperor Zeno (488-489). Rabbūlā, a native of Ken-neshrīn (Ḳinnesrīn), whose father was a heathen priest but his mother a Christian, was converted to Christianity by Eusebius, bishop of Ḳen-neshrīn, and Acacius, bishop of Aleppo. He voluntarily gave up all his property, forsook his wife, and became a monk in the convent of Abraham near his native city. On the death of Diogenes, bishop of Edcssa, he was appointed his successor (411-412). His admiring biographer depicts him as a model bishop, and he certainly appears to have been active and energetic in teaching and preaching and attending to the needs of the poor. In the theological disputes of the day he seems at first to have sided, if not with Nestorius, at least with those who were averse to extreme measures, such as John, patriarch of Antioch, and his partisans; but afterwards he joined the opposite party, and became a warm champion of the doctrines of Cyril, which he supported at the council of Edessa (431). From this time onward he was a staunch opponent of Nestorianism, and even resorted to such an extreme measure as burning the writings of Theodore of Mopsuestia. Hence Ibas in his letter to Mārī speaks of him as “the tyrant of Edessa,” and Andrew of Samosata, writing to Alexander of Hierapolis in 432, complains bitterly of his persecution of the orthodox (i.e ., the Nestorians). He died in August 435. Of the writings of Rabbūlā but little has come down to us. There is a sermon extant in manuscript, enjoining the bestowing of alms on behalf of the souls of the dead and prohibiting all feasting on the occasion of their commemoration. Another sermon, preached at Constantinople, is directed against the errors of Nestorius. There are also extant canons and orders addressed to the monks and clergy of his diocese, and a number of hymns, of which Overbeck has printed some specimens. He also rendered into Syriac Cyril’s treatise De Recta in Dominum nostrum J. C. Fide ad Theodosium Imperatorem from a copy which was sent to him by the author. His biographer intended to translate into Syriac a collection of forty-six of his letters, written in Greek “to priests and emperors and nobles and monks;” but of these only a few remain, e.g., to Andrew of Samosāta, condemning his treatise against the twelve anathemas of Cyril; to Cyril, regarding Theodore of Mopsuestia; and to Gemellinus of Perrhē, about certain monks and other persons who misused the sacred elements as ordinary food.
Rabbūlā was succeeded in the see of Edessa (435) by Īhībhā or Hībhā (Graecized Ibas), who in his younger days had been one of the translators of Theodore’s works in the Persian school. This, with his letter to Mārī the Persian and other utterances, led to his being charged with Nestorianism. He was acquitted by the two synods of Tyre and Beirūt, but condemned by the second council of Ephesus (449), and Nonnus was substituted in his room. He was restored, however, at the end of two years by the council of Chalcedon, and sat till October 457, when he was succeeded by Nonnus, who in his turn was followed by Cyrus in 471. Besides the writings above-mentioned, 'Abhd-īshō' attributes to Ibas “a commentary on Proverbs, sermons and metrical homilies (madhrāshē), and a disputation with a heretic”; but none of these appear to have come down to us.
During this stormy period the name of Acacius, bishop of Amid, is mentioned as the author of certain epistles. The great event of his life, which is referred by Socrates (bk. vii. 21) to the year 422, is thus briefly recorded in the Martyrologium Rοmanum Gregorii XIII. (Malines, 1859), 9th April: “Amidae in Mesopotamia sancti Acatii episcopi, qui pro redimendis captivis etiam ecclesiae vasa conflavit ac vendidit.” The said captives were Persian subjects, who were thus ransomed and sent back to their king and country. Acacius was doubtless a favourer of Nestorianism, for his letters were thought worthy of a commentary by Mārī, bishop of Bēth Hardashēr, the correspondent of Ibas.
About the same time rose one of the stars of Syriac literature, Isaac, commonly called the Great, of Antioch. He was a native of Amid, but went as a young man to Edessa, where he enjoyed the teaching of Zenobius, the disciple of Ephraim. Thence he removed to Antioch, where he lived as priest and abbot of one of the many convents in its immediate neighbourhood. In his younger days he would seem to have travelled farther than most of his countrymen, as it is stated that he visited Rome and other cities. With this agrees what is recorded by Dionysius of Tell-Mahrē as to his having composed poems on the secular games celebrated at Rome in 404, and on the capture of the city by Alaric in 410, which shows that he took a more than ordinary interest in the Western capital. Isaac died in or about 460, soon after the destruction of Antioch by the earthquake of 459, on which he wrote a poem. Isaac’s works are nearly as voluminous and varied as those of Ephraim, with which indeed they are often confounded in MSS. and in the Roman edition. They were gathered into one corpus by the Jacobite patriarch John bar Shūshan or Susanna, who began in his old age to transcribe and annotate them, but was hindered from completing his task by death (1073). Assemani has given a list of considerably more than a hundred metrical homilies from MSS. in the Vatican. Of these part of one on the Crucifixion was edited by Overbeck, and another on the love of learning by Zingerle. But it has been left to Bickell to collect and translate all the extant writings of this Syrian father and to commence the publication of them. Out of nearly 200 metrical homilies his first volume contains in 307 pages only fifteen, and his second brings us in 353 pages only as far as No. 37. Some of these poems have a certain historical value, such as the second homily on fasting, probably written soon after 420, the two homilies on the destruction of the town of Bēth Ḥūr by the Arabs (c. 457), s and the two against persons who resort to soothsayers. Others possess some interest as bearing on the theological views of the author, who combats the errors of Nestorius and Eutyches. One of the longest and most wearisome is a stupendous poem of 2137 verses on a parrot which proclaimed ἅyιoς ὁ θεoς in the streets of Antioch. Another on repentance runs to the length of 1929 verses. In prose Isaac seems to have written very little; at least Bickell mentions only "various questions and answers, an ascetic narrative and ascetic rules.”
Concerning Isaac’s contemporary Dādhā we know but little. He was a monk from the neighbourhood of Amid, who was sent by the people of that city to Constantinople on account of the ravages of war and famine, to obtain remission of the taxes or some similar relief, and was well received by the emperor. He is said to have written about three hundred tracts on various topics connected with the Scriptures and on the saints, besides poems (madhrāshē).
Here, too, we may record the name of Simeon the Stylite, who died in 459 or soon after. The Monophysites contend that he held their theological views, and accordingly we find in a MS. of the 8th century a letter of his to the emperor Leo regarding Theodoret of Cyrrhus, who had come to him and tried to pervert him to the opinions of the Dyophysites, ° and in another MS., of about the same age, three letters to the emperor Leo, to the abbot Jacob of Kaphrā Rĕḥīmā, and to John I., patriarch of Antioch, all tending to prove that he rejected the council of Chalcedon. A third MS., of the 6th century, contains certain “precepts and admonitions” addressed by him to the brethren. There is extant in very old MSS. a Life of Simeon, full of absurd stories, which has been edited by S. E. Assemani in the Acta Sanctorum Martyrum, vol. ii. 268 sq. At the end of it (p. 394) there is a letter by one Cosmas, priest of the village of Panīr, written in the name of his congregation to the Stylite, promising implicit obedience to all his precepts and orders, and requesting his prayers on their behalf; but there is nothing whatever to show that this Cosmas was the author of the Life or had any share in writing it.
About this time we find Dādh-īshō', the catholicus of Seleucia (421-456), composing his commentaries on the books of Daniel, Kings, and Bar-Sīrā or Ecclesiasticus. But the chief seat of Nestorian scholarship and literary activity was still the Persian school of Edessa, where Bar-ṣaumā and other teachers were actively engaged in defending and propagating their peculiar tenets. Bar-ṣaumā, if we may believe the scurrilous Monophysite Simeon of Bēth Arshām, was originally the slave of one Mārā of Bēth Karū, and bore at Edessa the nickname of Sāḥē bēth ḳĕnaiyā. P He was at Edessa in 449, when his expulsion was called for by the rabble. In what yeaι - it actually took place we do not know, but we afterwards find him busy in the East under the catholicus Bābhōyah or Babuaeus (from about 457 to 483) and his successor Acacius (from about 484 to 496), during which period he was bishop of Nisībis. Of his personal character and work this is not the place to attempt to form a judgment; but the reader should beware of placing implicit trust in the statements of bitter and unscrupulous theological opponents like Simeon of Bēth Arshām, Bar-Hebraeus, and Assemani. Bar-ṣaumā does not appear to have written much, as 'Abhd-īshō' mentions only paraenetic and funeral sermons, hymns of the class called turgāmē, a metrical homilies (madhrāshē ) letters, and an anaphora or liturgy.
A fellow-worker with him both at Edessa and Nisībis was Narsai (or Narsē), of Ma'allĕ'thā or Ma'althāyā, whom Simeon of Bēth Arshām calls “the Leper,” whereas his co-sectarians style him “the Harp of the Holy Spirit.” He was especially famous as a writer of hymns and other metrical compositions, his favourite metre being that of six syllables. He fled from Edessa to escape the wrath of the bishop Cyrus (471-498), probably in the year 489, and died at Nisībis early in the next century. Narsai’s works, as enumerated by 'Abhd-īshō', consist of commentaries on the first four books of the Pentateuch, Joshua, Judges, and Ecclesiastes, Isaiah and the twelve minor prophets, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel, twelve volumes of metrical discourses (360 in number), a liturgy, expositions of the order of celebrating the Eucharist and of baptism, paraenetic and funeral sermons, hymns of several sorts, and a book entitled On the Corruption of Morals.
Mārī the Persian has been already mentioned as the correspondent of Ibas. Besides the commentary on the epistles of Acacius (see above, p. 829), he wrote a commentary on the book of Daniel and a controversial treatise against the magi of Nisibis. Acacius, catholicus of Seleucia (c. 484-496), composed discourses on fasting and on the faith, as also against the Monophysites, and translated into Persian for the king Ḳawādh a treatise on the faith by Elisha, bishop of Nisībis, the successor of Bar-saumā. Assemani tries hard to cleanse Acacius from the stain of Nestorianism, but, as Abbeloos remarks, “vereor ne Aethiopem dealbare voluerit; nam omnia tum Jacobitarum tum Nestorianorum monumenta, quae ipse recitat, contrarium testantur.” Mīkhā or Micah, another member of the band of exiled Edessenes, became bishop of Lāshōm. He wrote a commentary on the books of Kings, a discourse on his predecessor Sabhr-īshō', another on a person whose name is written Kntropos, and a tract entitled The Five Reasons of the Mautébhe. ’ To these writers may be added two others,—Yazīdādh, who is also said to ' have belonged to the Edessene school and to have compiled “a book of collectanea (luḳḳāṭē)," and Ara, who wrote a treatise against the magi or Persian priesthood, and another against the followers of Bardesānes with the contemptuous title of Ḥabhsh ō shy ā th ā or “the Beetles.”
The Persian school at Edessa was, as we have already hinted, the chief seat of the study of Greek during the early days of the Syrian literature. Of the most ancient translators we know nothing; but the oldest MSS. are Edessene, viz., the famous MS. in the British Museum, Add. 12150, dated towards the end of 411, and the equally well known codex at St Petersburg, written in 462. The former contains the Recognitiones of Clement, the discourses of Titus of Bostra against the Manichees, the Theophania of Eusebius, and his history of the confessors in Palestine; the latter, the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius. Now, as the text presented by these MSS. has evidently passed through the hands of several successive scribes, it seems to follow that these books were translated into Syriac in the lifetime of the authors themselves, or very soon after, for Eusebius died in 340 and Titus in 371. Very likely the one or the other may have had a friend at the chief seat of Syriac learning who was willing to perform for him the same kind office that Rabbūlā undertook for Cyril. A little later on our information becomes fuller and more exact. Ma'nā, a Persian by race, from the town of Bēth Hardashēr, was resident at Edessa in the earlier part of the 5th century, and is mentioned by Simeon of Bēth Arshām among the distinguished Nestorian scholars whom he holds up to ridicule. His nickname was Shāthē ḳeṭmā, “the Drinker of Ashes.” Ma'nā devoted himself to the task of translating into Syriac the commentaries of Theodore of Mopsuestia during the lifetime of that great theologian, who did not die till 429. He must, however, have withdrawn from Edessa at a comparatively early period, as he was bishop of Persis prior to 420, in which year (the last of his reign) Yazdegerd I. made him catholicus of Seleucia, in succession to Yabh-alähä. He had, it appears, translated a number of books from Syriac into Persian (Pahlavī), and thus probably ingratiated himself with the king. However, he soon fell under the royal displeasure, was degraded from his office, and ordered to retire to Persis, where he resumed his former duties, and so incurred the anger of Yazdegerd’s successor, Pērōz. Ma'nā’s work, the exact extent of which is not known to us, was carried on and completed by other members of the Persian school,—such as Acacius the catholicus and Yazīdādh; John of Bēth Garmai, afterwards bishop of Bēth Sārī (or Serai?), and Abraham the Mede, disciples of Narsai; Mīkhā, afterwards bishop of Lāshōm in Beth Gannai; Paul bar "Ḳaḳai (or Kaki), afterwards bishop of Lādhān in al-Ahwāz; 'Abhshotā (?) of Nineveh, and others, —who are expressly said to have “taken away with them” (appēḳ 'ammĕhōri) from Edessa, and disseminated throughout the East, the writings of Theodore and Nestorius. ® Ibas himself was one of these translators in his younger days (see above, p. 829). About the same time with Ma'nā’s translations began the Aristotelian studies of the Syrian Nestorians. To understand and translate the writings of their favourite Greek theologians, Paul of Samosata, Diodore of Tarsus, Theodore of Mopsuestia, and Nestorius himself, not to mention Theodoret of Cyrrhus, required a considerable knowledge of the Aristotelian logic. Hence the labours of Probus (Πρόβςo , in Syriac Pr ō bhos, Prōbhā, or Prōbhē), who translated and commented on the ∏ ερί ἑ μηvείaς, and probably treated in a similar manner other parts of the Organorι. ° It is not easy to fix his date precisely. 'Abhd-īshō' makes him contemporary with Ibas and another translator named Kūmī. If the Berlin MS. Sachau 226 can be trusted, he was archdeacon and archiater at Antioch. Hoffmann has assigned reasons for supposing him not to be anterior to the Athenian expositor Syrianus (433-450 ?).
Whilst the Nestorians were thus making rapid progress all over the East, another heresy was spreading in the West. Eutyches had found followers in Syria, among others Bar-saumā the archimandrite, a man famous for his piety and asceticism, who represented the abbots of Syria at the second council of Ephesus, and was afterwards condemned by the council of Chalcedon. He died in 458. His life was written by his disciple Samuel, in much the same style as that of Simeon Stylites, and is extant in several MSS. in the British Museum. His memory has always been held in the greatest reverence by the Jacobites. The Armenians, according to Assemani, keep his commemoration on the 1st of February, the Syrians and Copts on the 3d. The decisions of the council of Chalcedon produced an immediate and irreparable breach in the Eastern Church; and the struggle of the rival factions was carried on with desperate fury alike at Constantinople, Antioch, and Alexandria. In Syria the persecution of the Monophysites was violent during the years 518-521, under the emperor Justin, and again in 535 and the following years, under Justinian, when they seemed in a fair way of being completely crushed by brute force.
The first name to be mentioned here, as belonging to both the 5th and 6th centuries, is that of Jacob of Sĕrūgh, one of the most celebrated writers of the Syrian Church, “the flute of the Holy Spirit and the harp of the believing church.” There are no less than three biographies of him extant in Syriac,—the first, by his namesake Jacob of Edessa; the second, anonymous; the third, a lengthy metrical panegyric, said to have been written for his commemoration by a disciple of his named George. This, however, seems, from the whole tone of the composition, to be unlikely, and Bickell is probably right in supposing the author to be George, bishop of Sĕrūgh, a contemporary of Jacob of Edessa. Jacob was born at Kurtam, “a village on the river Euphrates,” probably in the district of Sĕrūgh, in 451. His father was a priest, and, as his parents had been childless for many years, his birth was regarded as a reward for their alms, prayers, and vows. Whether he was educated at Edessa or not, he soon acquired a great reputation for learning and eloquence. He appears to have led a life of quiet work and study, and to have devoted himself in particular to literary composition. He became periodeutes of Ḥaurā in Sĕrūgh, whence we find him writing to the Christians of Najrān, and to the city of Edessa when threatened by the Persians. As periodeutes he is mentioned in eulogistic terms by Joshua the Stylite (503). In 519, when sixty-eight years old, he was made bishop of Batman, the chief town of Sĕrūgh, where he died on 29th November 521. Jacob’s prose writings are not numerous. A liturgy is ascribed to him, and an order of baptism, the former of which has been translated by Renaudot, the latter edited by J. A. Assemani. Further, he composed six festal homilies, one of which has been published by Zingerle, who has also translated the whole of them into German; a discourse showing that we should not neglect or despise our sins; another for the night of Wednesday in the third week of Lent; and some short funeral sermons. To him we also owe a life of Mār Hannīnā (died in 500), addressed to one Philotheus. Of his letters a considerable number have been preserved, particularly in two MSS. in the British Museum, Add. 14587 and 17163, ff. l-48. Of these Martin has edited and translated the three epistles to the monks of the convent of Mār Bassus at Ḥārim, with a reply by the monks, and another letter to Paul, bishop of Edessa, from all of which it is evident that Jacob always was a Monophysite, and continued such to his death. The letter to Stephen bar Ṣūdh-ailē is given, with an English version, by Frothingham; and that to the Himyarite Christians of Najrān has been edited and translated by Schröter in the Z.D.M.G., xxxi. (1877), p. 360 sg. It belongs to the year 519 or 520. According to Bar-Hebraeus, he also wrote “a commentary on the six centuries of Evagrius, at the request of Mär George, bishop of the (Arab) tribes, who was his disciple.” As George, bishop of the Arab tribes, was a contemporary of Jacob of Edessa, this statement seems to rest on some misapprehension; at all events no such work now exists. The paucity of Jacob’s prose writings is more than compensated by a flood of metrical compositions, mostly in dodecasyllabic verse, or the four-syllable line thrice repeated. “He had,” says Bar-Hebraeus, “seventy amanuenses to copy out his metrical homilies, which were 760 in number, besides commentaries and letters and odes (madhrāshē) and hymns (sughyāthā) Of these homilies more than the half have perished, but nearly 300 are still preserved in European collections. Very few of them have as yet been published, though many of them are by no means devoid of interest. Indeed Jacob is on the whole far more readable than Ephraim or Isaac of Antioch.
Very different from the gentle and studious bishop of Sĕrūgh was his contemporary and neighbour, the energetic and fiery Philoxenus of Mabbōgh. Aksĕnāyā or Philoxenus was a native of Tahal, somewhere in Bēth Garmai, and studied at Edessa in the time of Ibas. He was ordained bishop of Hierapolis or Mabbōgh (Manbij) by Peter the Fuller, patriarch of Antioch, in 485, and devoted his life to the advocacy of Monophysite doctrine. Twice he visited Constantinople in the service of his party, and suffered much (as was to he expected) at the hands of its enemies, for thus he writes in later years to the monks of the convent of Sĕnūn near Edessa: “What I endured from Flavian and Macedonius, who were archbishops of Antioch and of the capital, and previously from Cal-endion, is known and spoken of everywhere. I keep silence both as to what was plotted against me in the time of the Persian war among the nobles by the care of the aforesaid Flavian the heretic, and also as to what befell me in Edessa, and in the district of the Aparneans, and in that of the Antiochians, when I was in the convent of the blessed Mār Bassus, and again in Antioch itself; and when I went up on two occasions to the capital, like things were done to me by the Nestorian heretics.” He succeeded at last in getting rid of his enemy Flavian in 512, and in the same year he presided at a synod in which his friend Severas was ordained patriarch of Antioch. His triumph, however, was but short-lived, for Justin, the successor of Anastasius, sentenced to banishment in 519 fifty-four bishops who refused to accept the decrees of the council of Chalcedon, among whom were Severus, Philoxenus, Peter of Apamea, John of Teliā, Julian of Halicarnassus, and Mārā of Amid. Philoxenus was exiled to Philippopolis in Thrace, and afterwards to Gangra in Paphlagonia, where he was murdered about the year 523. The Jacobite Church commemorates him on 10th December, 18th February, and 1st April. Philoxenus, however, was something more than a man of action and of strife: he was a scholar and an elegant writer. Even Assemani, who never misses an opportunity of reviling him, is obliged to own (B.O., ii. 20) “scripsit Syriace, si quis alius, elegantissime, atque adeo inter optimos hujusce lingnae scriptores a Jacobo Edesseno collocari meruit.” Unfortunately scarcely any of his numerous works have as yet been printed. To him the Syriac Church owed its first revised translation of the Scriptures (see above, p. 825); and he also drew up an anaphora ® and an order of baptism. Portions of his commentaries on the Gospels are contained in two MSS. in the British Museum. Besides sundry sermons, he composed thirteen homilies on the Christian life and character, of which there are several ancient copies in the British Museum. Of his controversial works the two most important are a treatise On the Trinity and the Incarnation in three discourses, and another, in ten discourses, showing “that one (Person) of the Trinity became incarnate and suffered”; but there are many smaller tracts against the Nestorians and Dyophysites. His letters are numerous and may be of some value for the ecclesiastical history of his time. Assemani enumerates and gives extracts from several of them, but none of them have as yet been printed in full, with the exception of that to Abū Nafīr of Ḥērtā (al-Hirah), to the monks of Tell- 'Addā, and to the priests Abraham and Orestes of Edessa regarding Stephen bar Südh-ailë.
Contemporary with Jacob of Sĕrūgh and Philoxenus of Mabbōgh was the pantheist Stephen bar Südh-ailë, with whom both of these writers corresponded, and regarding whom the latter wrote the above-mentioned letter to the priests Abraham and Orestes. This man was the author of the work entitled The Book of Hiero-thcus, which he published under the name of Hierotheus, the teacher of St Dionysius of Athens, and exercised a strong influence on the whole pseudo-Dionysian literature. Theodosius, patriarch of Antioch (887-896), wrote a commentary on the Hierotheus. Bar-Hebraeus too made copious extracts from it, which he arranged and illustrated with a commentary chiefly derived from that of Theodosius.
At the same time with Jacob of Sĕrūgh and Philoxenus, and in the same neighbourhood, lived one of the earliest and best of the Syrian historians, the Stylite monk Yēshū' or Joshua. Of him we know nothing but that he originally belonged to the great convent of Zuḳnīn near Āmid, that at the beginning of the 6th century he was residing at Edessa, and that he dedicated his Chronicle of the Persian War to an abbot named Sergius. His approving mention of Jacob and Philoxenus shows that he was a Monophysite. Joshua’s Chronicle would have been entirely lost to us, had it not been for the thoughtfulness of a later writer, Dionysius of Tell-Mahrë (d. 845), who incorporated it with his account of the reign ot Anastasius in the smaller redaction of his own History. It was first made known to us by Assemani (Bibl. Orient., i. 260-283), who gave a copious analysis with some extracts; and it is now generally acknowledged to be one of the best, if not actually the best, account of the great war between the Persian and Byzantine empires during the reigns of Kawādh and Anastasius (502-506). To the indefatigable Abbé Martin belongs the credit of publishing the editio princeps of the Syriac text. The work was written in the year 507, immediately after the conclusion of the war, as is shown by the whole tone of the last chapter; and it is much to be regretted that the author did not carry out his intention of continuing it, or, if he did, that the continuation has perished.
The interest which Jacob of Sĕrūgh took in every branch of literature was the means of bringing into notice a hymn-writer of humble rank, the deacon Simeon Ḳūkāyā, a potter by trade, as his name denotes. This man lived in the village of Gēshīr, not far from the convent of Mār Bassus, and while he worked at his wheel composed hymns, which he wrote down on a tablet or a scroll, as might be convenient. Jacob heard of him from the monks, paid him a visit, admired his hymns, and took away some of them with him, at the same time urging the author to continue his labours. A specimen of these Ḳūkāyāthā has been preserved in the shape of nine hymns on the nativity of our Lord, Brit. Mus. Add. 14520, a MS. of the 8th or 9th century.
About the same time flourished Simeon, bishop of Bēth Arshām, commonly called Dārōshā Phārsāyā or “the Persian Disputant.” This keen Monophysite was one of the few representatives of his creed in the Persian territory, and exhibited a wonderful activity, mental and bodily, on behalf of his co-religionists, traversing the Babylonian and Persian districts in all directions, and disputing with Manichees, Daisanites, Eutychians, and Nestorians. After one of these disputations, at which the Nestorian catholicus Bābhai (498-503) was present, Simeon was made bishop, a dignity which he had declined on several previous occasions. He visited ē
Ḥērtā (al-Ḥīrah) more than once, and died during his third residence at Constantinople, whither he had come to see the empress Theodora. Assemani states, on the authority of Dionysius of Teil-Maḥrē, that he was bishop of Bēth Arshām from 510 to 515, but the Syriac passage which he quotes merely gives the floruit of 510. If, however, the statements of John of Ephesus, who knew him personally, be correct, he was probably made bishop before 503, the date of Bābhai’s decease. His death must have taken place before 548, in which year Theodora departed this life. Besides an anaphora, ® we possess only two letters of Simeon, which are both of considerable interest. The one is entitled On Bar-ṣaumā and the Sect of the Nestorians ; it deals with the origin and spread of Nestorianism in the East, but from the bitterest and narrowest sectarian point of view. The other, which is much more valuable, is addressed to Simeon, abbot of Gabbūlā, and treats of the persecution of the Christians at Najrān by Dhū Nuwās, king of al-Yaman, in the year 523. It is dated 524, in which year the writer was himself at Hērtā (al-Ḥīrah). To the same age and sect as Simeon belonged John bar Cursus (K oυρσoς ), bishop of Telia or Constantina. He was a native of Callinicus (ar-Raḳḳah), of good family, and was carefully educated by his widowed mother, who put him into the army at the age of twenty. He would not, however, be hindered from quitting the service after a few years and becoming a monk. Subsequently, in 519, he was raised to the dignity of bishop of Telia, whence he was expelled by Justin in 521. In 533 he visited Constantinople, and on his return to the East was seized by his enemies in the mountains of Sinjār, and dragged to Nisībis, Rās'ain, and Antioch, where he died in 538, at the age of fifty-five, having been for a year and six days a close prisoner in the convent of the Comes Manassē by order of the cruel persecutor Ephraim, patriarch of Antioch (529-544). His life was written by his disciple Elias (of Dārā?). The Jacobite Church commemorates him on the 6th of February. Canons by John of Telia are extant in several MSS. in the British Museum and elsewhere. The questions put to him by Sergius with his replies have been published by Lamy. His creed or confession of faith, addressed to the convents in and around Telia, is found in Brit. Mus. Add. 14549 (Catal., p. 431), and an exposition of the Trisagion in Cod. Vat. clix. (Catal., iii. 314) and Bodl. Marsh. 101 (Payne Smith, Catal., p. 463, No. 20).
Another of the unfortunate Monophysite bishops whom Justin expelled from their sees (in 519) was Mārā of Āmid, the third bishop of the name. He was banished, with his syncelli and with Isidore, bishop of Ken-neshrīn (Kinnesrīn), in the first instance to Petra, but was afterwards allowed to go to Alexandria, where he died in about eight years. According to Assemani (Bibl. Orient., ii. 52; comp. p. 169), Mārā wrote a commentary on the Gospels. It would seem, however, from a passage of Zacharias Rhetor, that Mārā merely prefixed a short prologue in Greek to a copy of the Gospels which he had procured at Alexandria, and that this MS. contained (as might be expected) the pericope on the woman taken in adultery (John viii. 2-11). That the Syriac translations of the prologue and pericope were made by himself is nowhere stated.
Yet another sufferer at the hands of Justin was John bar Aphtōnyā (Aphthonia, his mother’s name). He was abbot of the convent of St Thomas at Seleucia (apparently in Pieria, on the Orontes), which was famous as a school for the study of Greek literature. Being expelled thence, he removed with his whole brotherhood to Ken-neshrē (the Eagles’ Nest) on the Euphrates, opposite Europus (Jerābīs), where he founded a new convent and school that more than rivalled the parent establishment, for here Thomas of Heraclea, Jacob of Edessa, and others received their training in Greek letters. His Life, written by a disciple, is extant in Brit. Mus. Add. 12174. n According to Dionysius of Tell-Mahrē, as quoted by Assemani (loc. cit. ), he died in 538. He wrote a commentary on the Song of Songs, some extracts from which are preserved in a Catena Patrum in the British Museum (Add. 12168, f. 138a), a considerable number of hymns, and a biography of Severus of Antioch, which must have been his last work, as he survived Severas only about nine months.
We now come to the man who was the real founder of the Jacobite Church in Asia, and from whom the Jacobites took their name, Jacob bar Theophilus, surnamed “Burde'ânâ”, because his dress consisted of a barda'thā or coarse horse-cloth, which he never changed till it became quite ragged. What Assemani could learn regarding him he has put together in the Bibl. Orient., ii. 62-69; since then our sources of information have been largely increased, especially by the publication of the Bcclesiastical History of John of Ephesus by Cureton and of the same writer’s Lives in Land’s Anecd. Syr., ii. On a careful study of these is based Kleyn’s excellent book Jacobus Baradaeüs, de Stichtcr der Syrische Monoj)hysictische Kerk, 1882. Jacob was the son of Theophilus bar Ma'nū, a priest of Tellā or Constantina, and the child of his old age. After receiving a good education, he was entered at the monastery of Pĕsīltā (or the Quarry), close by the village of Gum-mĕthā in Mount īzalā (or īzlā), not far from Tellā. About 527-
528 he and another monk of Tellā, named Sergius, were sent to Constantinople in defence of their faith, and, being favourably received by the empress Theodora, they remained there fifteen years. Meantime the persecutions of the Monophysites, more especially that of 536-537 by Ephraim of Antioch, seemed to have crushed their party, despite all the efforts of the devoted John of Telia and John of Hephaestus. This state of matters excited the religious zeal of al-Ḥārith ibn Jabalah, the Arab king of Ghassān, who came to Constantinople in 542-543, and urged Theodora to send two or three bishops to Syria. Accordingly two were consecrated by Theodosius, the exiled patriarch of Alexandria, namely, Theodore as bishop of Bostra, with jurisdiction over the provinces of Palestine and Arabia, and Jacob as bishop of Edessa, with jurisdiction over all Syria and Asia. From this time forward Jacob’s life was one of ceaseless toil and hardship. He visited in person and on foot almost every part of his vast diocese, consecrating deacons and priests, strengthening the weak, and bringing back those who had erred from the true faith. But to restore the Monophysite Church bishops were necessary, and the consecration of a bishop required the presence of at least three others. Selecting a priest named Conon from Cilicia and another named Eugenius from Isauria, he travelled with them to Constantinople and thence to Alexandria with letters of recommendation from the patriarch Theodosius. At Alexandria Conon was ordained bishop of Tarsus in Cilicia and Eugenius bishop of Seleucia in Isauria, whilst Antoninus and Antonius were consecrated for dioceses in Syria. On his return to Syria other bishops were appointed to sees there and in Asia, among the latter the historian John of Ephesus; and so the work progressed, till at last Jacob’s efforts were crowned by the enthroning of his old friend Sergius as patriarch of Antioch (in 544). Sergius died in 547, and the see remained vacant for three years, after which, by the advice of Theodosius, Jacob and his bishops chose Paul, an abbot of Alexandria, to be their patriarch. Of the subsequent internal strifes among the Monophysites themselves we cannot here speak. The aged Jacob set out once more in the year 578 to visit Damian, patriarch of Alexandria, but died on the Egyptian frontier in the convent of Mär Romanus or of Casion. Here his remains rested in peace till 622, when they were stolen by the emissaries of Zacchseus, bishop of Tellā, and buried with much pomp in the monastery of Pĕsīltā. His commemoration takes place on 28th November, 21st March, and 31st July. Jacob’s life was too active and busy to admit of his writing much. We may mention an anaphora, sundry letters, a creed or confession of faith, preserved in Arabic and a secondary Ethiopic translation, and a homily for the feast of the annunciation, also extant only in an Arabic translation.
Conspicuous among the scholars of this age for his knowledge of Greek, and more especially of the Aristotelian philosophy, was Sergius, priest and archiater of Rās'ain. He was, however, if Zacharias Rhetor may be trusted, a man of loose morals and avaricious. He journeyed in 535 from Rās'ain to Antioch to lodge a complaint before the patriarch Ephraim against his bishop Asȳlus. Just at this time the exiled Severas of Antioch and Theodosius of Alexandria, as well as the Stylite monk Zĕ'ōrā, were living with Anthimus of Constantinople under the protection of the empress Theodora. This alarmed Ephraim, who seems to have found a willing tool in Sergius. At any rate he sent him to Rome with letters to Agapetus, who travelled with him to Constantinople in the spring of 536, and procured the deposition and banishment of the Monophysites. Sergius died at Constantinople almost immediately afterwards, and Agapetus followed him in a few days, wherein John of Ephesus and Zacharias Rhetor clearly see the judgment of Heaven. As a man of letters Sergius was to the Monophysites what Probus was to the Nestorians: he was the first to make them acquainted with the works of Aristotle by means of translations and commentaries. 'Abhd-īshō', it is true, gives Sergius a place in his catalogue of Nestorian writers, and states that he composed “expositions of logic” or “dialectics”; but he merely does so in the same way and on the same grounds that he registers the name of Jacob of Edessa as the author of “annals and a chronicle.” The books were too valuable for him to insist on the heresy of the writers. In the case of Sergius there was an additional reason. The man was well known in the East, many of his works being dedicated to his friend and of the Museo Borgiano and in Brit. Mus. Add. 14650, from which it lias been reedited (with an excellent introduction, translation, and notes) by Guidi, La Lettera di Simeοne, &c., Reale Accademia dei Lincei, 1S81. To this work the reader is referred for all the documents bearing on the subject. pupil Theodore, afterwards Nestorian bishop of Manx or Merv (see p. 837 infra). R.O., iii. 1, 147; Renan, op. eit., p. 29. 1 What remains of Sergius’s labours is mostly contained in a single MS. of the 7th century (Brit. Mus. Add. 14658). Of translations from the Greek we find in this volume the Isagoge of Porphyry, followed by the so-called Tabula Porphyrii, i the Categories of Aristotle, the ∏ερὶ κόσμου πρὸς Αλέξανδρον, and a treatise on the soul,—not the well-known ∏eρt ψυχηs, but a wholly different tractate in five short sections. It also contains Sergius’s own treatise on logic, addressed to Theodore, which is unfortunately imperfect; a tract on negation and affirmation; a treatise, likewise addressed to Theodore, On the Causes of the Universe, according to the views of Aristotle, showing how it is a circle; a tract On Genus, Species, and Individuality ; and a third tract addressed to Theodore, On the Action and Influence of the Moon, explanatory and illustrative of Galen’s ∏e∕>2 κρίσιμων ημερών, bk. iii., with a short appendix “On the Motion of the Sun.” Here too we find part (sections 11, 12) of his version of the Ars Grammatica of Dionysius Thrax, a larger portion (sections 11-20) being contained in Brit. Mus. Add. 14620 (Wright, Catal., p. 802). There is a scholion of Sergius on the term σχήμα, in Brit. Mus. Add. 14660 (see Wright, Catal., p. 1162). In his capacity of physician, Sergius translated part of the works of Galen. Brit. Mus. Add. 14661 contains books vi.-viii. of the treatise De Simplicium Medicamentorum Temperamentis ac Facultatibus (Wright, Catal., p. 1187), addressed to Theodore; and in Brit. Mus. Add. 17156 there are three leaves, two of which contain fragments of the Ars Medica, and one of the treatise De Alimentorum Facultatibus (Wright, Catal., p. 1188). θ As one of the clergy, he wasted his time in making a translation of the works which passed under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite. ° Brit. Mus. Add. 12151 u contains this version with the introduction and notes of Phocas bar Sergius of Edessa, a writer of the 8th century, as appears from his citing Athanasius II. and Jacob of Edessa. In Brit. Mus. Add. 22370 we find Sergius’s own introduction and the commentary of a later writer, Theodore bar Zarūdi.
If Sergius was the Probus of the Monophysites, their Ma'nū was Paul, bishop of Callinicus (ar-Raḳḳah), who, being expelled from his see in 519, betook himself to Edessa and there devoted himself to the task of translating the works of Severas into Syriac. We know for certain that he edited versions of the correspondence of Severas and Julian of Halicarnassus on the corruptibility or incorruptibility of the body of Christ, with a discourse of Severus against Julian; of the treatise against the Additions or Appendices of Julian, and against the last apology of Julian; of that against the Manichees; and of the Philalethes. ® Probably by him are the older translation of the Homiliae Cathedrales and that of the correspondence of Sergius Grammaticus and Severus regarding the doctrine of the two natures in Christ, possibly, too, the translation of the treatise against John Grammaticus of Caesarea and of some other works which are known to us only by a few scattered citations. Hence he is called by the Jacobites Mĕphashshĕḳānā dha-khĕthābhē, “the Translator of Books.”
This seems the proper place to make mention of a most important though anonymous work, the translation of the so-called Civil Laws of the Emperors Constantine, Theodosius, and Leo, which lies at the root of all subsequent Christian Oriental legislation in ecclesiastical, judicial, and private matters. The Syriac version, made from a Greek original, exists in two manuscripts, the older of which undeniably belongs to the earlier part of the 6th century. The work itself appears, according to the researches of Brans (op. cit., pp. 318-319), to date from the time of the emperor Basiliscus (Brit. Mus. Add. 475-477), who was a favourer of the Monophysites; the Syriac translation is ascribed to a Monophysite monk of Mabbōgh or Hierapolis (ibid., p. 155). The Paris MS. probably represents a Nestorian revision of the 9th or 10th century at (Baghdad) Bagh-dādh (ibid., p. 166). The oldest MS. of the secondary Arabic version is dated 1352 (ibid., p. 164), but it has been traced back to the time of the Nestorian lawyer Abu 'l-Faraj 'Abdallah ibn a‘- Taiyib (who died 1043), whether made by him or not (ibid., p. 177). It belongs to the same class as the London Syriac, but is based on a better text, such as that of the fragment in Brit. Mus. Add. 18295 (ibid ., p. 172). Of the secondary Armenian translation the same is to be said as of the Arabic. The oldest MS. of it dates from 1328, but it probably goes as far back as the end of the 12th century (ibid., p. 164). The Georgian version, of which there is a MS. at St Petersburg, is most likely an offshoot of the Armenian.
Another scholar, besides Sergius, whom 'Abhd-īshō' wrongly claims as a Nestorian is Aḥū-dh’emmēh, metropolitan of Taghrīth (Tekrīt). He appears, on the contrary, to have been the head of the Monophysites in the Persian territory. According to Bar-Hebraeus, he was appointed by Christopher, catholicus of the Armenians, to be bishop of Bēth 'Arbāyē, but was promoted by Jacob Burdĕ'ānā in 559 to the see of Taghrīth, where he ordained many priests and founded-two monasteries. Among his numerous converts from heathenism was a youthful member of the royal family of Persia, whom he baptized by the name of George. This excited the anger of Khosrau I. Anōsharwān, who ordered the bishop to be beheaded (2d August 575). As a writer Aḥū-dh’emmēh seems to have been more of a philosopher than a theologian. He wrote against the Persian priesthood and against the Greek philosophers, a book of definitions, a treatise on logic, on freewill in two discourses, on the soul and on man as the microcosm, and a treatise on the composition of man as consisting of soul and body. He is also mentioned by later authors as a writer on grammar.
Somewhat before this time a monk of Edessa, whose name is unknown to us, tried his hand at the composition of a tripartite historical romance, —a history of Constantine and his three sons; an account of Eusebius, bishop of Rome, and his sufferings at the hands of Julian the Apostate; and a history of Jovian or, as the Orientals usually call him, Jovinian, under Julian and during his own reign. The whole purports to be written by one Aplōris or Aplōlārīs (Apollinarius ?), an official at the court of Jovian, at the request of 'Abhdēl, abbot of Sndrūn (?) Māhōzā, with a view to the conversion of the heathens. All three parts contain but a very small quantity of historical facts or dates, and deal in the grossest exaggerations and inventions. Yet the Syriac style is pure, and we gain from the book a good idea of the way in which the author’s countrymen thought and spoke and acted. This romance has been published by Hoffmann, and Nōldeke has given a full account of it, with an abridged translation, in Z.D.M.G., xxviii. p. 263 sq. He places the time of composition between 502 and 532. It is curious to find that this romance must have been known in an Arabic translation to the historian al-Tabarí, who treats it as a genuine historical document. From him it has passed to the Kamil of Ibn al-Athir, i. 283 sq., and the Aklibār al-Bashar of Abu Ί-Fidā (Hist. Anteislamica, ed. Fleischer, p. 84). Ibn Wādih al-Ya'kūbī seems in his Annals to have drawn from the same source, though independently of at-Tabari, and so also al-Mas’ūdī, Murūj adh-Dhahab, ii. 323. BarHebraeus has also made some use of it in his Ghronicon, ed. Bruns and Kirsch, pp. 68-69. No doubt, too, it is the work attributed by ’Abhd-īshō' to the grave ecclesiastical historian Socrates, who, as he says, wrote “a history of the emperors Constantine and Jovinian.”
Another, but much inferior, romance, of which Julian is the hero, is contained in Brit. Mus. Add. 7192, a manuscript of the 7th century. It has been edited by Hoffmann, op. cit., pp. 242-259, and translated by Nōldeke, Z.D.M. G., xxviii. 660-674. We shall not be far wrong in assigning it likewise to the 6th century, though it is probably rather later than that just noticed.
Of real historical value, on the contrary, is the anonymous Chronicon Edessenum, fortunately preserved to us in the Vatican MS. clxiii., and edited by Assemani in B.O., i. 388-417. There is an English translation of it in the Journ. of Sacred Lit., 1864, vol. V. (new ser. ), p. 28 sq. It begins with A.Gr. 180, but the entries are very sparse till we reach A.Gr. 513 (202 A.D.). The last of them refers to the year 540, about which time the little book must have been compiled. The author made use of the archives of Edessa and other documents now lost to us, as well as of the Chronicle of Joshua the Stylite (see above, p. 832). In religious matters he is not a violent partisan, nor given to the use of harsh words, a thing to be noted in the age in which he lived.
Another writer of first-rate importance as a historian is John, bishop of Asia or Ephesus, “the teacher of the heathen,” “the overseer of the heathen,” and “the idol-breaker,” as he ioves to style himself. He was a native of Āmid, and must have been born early in the 6th century, according to Land about 505. He was ordained deacon in the convent of St John in 529, when he must have been at least twenty years of age. In 534 the terrible pestilence of the reign of Justinian broke out, andat that time John was in Palestine, having, doubtless, fled from Āmid to avoid the persecution of the Monophysites by Abraham bar Kill (?) of Telia, bishop of Āmid (from about 520 to 546), and Ephraim bar Appian of Āmid, patriarch of Antioch (529-544), “a much worse persecutor than Paul or Euphrasius.” In 535 we find him at Constantinople, where in the following year, according to BarHebraeus, he became bishop of the Monophysites in succession to the deposed Anthimus. Be this as it may, he was certainly received with great favour by Justinian, whose friendship and confidence he enjoyed for thirty years, and “had the administration of the entire revenues of all the congregations of the believers (i.e., the Monophysites) in Constantinople and everywhere else.” Wishing to root out heathenism in Asia Minor, obviously for political as well as religious reasons, the emperor appointed John to be his missionary bishop. In this task he had great success, to which his faithful friend and fellow-labourer for thirty-five years, Deuterius, largely contributed. He interested himself, too, in the missionary efforts of Julian, Theodore, and Longinus among the Nubians and Alodaei. In 546 the emperor employed him in searching out and putting down the secret practice of idolatry in Constantinople and its neighbourhood. After the death of his patron the fortunes of John soon underwent a change. Bk. i. of the third part of his History commences with the persecution under Justin in 571, in which he suffered imprisonment. His friend Deuterius, whom he had made bishop of Caria, was also persecuted, and died at Constantinople. From this time forward John’s story is that of his party, and the evidently confused and disordered state of his History is fully explained and excused by his own words in bk. ii. 50, where he tells us “that most of these histories were written at the very time when the persecution was going on, and under the difficulties caused by its pressure; and it was even necessary that friends should remove the leaves on which these chapters were inscribed, and every other particle of writing, and conceal them in various places, where they sometimes remained for two or three years. When therefore matters occurred which the writer wished to record, it was possible that he might have partly spoken of them before, but he had no papers or notes by which to read and know whether they had been described or not. If therefore he did not remember that he had recorded them, at some subsequent time he probably again proceeded to their detail; and therefore occasionally the same subject is recorded in more chapters than one; nor afterwards did he ever find a fitting time for plainly and clearly arranging them in an orderly narrative.” Some of the chapters are actually dated at various times from A.Gr. 886 (575 A.D.) to 896 (585). The time and place of his death are unknown, but he cannot have lived long after 585, being then about eighty years of age. His greatest literary work is his Ecclesiastical History in three parts, the first two of which, as he himself tells us, embraced, in six books each, the period from Julius Caesar to the seventh year of Justin II., whilst the third, also in six books, carried on the tale to the end of the author’s life. The first part is entirely lost. Of the second we have copious excerpts in the Chronicle of Dionysius of Tell-Mahrē and in two M SS. in the British Museum. The third has fortunately come down to us, though with considerable lacunae, in Brit. Mus. Add. 14640 (of the 7th century). This book is worthy of all praise for the fulness and accuracy of its information and the evident striving of the author after impartiality. The Syriac style, however, is very awkward and involved, and abounds in Greek words and phrases. Of scarcely less value for the history of his own time is another work entitled Biographies of Eastern Saints, men and women, contained in Brit. Mus. Add. 14647, ff. 1-135. These lives were gathered into one corpus about 569, as appears from the account of the combination of the monasteries of Āmid during the persecution of 521, which was put on paper in 567, and from the history of the convent of St John, extending from its foundation in 389 to 568. To these lives Land has added three more, which are ascribed in MSS. to John, but do not seem to have been included in this collection.
The name of Zacharias Rhetor or Scholasticus, bishop of Mitylēnē in Lesbos, must next be mentioned, for, though a Greek author, his work has entered into the Syriac literature as part of a compilation by a Syrian monk. The Ecclesiastical History of Zacharias seems to have terminated about the year 518, whereas his Syriac translator was writing as late as 569, and even later. The MS. in the British Museum, Add. 17202, cannot be younger than the beginning of the 7th century, and is clearly the compilation of a Monophysite, who used Zacharias as his chief authority in books iii.-vi.; whereas books i., ii., and vii.-xii. were gathered from different sources, such as Moses of Aggēl (about 550-570), Simeon of Bēth Arshām (see above, p. 832), Mārā of Āmid (see above, p. 833), the correspondence of J ulian of Halicarnassus and Severus of āntioch (see above, p. 834), the history of John of Ephesus, &c. In a Syriac MS. in the Vatican (No. cxlv.) we find a series of extracts from this Syriac work (f. 78 sq. ) as a continuation of copious excerpts from the Greek histories of Socrates and Theodoret. The last of these, on the public buildings, statues, and other decorations of the city of Rome, has been carefully re-edited and annotated by Guidi.
We turn from the historians to the ascetic writers of this century, who seem to have been more prized by their countrymen, though far less valuable to us. And first we mention the author who is commonly called John Sābhā or “the Aged,” placing him here on the authority of Assemani (B. O., i. 433), for 'Abhd-īshō' claims him as a Nestorian (B.O., iii. 1, 103). His floruit is given as about 550. His writings consist of short sermons or tracts, exclusively intended for the training and study of monks and coenobites, and a number of letters. 'Abhd-īshō' (Zoe. cZZ.) says: “he composed two volumes, besides mournful epistles, on the monastic life.” They were collected by his brother, who has prefixed a brief apology, at the end of which the reader may find a curious example of affected humility (B.O., i. 435). Two short specimens of the style of “the spiritual old man,” ash-Shaikh ar-ruhāni, are printed in Zingerle’s Monumenta Syr., i. 102-104.
A little junior to John Sābhā was the even more widely known Isaac of Nineveh, to whom the Nestorians also lay claim. His date is fixed, as Assemani points out, by the facts of his citing Jacob of Sērūgh and corresponding with Simeon Stylites the younger or Thaurnastorites, who died in 593. According to the Arabic biography, printed in B.O., i. 444, he was a monk of the convent of Mār Matthew at Mosul, and afterwards became bishop of that city, but soon resigned his office and retired to the desert of Skētē in Egypt, where he composed his ascetic works. According to 'Abhd-ishō' (B.O., iii. 1, 104), Isaac “wrote seven volumes on the guidance of the Spirit, and on the Divine mysteries and judgements and dispensation.” Many of his discourses and epistles have been catalogued by Assemani, B.O., i. 446-460. The MS. Vat. cxxiv. contains the first half of his writings (Catal., iii. 143), and similarly MSS. Brit. Mus. Add. 14632 and 14633. The Arabic translation is divided into four books; the Ethiopie is naturally derived from the Arabic. A Greek version was made from the original Syriac by two monks of St Saba, near Jerusalem, named Patricius and Abraamius, on which see Assemani, B.O., i. 445, and Bickell, Conspectus, p. 26. The only printed specimens of his discourses are two in Zingerle’s Monumenta Syr., i. 97-101.
Another author of this class, but of less mark, is Abraham of Nephtar, who flourished towards the end of the 6th century and in the early part of the 7th. Him too the Nestorians claim as theirs. 'Abhd-īshō' speaks of “various works” of his, but our libraries seem to contain only eight short discourses, the titles of which are given by Assemani, B. O., i. 464. They have been translated into Arabic, and there was also a Persian version of them by Job the monk (B.O., iii. 1, 431).
We record here the name of Moses of Aggēl as being one of those who, after Rabbulā, undertook the translation of the writings of Cyril of Alexandria into Syriac. He made a version of the Glaphyra, at the request of a monk named Paphnutius, from whose letter we learn that the treatise On Worship in Spirit and in Truth had been already translated, whilst from the reply of Moses, as quoted in B. O., ii. 82-83, it is obvious that he was writing after the death of Philoxenus and the chorepiscopus Polycarp. Hence we may place him soon after the middle of the century, say from 550 to 570. Much later he cannot be, because his translation of the History of Moses and āsyath (see above, p. 826) has been admitted into the Syriac compilation that passes under the name of Zacharias Rhetor (see above, p. 835).
Peter of Callinicus (ar-Raḳḳah), Jacobite patriarch of Antioch, 578-591, deserves mention on account of his huge controversial treatise against Damian, patriarch of Alexandria, manuscripts of parts of which, of the 7th and 8th centuries, are extant in the Vatican and the British Museum. Other writings of his are an anaphora, a short treatise against the Tritheists, sundry letters, and a metrical homily on the Crucifixion of our Lord. In the dispute between him and Damian was involved his syncellus and successor Julian, who defended Peter against an attack made upon him by Sergius the Armenian, bishop of Edessa, and his brother John.
Of the numerous Nestorian writers of the 6th century we unfortunately know but little more than can be learned from the catalogue of 'Abhd-īshō'. Their works have either been lost, or else very few of them have as yet reached our European libraries.
The successor of Narsai (above, p. 830) in the school of Nisībis was his sister’s son Abraham, who must have fled from Edessa with his uncle. His principal writings are commentaries on Joshua, Judges, Kings, Ecclesiasticus, Isaiah, the twelve minor prophets, Daniel, and the Song of Songs.
To him succeeded as teacher John, also a disciple of Narsai. He wrote commentaries on Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers, Job, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Proverbs; also controversial treatises against the Magi or Persian priesthood, the Jews, and (Christian) heretics; a book of questions on the Old and New Testaments; and various hymns. If the discourses on the plague at Nisībis and the death of Khosrau I. Anōsharwān be really by him, he was alive as late as 579, in the spring of which year that monarch died.
John was followed by Joseph Hūzāyā, another disciple of Narsai, and the first Syriac grammarian. Of him Bar-Hebraeus observes that “he changed the Edessene (or Western) mode of reading into the Eastern mode which the Nestorians employ; otherwise during the whole time of Narsai they used to read like us Westerns.” He was the inventor of some of the Syriac signs of interpunction, 3θ and wrote a treatise on grammar and another on words that are spelled with the same letters but have different meanings.
Of Mār-abhā the Elder, catholicus from 536 to 552, we have already spoken above as a translator of the Scriptures (p. 826). He was a convert from the Zoroastrian religion, and seems to have been a man of great talent and versatility, as he mastered both the Greek and Syriac languages. Receiving baptism at Hērtā (al-Ḥīrah) from a teacher named Joseph, he went for the purposes of study to Nisībis, and afterwards to Edessa, where he and his teacher Thomas translated into Syriac the liturgy of Nestorius. They visited Constantinople together, and, escaping thence at some risk of their lives, betook themselves to Nisībis, where Mār-abhā became eminent as a teacher. On being chosen catholicus he opened a college at Seleucia and lectured there. Unluckily, he got into controversy, it is said, with the Persian monarch Khosrau I. Anōsharwān (531-579), who banished him to ādharbāigān (Azerbijan) and destroyed the Nestorian church beside his palace at Seleucia. Mār-abhā, however, had the temerity to return to Seleucia, was thrown by the king into prison, and died there. His dead body was carried by one of his disciples to Hērtā, where it was buried and a monastery erected over the grave. He wrote commentaries on Genesis, the Psalms, and Proverbs, and the epistles of St Paul to the Romans, Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, and Hebrews; various homilies; synodical epistles; and ecclesiastical canons. In these last he opposed the practice of marriage at least among the higher orders of the clergy, the bishops and catholics. What is meant by his “canones in totum Davidem” may be seen from such MSS. of the Psalter as Brit. Mus. Add. 7156 and Munich, cod. Syr. 4 (Orient. 147). Hymns of his are also extant.
Under Mār-abhā flourished Abraham of Kashkar (al-ΛVasit), distinguished for his acquaintance with philosophy and for his ascetic virtues. He introduced certain reforms into the Persian monasteries. After living for some time in a cave at Hazzah, he betook himself to Jerusalem and thence to Egypt. Returning to his old haunt, he led the life of a hermit for thirty years, travelling into the far north as a missionary. He died at Hazzah, but his body was secretly removed to his native place Kashkar. He wrote a treatise on the monastic life, which was translated into Persian by his disciple Job the monk.
He must, it would seem, be distinguished from another Abraham of Kashkar, who lived about the same time, and with whom Assemani has confounded him. This Abraham was a student at Nisībis under Abraham the nephew of Narsai. Thence he went to Hērtā (al-Ḥīrah), where he converted some of the heathen inhabitants, visited Egypt and Mount Sinai, and finally settled down as a hermit in a cave on Mount Izlā, near Nisībis, where a great number of followers soon gathered about him and a large monastery was built. He introduced stricter rules than heretofore among the coenobites. His death did not take place till towards the end of the century.
Theodore, bishop of Marti or Merv, was appointed to this see by Mār-abhā in place of David, whom he had deposed, about 540. He seems to have been much addicted to the study of the Aristotelian dialectics, since several of the translations and treatises of Sergius of Rās'ain are dedicated to him. Among his own works there is mentioned “a solution of the ten questions of Sergius.” He also composed a commentary on the Psalms and a metrical history of Mār Eugenius and his companions, who came from Klysma and introduced asceticism into Mesopotamia about the beginning of the 4th century. What may have been the contents of the “liber varii argumenti” which he wrote at the request of Mār-abhā himself it is hard to guess, in the default of any copy of it.
Theodore’s brother Gabriel, bishop of Hormizdshēr, is stated by 'Abhd-īshō' to have written two controversial books against the Manichees and the Chaldaeans (astrologers), as also about 300 chapters on various passages of Scripture which needed elucidation and explanation.
The successor of Mār-abhā in the see of Seleucia was Joseph, in 552. He studied medicine in the West and practised in Nisībis, where he lived in one of the convents. Having been introduced by a Persian noble to the notice of Khosrau I., he cured that monarch of an illness, and ingratiated himself with him so much that he favoured his appointment to the office of catholicus. Of his strange pranks and cruelties as archbishop some account, doubtless highly coloured, may be read in B.O., iii. 1, 432-433, and Bar-Hebraeus, Chron. Eccles., ii. 95-97. He was deposed after he had sat for three years, but he lived twelve years longer, during which time no successor was appointed. He promulgated twenty-three canons, and, according to Elias, bishop of Damascus (893), l0 after his deposition drew up a list of his predecessors in the dignity of catholicus, wherein he would seem to have paid special attention to those who had shared the same fate with himself. At least Bar-Hebraeus (perhaps not a quite trustworthy witness in this case) gives currency to the charge of his having forged the consolatory epistles of Jacob of Nisībis and Mār Ephraim to Pāpā of Seleucia on his deposition.
A little later in the century, under the sway of his successor Ezekiel (a disciple of Mār-abhā and the son-in-law of his predecessor Paul), 567-580, there flourished Paul the Persian, of Dērshar or Dērshahr, a courtier of Khosrau I. Anōsharwān. He is said by Bar-Hebraeus to have been distinguished alike in ecclesiastical and philosophical lore, and to have aspired to the post of metropolitan bishop of Persis, but, being disappointed, to have gone over to the Zoroastrian religion. This may or may not be true; but it is certain that Paul thought more of knowledge than faith, for thus he speaks: “Scientia enim agit de rebus proximis et manifestis et quae sciri possunt, fides autem de omnibus materiis quae remotae sunt, neque conspiciuntur neque certa ratione cognoscuntur. Haec quidem cum dubio est, illa autem sine dubio. Omne dubium dissensionem parit, dubii absentia autem unanimitatem. Scientia igitur potior est fide, et illam prae hac eligendum est.” BarHebraeus speaks of Paul’s “admirable introduction to the dialectics (of Aristotle),” by which he no doubt means the treatise on logic extant in a single MS. in the Brit. Mus. It has been edited, with a Latin translation and notes, by Land.
About this same time Assemani places the periodeutes Bōdh, who is said to have had the charge of the Christians in the remoter districts of the Persian empire as far as India. Among his writings are specified “discourses on the faith and against the Manichees and Marcionites,” as well as a book of “Greek questions,” probably philosophical, bearing the strange title of Aleph Migln. ' a All these have perished, but his name will go down to remote posterity as the translator into Syriac of the collection of Indian tales commonly called Kalīlah and Dimncth. ' a Of this work a single copy has come down to our time, preserved in an Oriental library. A transcript of it was first procured by Bickell, who, in conjunction with Benfey, edited the book (Leipsic, 1876); and since then three additional copies of the same original have been got by Sachau. That Bōdh made his Syriac translation from an Indian (Sanskrit) original, as 'Abhd-īshō' asserts, is wholly unlikely; he no doubt had before him a Pahlavi or Persian version.
Just at this period the Nestorian Church ran a great risk of disruption from an internal schism. Hannānā of Hedhaiyabh, the successor of Joseph Hūzāyā in the school of Nisībis, who had, it is said, a following of 800 pupils, had dared to assail the doctrines and exegesis of Theodore of Mopsuestia and to follow in some points those of Chrysostom. He commenced his work at Nisībis, under the metropolitan Ahā-dh’abhū(hi), by publishing a revised edition of the statutes of the school. During the time of the catholicus Ezekiel (567-580) he brought forward his theological views, which were condemned at a synod held under the next catholicus, īshō'-yabh of Arzōn (581-595), and at another synod presided over by his successor, Sabhr-ishō' (596-604). On the death of this latter a struggle took place between the rival factions, the orthodox Nestorians putting forward as their candidate Gregory of Tell-Besmē, bishop of Nisībis, whilst the others supported Gregory of Kashkar, a teacher in the school of Māhōzē or Selik (Seleucia). The influence of the Persian court decided the matter in favour of the latter, who was a persona grata in the eyes of the queen Shirin and her physician Gabriel of Sliiggār (Sinjār), a keen Monophysite, who naturally availed himself of this opportunity to harm the rival sect of Christians. Gregory was not, however, a partisan of Hannānā, but an orthodox Nestorian, as appears from the account given of the synod over which he presided, by which the Nicene creed was confirmed, the commentaries of Theodore of Mopsuestia approved, and the memory and writings of Bar-saumā vindicated against his assailants. He died at the end of three years (607), and the archiepiscopal see remained vacant till after the murder of Khosrau II. Parwēz in 628, during which time of persecution Bābhai the archimandrite distinguished himself as the leader and guide of the Nestorian Church. In the overthrow of Khosrau the oppressed Nestorians bore a part, more especially Shamtā and Kurta, the sons of the noble Yazdin, who had been the director of the land-tax of the whole kingdom and had amassed an enormous fortune, which the king confiscated. To return to Hannānā, his works, as enumerated by 'Abhd-īshō', are—commentaries on Genesis, Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, the twelve minor prophets, the Gospel of St Mark, and the epistles of St Paul; expositions of the (Nicene) creed and the liturgy; on the occasions of the celebration of Palm Sunday, Golden Friday, rogations, and the invention of the cross; a discourse on Palm Sunday; and various other writings in which he attacked the teaching of Theodore of Mopsuestia, and which the church therefore placed on its index expurgatorius.
The doctrines of Hannānā found a warm champion in Joseph of Hazzā (Arbēl or Irbil), with whom Bābhai the archimandrite entered into controversy. ® He is said to have composed some 1900 tracts, of which 'Abhd-īshō' mentions about a dozen as “profitable,” whence we may conjecture that the rest were more or less deeply tinged with heresy. The chief of them are—on theory (or speculation) and practice; the hook of the treasurer, containing the solution of abstruse questions; on misfortunes and chastisements; on the reasons of the principal feasts of the church; the book of the histories of the Paradise of the Orientals, containing many notices of ecclesiastical history; an exposition of the vision of Ezekiel and of the vision of St Gregory; of the book of the merchant ®; of (pseudo-)Dionysius (the Areopagite); and of the capita scicntiae or heads of knowledge (of Evagrius); besides epistles on the exalted character of the monastic life. Joseph appears to have been made a bishop in his latter days, and to have taken the name of 'Abhd-īshō'; at least a MS. in the India Office (No. 9) contains a tract on Zech. iv. 10 (f. 241b), and three series of questions addressed by a pupil to his teacher, by “Mār 'Abhd-īshō', who is Joseph Hazzāyā” (f. 293a).
The successor of Ezekiel as catholicus of the Nestorians was Ishō'-yabh of Arzōn, 581-595. He was a native of Bēth 'Arbāyē, educated at Nisībis under Abraham (see above, p. 836), and subsequently made bishop of Arzōn (Άρζανηνή). He managed to ingratiate himself with the Persian monarch Hormizd IV. ( 579-590), by whose influence he was raised to the archiepiscopate; and he continued to stand in favour with his son and successor Khosrau II. Parwēz, as well as with the Greek emperor Maurice. Doubtless both found the Christian archbishop a convenient ambassador and agent in public and priVate affairs, for Maurice had given his daughter Maria in marriage to Khosrau. He was also a friend of the Arab king of Ilērtā (al-Ḥīrah), Abu Kābūs Nu'mān ihn al-Mundhir, who had been converted to Christianity, with his sons, by Simeon, bishop of Hērtā, Sabhr-ishō', bishop of Lāshōm, and the monk Ishō ’-zekha. lθ On a pastoral visit to this part of his diocese, the catholicus was taken ill, and died in the convent of Hind (the daughter of Nu'mān) at al-Ḥīrah. Among his works are mentioned a treatise against Eunomius, one against a heretical (Monophysite) bishop who had entered into argument with him, twenty-two questions regarding the sacraments of the church, an apology, and synodical canonsand epistles.
Mēshihā-zēkliā,_ also called Ishō'-zēkhā or Zekha-ishō', was a monk of Mount Izlā. When many of his brotherhood were expelled from their convent by Bābhai the archimandrite, he betook himself to the district of Dāsen, and founded there a monastery, which was henceforth known as Bēth Rabban Zēkhā-īshō' or, for shortness’ sake, Bēth Rabban simply. He was the author of an ecclesiastical history, which 'Abdh-īshō' praises as being “exact.”
Dādh-ishō' was the successor of Abraham of Kashkar as abbot of the great convent on Mount Izlā, apparently during the lifetime of the latter, who lived to a great age (see above p. 837). He composed a treatise on the monastic life and another entitled On Silence in Body and in Spirit, a discourse on the consecration of the cell, besides funeral sermons and epistles. He also translated or edited a commentary on The Paradise of the Western Monks (probably meaning the Paradise of Palladius and Jerome), and annotated the works of Isaiah of Scete. 2θ
Hereabout too is the date of the monk Bar-'idtā, the founder of the convent which bcars_ his* name, a contemporary of Bābhai of Izlā and Jacob of Bēth 'Ābhē. He was the author of a monastic history, which is often quoted by Thomas of Margā, and seems to have been a work of considerable value. He must be distinguished from a later Bar-'idtā, of the convent of Selibhā, near the village of Hēghlā on the Tigris, with whom Assemani has confounded him. ®
In the Bibl. Orient., iii. 1, 230, 'Abhd-īshō' mentions an historian whose name is given by Assemani as Simeon Karkhāyā, with the additional information that he was bishop of Karkliā and flourished under the patriarch Timothy I. about 800. His name seems, however, to have been wrongly read, and he appears to have lived at a much earlier date. At least Elias bar Shināyā speaks in his Chronicle of one Simeon Barkāyā as the author of a chronicle (in at least two books), who wrote in the reign of the Persian king Khosrau II. Parwēz, A. Gr. 902 = 591 a.d.
The name of Sabhr-īshō' the catholicus carries us over into the 7th century. He was a native of Pērōz-ābādh in Bēth Garmai, became bishop of Lāshōm, and was raised to the archiepiscopate in 596 by the favour of Khosrau II. Parwēz. On the murder of his father-in-law Maurice (November 602), Khosrau resolved upon war, and took the field in 604, when he besieged and captured the fortress of Dārā, the first great success in a fearful struggle of twenty-five years. Bar-Hebraeus states that Sabhr-īshō' accompanied him and died during the siege; but other authorities say, doubtless more correctly, that he died at Nisībis. He is said to have been the author of an ecclesiastical history, of which a fragment, relating to the emperor Maurice, was supposed to be extant in Cod. Vat. clxxxiii.; but Guidi has shown that this is incorrect, and that the said fragment is merely an extract from a legendary life of Sabhr-īshō' by some later hand (Z.D.M.G., xl., pp. 559-561). ∙ i
About the same time with Sabhr-īshō', if Assemani be right, we may place Simeon of Bēth Garmai, who translated into Syriac the Chronicle of Eusebius. This version seems unfortunately to be entirely lost.
With the 7th century begins the slow decay of the native literature of the Syrians, to which the frightful sufferings of the people during the great war with the Persians in its first quarter largely contributed. During all those years we meet with scarcely a name of any note in letters, more especially in western Syria. Paul of Telia and Thomas of Harkel were, it is true, labouring at the revised versions of the Old arid New Testaments in Alexandria, hut even there they were scared by the Persian hosts, who took possession of the city in 615 or 616, shortly after the capture of Jerusalem by another army in 614. ® A third diligent worker under the same adverse circumstances was the abbot Paul, who fled from his convent in Syria to escape the Persian invasion, and took refuge in the island of Cyprus. Here he occupied himself with rendering into Syriac the works of Gregory Nazianzen. Of this version, which was completed in two volumes in 624, there are several old MSS. in the British Museum. This Paul was also the translator of the Octoechus of Severus, of which there is a MS. in the British Museum, Add. 17134, dated 675. To this collection he himself contributed a hymn on the holy chrism and a translation of the “Gloria in excelsis.”
The name of Mārūthā is the first that deserves mention here, more, however, on account of his ecclesiastical weight and position than his literary merit. He was a native of Shurzak (?), a village in the diocese of Bēth Nuhādhrē, was ordained priest in the convent of Nardus, lived for twenty years in the convent of Zakkāi or Zacchaeus at Callinicus (ar-Raḳḳah), and went thence to Edessa for purposes of study. On returning to the East, he. resided in the convent of Mār Matthew at Mosul, where he occupied himself with remodelling its rules and orders. He sided with the Monophysite party at the Persian court, and, after the death of the physician Gabriel, found it advisable to retire to 'ākōlā (al-Kùfah). He was eleVated to the dignity of metropolitan ’ bishop of Taghrith in 640, after the establishment of peace between the Greeks and Persians, and was the first real maphriān (maphrēyānā) and organizer of the Jacobite Church in the East, which so rapidly increased. in numbers and influence that he was called upon to ordain bishops for such remote regions as Segestān (Sistān) and Harēw (Herat). Mārūthā died in 649. His life was written by his successor Denhā. Mārūthā compiled a liturgy and wrote a commentary on the Gospels, both of which are sometimes wrongly assigned to the elder Mārūthā of Maiperkat. He was also the author of short discourses ou New (or Low) Sunday, and on the consecration of the water on the eve of the Epiphany, as well as of some hymns and sedrās.
Contemporary with Mārūthā, under the patriarch Athanasius Gammālā (died in 631) and his successor John, flourished Severus Sēbōklit of Nisībis, bishop of the convent of Ken-neshrē, at this time one of the chief seats of Greek learning in western Syria. He devoted himself, as might be expected, to philosophical and mathematical as well as theological studies. Of the first we have specimens in his treatise on the syllogisms in the Analytica Priora of Aristotle, his commentary on the ∏epi epμηveias, and his letters to the priest Aitīlāhā of Mosul on certain terms in the ∏epl epμηveιas, and to the periodeutes Yaunān or Jonas on some points in the logic of Aristotle. Of his astronomical and geographical studies there are a few examples in Brit. Mus. Add. 14538, ff. 153-155, such as whether the heaven surrounds the earth in the form of a wheel or sphere, on the habitable and uninhabitable portions of the earth, on the measurement of the heaven and the earth and the space between them, and on the motions of the sun and moon. In the Royal Library at Berlin there is a short treatise of his on the astrolabe. More or less theological in their nature are his letter to the priest and periodeutes Basil of Cyprus, on the 14th of Nisan, A. Gr. 976 (665 A.n.), a treatise on the weeks of Daniel, and letters to Sergius, abbot of Shiggār (Sinjār), on two discourses of Gregory Nazianzen. lō He is also said to have drawn up a liturgy.
John I., Jacobite patriarch of Antioch, was called from the convent of Eusēbhōnā at Tell-'Addā to the archiépiscopal throne in 631, and died in December 648. Bar-Hebraeus tells us that he translated the Gospels into Arabic at the command of the Arab emir 'Amr ibn Sa'd. He is better known as the author of numerous sedrās and other prayers, whence he is commonly called Yōhan-nān dé-sedhrau(hī), or “John of the Sedrās.” He also drew up a liturgy.
During the second quarter of this century, from 633 to 636, the Muhammadan conquest of Syria took place. The petty Arab kingdoms of the Lakhmites (al-Ḥīrah), the ThaTabites and Kindites, and the Ghassānites, as well as the wandering tribes of Mesopotamia, were absorbed; and the Persians were beaten back into their own country, quickly to be overrun in its turn. The year 638 witnessed the last effort of the Greek empire to wrest Syria from the invaders; the Muslim yoke was no longer to be shaken off. The effects of this conquest soon begin to make themselves manifest in the literature of the country. The more the Arabic language comes into use, the more the Syriac wanes and wastes away; the more Muhammadan literature flourishes, the more purely Christian literature pines and dwindles; so that from this time on it becomes necessary to compile grammars and dictionaries of the old Syriac tongue, and to note and record the correct reading and pronunciation of words in the Scriptures and other books, in order that the understanding of them may not be lost.
Among the small band of Monophysite scholars who made themselves conspicuous during the latter half of the 7th century the most famous name is that of Jacob of Edessa. He was a native of 'En-dēbhā (the Wolf’s well), a village in the district of Gumyah (al-Jūmah), in the province of Antioch. The date of his birth is not mentioned, but it may have been about 640 or a little earlier. He studied under Severas Sēbōklit at the famous convent of Ken-neslirē, where he learned Greek and the accurate reading of the
Scriptures. Thence he went to Alexandria, but we are not told how long he remained there. After his return to Syria he was appointed bishop of Edessa in 679-680; but Bar-Hebraeus says that he was ordained by the patriarch Athanasius II., 684-687, which seems more probable, as they were intimate friends. If he was appointed in 684, the three or four years for which he held this office would terminate in 687-688, in which latter year Julian llōmāyā (or “the Soldier ”) was elected patriarch. Apparently Jacob was very strict in the enforcement of canonical rales, and thereby offended a portion of his clergy. He would seem to have appealed to the patriarch and his fellow-bishops, who were in favour of temporizing; whereupon Jacob burnt a copy of the rales before the gate of Julian’s convent, at the same time crying aloud, “I burn with fire as superfluous and useless the canons which ye trample under foot and heed not.” He then betook himself to the convent at Kaisūm, a town near Samosāta, and Habbibh was appointed to Edessa in his stead. After a while the’ monks of Eusēbhōnā invited Jacob to their convent, and there he taught for eleven years the Psalms and the reading of the Scriptures in Greek, the study of which language had fallen into desuetude. Owing to disputes with some of the brethren “who hated the Greeks,” he left this house and went to the great convent at Tell- 'Addā, where he worked for nine years more at his revised version of the Old Testament. On the death of Habbibh Jacob was recalled to Edessa, where he resided for four months, at the end of which time he returned to Tell-'Addā to fetch his library and pupils, but died there on 5th June 708. In the literature of his country Jacob holds much the same place as Jerome among the Latin fathers. He was, for his time, a man of great culture and wide reading, being familiar with Greek and with older Syriac writers. Of Hebrew he probably understood veιy little, but he was always ready, like Aphraates, to avail himself of the aid of Jewish scholars, whose opinion he often cites. He appears before us as at once theologian, historian, philosopher, and grammarian, as a translator of various Greek works, and as the indefatigable correspondent of many students who sought his advice and assistance from far and near. As a theologian, Jacob wrote commentaries on the Old and New Testaments, which are cited by later authors, such as Dionysius bar Salibi and Bar-Hebraeus, as well as in the large Catena of the monk Severus, further, scholia on the whole Scriptures, of which specimens may be found in S. Ephraemi Opera Syr. a and in Phillips’s Scholia on some Passages of the Old Testament (18 64). His discourses on the six days of creation are extant at Leyden and Lyons. This was his latest work, being unfinished at the time of his death; it was completed by his friend George, bishop of the Arab tribes. Like many other doctors of the Syrian Church, Jacob drew up an anaphora or liturgy, and revised the liturgy of St James, the brother of our Lord. He also composed orders of baptism, of the consecration of the water on the eve of the Epiphany, and of the solemnization of matrimony, with which we may connect his translation of the order of baptism of Severas and the tract upon the forbidden degrees of affinity. The Book of Treasures contained expositions of the Eucharistic service, of the consecration of the water, and of the rite of baptism, probably identical with or similar to those which are found separately in MSS. He likewise arranged the horologium or canonical hours of the ferial days, and drew up a calendar of feasts and saints’ days for the whole year. Of his numerous canons, those addressed to the priest Addai have been edited by Lamy, Dissert, de Syrorum Fide, &c., p. 98 sq., and De Lagarde, Reliquiae Diris Eccles. Antiquissimae, p. 117 sq. Under this head we may mention the Scholion de Diaconissis earumque Munere (Catal. Vah, ii. 319) and the Scholion de Foribus Ecclesiae dum Ordinationes aut alia Sacra celebrantur occludendis (Cod. Vat. ceciv., in Mai, Scriptt. Vett. Nova Coll., v.). Jacob also composed homilies, of which a few survive in manuscript: for example—(1) that Christians are not to offer a lamb after the Jewish fashion, nor oxen and sheep, on behalf of the deceased, nor to use pure wine and unleavened bread in celebrating the Eucharist; (2) against the use of unleavened bread; (3) against the Armenians as Dyophysites, and because they offend against these doctrines; (4) against certain impious men and transgressors of the law of God, who trample under foot the canons of the church. To these may be added his metrical discourses on the Trinity and the incarnation of the word and on the faith against the Nestorians. Whether the treatise De Causa omnium Causarum really belongs to him can hardly be decided till it has been published. The remarks in the Bodleian Catalogue, p. 585, note, point to a writer of much later date. The loss of Jacob’s Chronicle is greatly to be regretted; only a few leaves, all more or less mutilated, remain to us in Brit. Mus. Add. 14685. The author’s design was to continue the Chronicle of Eusebius on the same plan, from the twentieth year of the reign of Constantine down to his own time. The introduction was divided into four sections, the first of which treated of the canon of Eusebius and the error of three years in his calculation; the second of the dynasties contemporary with the Roman empire, but omitted by Eusebius; the third explained what dynasties were coordinated by Jacob with the Roman empire; and the fourth contained separate chronologies of each of these dynasties. Then followed the chronological canon, beginning with Olympiad cclxxvi. The last monarchs mentioned in the mutilated MS. are Heraclius I. of Constantinople, Ardashēr III. of Persia, and the caliph Abu Bakr. This work, which was finished by the author in 692, has been extensively used by subsequent Syrian historians, both Jacobite and Nestorian, such as Bar-Hebraeus, Elias bar Shīnāyā, &c., and it is therefore admitted by 'Abhd-īshō' into his list of books (B. O., iii. 1, 229). As a translator of Greek works Jacob deserves notice, not so much on account of any Aristotelian labours of his, lθ as because of his version of the Homiliae Cathedrales of Severns, a work of capital importance, which he finished in 701. u He also revised and corrected, with the help of Greek MSS., the abbot Paul’s version of the OctoecFus of Severas (see above, p. 838). The statement of Bar-Hebraeus that Jacob translated the works of Gregory Nazianzen seems to be erroneous. He merely retouched, we believe, the version of the abbot Paul (see above, p. 838), to which he probably added notes, illustrative extracts from the writings of Severas, and Athanasius’s redaction of the Συναγωγή καί eξηyησιs Ιστοριών appended to the homily In Sancta Lumina. i He made the Syriac version of the history of the Rechabites as narrated by Zosimus, which he is said to have translated from Hebrew into Greek and thence into Syriac. Of philosophical writings of his we may specify the Enchiridion, a tract on philosophical terms. The metrical composition on the same subject contained in two Vatican MSS. may perhaps also be by him. As a grammarian Jacob occupies an important place in Syriac literature. Nestorian scholars, such as Narsai and his pupils, more especially Joseph Hūzāyā (see above, p. 836), had no doubt elaborated a system of accentuation and interpunction, which vies in minuteness with that of the Jews, and had probably begun to store up the results of their studies in Massoretic MSS. of the Bible, like those of which we have already spoken (above, p. 826). But Jacob was the first to give a decided impulse to these pursuits among the Western Syrians, and to induce the monks of Eusēbhōnā and Tell-'Addā to compile Massoretic MSS. like those of their brethren in the East, and to pay attention to minute accuracy in the matter of the diacritical points and the signs of interpunction. Hence we usually find appended to such MSS. of the Jacobite schools the epistle of Jacob to George, bishop of Sērugh, on Syrian orthography, and a tract by him on the pointing of verbal and nominal forms and on the signs of interpunction and accentuation, besides a tract of apparently earlier date on the same signs, with a list of their names, by Thomas the deacon. Further, Jacob’s acquaintance with the Greek language and Greek MSS. suggested to him a striking simplification of the system of vowel-points which was now probably beginning to be introduced among the Easterns. He saw that all the vowel-sounds of the Syriac language, as spoken by the Edessenes, could be represented by means of the Greek vowel letters, a style of pointing which would be far clearer to the reader than a series of minute dots. Accordingly he, or his school, put A for a, 0 for ō (d), E for e, H for i, o∕ for u ; and this system has been adhered to by the Western Syrians or Jacobites since his time. Jacob wished, however, to go a step farther, and sought to introduce a reform for which his countrymen were not prepared. The constant perusal of Greek MSS. had accustomed him to see the vowels placed on an equality with the consonants as an integral part of the alphabet; and, considering how much this contributed to clearness of sense and facility of reading, he desired to see the like done in Syriac. For this purpose he himself designed a set of vowel-signs, to be written on a line with and between the consonants; and for the purpose of making this invention known to his countrymen he wrote a Syriac Grammar, in which he used them largely in the paradigms. The innoVation, however, found no favour, and the work was supposed to be utterly lost, until a few fragments (partly palimpsest) were simultaneously discovered by the present writer and Dr Neubauer. Finally, amid all his labours as priest and bishop, teacher and author, Jacob found time to correspond with a large number of persons in all parts of Syria; and these epistles are often among his most interesting writings. One of his principal correspondents was John the Stylite of the convent of Litarba (Alτaρβa plur., but also Aιτapyον, Abτaρyοv ; al-Athārib, near Aleppo); others were Eustathius of Dārā, Kyrīsōnā of Dārā, the priest Abraham, the deacon George, and the sculptor Thomas. To the priest Addai he wrote on the orders of baptism and the consecration of the water, to the deacon Bar-hadh-bē-shabbā against the council of Chalcedon, to the priest Paul of Antioch on the Syriac alphabet, in reply to a letter about the defects of the said alphabet as compared with the Greek, and to George, bishop of Sērugh, on Syriac orthography (see above).
After Jacob we may name his friend Athanasius of Balad, who also studied under Severus ∙Sebōkht at Ken-neshrē, and devoted himself to the translation of Greek works, philosophical and theological, in the convent of Mār Malchus in Tūr 'Abhdin or at Nisībis, where he for a time officiated as priest. He was advanced to the patriarchate in 684 and sat till 687 or 688. ° In the year 645 he translated the Isagoge of Porphyry, with an introduction, which seems to be chiefly derived from the preface of the Greek commentator Ammonius; and he also edited a version of an anonymous Isagōge, which is found in Brit. Mus. Add. 14660. At the request of Matthew, bishop of Aleppo, and Daniel, bishop of Edessa, he undertook in 669 a translation of select epistles of Severus of Antioch, and of these the sixth book survives in two MSS. He also busied himself with Gregory Nazianzen, as is evidenced by a scholion introductory to the homilies and the version of the fivvayoiyp κai eζτgyησLS Ιστοριών i The only other writings of his with which we are acquainted are an encyclical letter, prohibiting Christians from partaking of the sacrifices of their Muhammadan rulers, and a couple of sedrās. ®
Contemporary with him, and probably an alumnus of the same school, was the translator of the poems of Gregory Nazianzen, in the year 655, whom Assemani calls Senorinus Chididatus of Āmid. He has, however, misread the name. In the MS., as Professor Guidi informs us, it stands, not.
The former part of the name seems to be Ιαroυαptos; the latter is apparently (as Guidi suggests) a corruption of Kαrōiōαros. Whether the poems in Brit. Mus. Add. 18821 and 14547 belong to the translation of Januarius Candidatus or not, we cannotatpresent determine.
Another scholar of note at this time is George, bishop of the Arab tribes, the pupil and friend of Athanasius II. and Jacob. He was ordained, it would seem, in 687 or 688, two mouths after the death of Athanasius, and is said to have died in the first year of Athanasius III., who was consecrated in April 724. His diocese comprised the 'Akōlāyē or Arabs of 'ākōlā (al-Kūfah), the Tū'āyē (?), the Tanūkh, the Tha'labites, the Taghlibites, and in general the nomad Arabs of Mesopotamia. Of his works the most important is his translation of the Organon of Aristotle, of which there is a volume in the British Museum, Add. 14659,comprising, in its imperfect condition, the Categories, ∏epl eρμηveιas, and the first book of the Analytics, divided into two parts, with introductions and commentaries. Of this version a specimen has been edited by Hoffmann, De Hermeneuticis, &c., p. 22 sq., besides small fragments at pp. 30, 38, 45, and 53. He also compiled a large collection of scholia on the homilies of Gregory Nazianzen, which exhibits a wide range of reading, and completed the Hexaemeron of Jacob of Edessa (see above, p. 839). His other writings are—a commentary, or more likely scholia, on the Scriptures, cited in the Catena of Severus and by Bar-Hebraeus in his Aι<sar Raze ; a short commentary on the sacraments of the church, treating of baptism, the holy Eucharist, and the consecration of the chrism; a homily in twelve-syllable metre on the holy chrism in two shapes; another homily on solitary monks, in heptasyllabic metre; and a treatise on the Calendar in twelve-syllable metre, cited by Elias bar Shināyā. Like Jacob of Edessa, he carried on an extensive literary correspondence, of which some specimens have luckily been preserved in Brit. Mus. Add. 12154, ff. 222-291, dated from 714 to 718. Several of them are addressed to John the Stylite of Litarba, one of whose letters to Daniel, an Arab priest of the tribe of the Tū'āyē, is appended, f. 291. The most important of them is one written to the priest and recluse Yēshū' of Innib (near 'Azāz, north of Aleppo), part of which relates to Aphraates and his works (see above, p. 827). lθ
Contemporary with these scholars was Daniel of Salah (a village north-east of Midyād in Tur-Abdin), 2θ who wrote commentaries on the Psalms and Ecclesiastes. The former was in three volumes, and was composed at the request of John, abbot of the convent of Eusebius at Kaphrā dhē-Bhārthā (Kafr al-Bārah, near Apamea).
There is an abridgement of it in Brit. Mus. Add. 17125, f. 81 sq. The commentary on Ecclesiastes is known to us only from the extracts preserved in Severus’s Catena. · 3
Regarding George, bishop of Martyropolis, we can add little or nothing to the scanty information collected by Assemani. This scholar has, however, made a mistake in placing him so early as “circa annum Christi 580.” About a century later would probably be nearer the mark. Two of his pupils were Constantine, bishop of Harrān, who may have flourished during the latter part of the 7th century, and his successor Leo, who lived at the very end of it and the beginning of the 8th. 2β Constantine wrote several controversial works against the Monophysites, viz.,—an exposition of the creeds of the councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon, a treatise against Severus (of Antioch), an “anagnōsticon” concerning an alleged mutilation of the Trisagion, and a reply to a treatise of Simeon (II., Monophysite bishop of Harrān). Leo’s only literary effort appears to have been a letter to the Jacobite patriarch Elias, whom we have next to notice.
Elias belonged originally to the Dyophysite party in the Syrian Church, but was converted to the Monophysite sect by the study of the writings of Severus. He was a monk of the convent of Gubbā Barrāyā, and for eighteen years bishop of Apamea (or Fāmiyah), before he was raised to the patriarchate of Antioch (in 709). He died in 724. The only work of his known to us is an Apology, addressed to Leo, bishop of Harrān, in answer to a letter from him asking the reasons for Elias’s change of creed. It was probably written during the time of his episcopate. In it, besides George of Martyropolis and Constantine of Harrān, he cites John of Damascus, among whose Greek works is a tract against the Jacobites, addressed to the bishop Elias in defence of Peter, archbishop of Damascus.
Lazarus of Bēth Kandasā is known to us only through his disciple George of Bētli Nēkē as the compiler of a commentary on the New Testament, of which there are two volumes in the British Museum, the one (Add. 14682) containing the Gospels of St John and St Mark, the other (Add. 14683) the third and fourth parts σf the Pauline epistles from Galatians to Hebrews. The commentary on the epistles is merely an abridgement of Chrysostom; in that on the Gospels use is also made of Jacob of Serūgh, and occasionally of Theodore of Mopsuestia, Cyril of Alexandria, and Ephraim. He also quotes a passage of nine lines from the Sibylline oracles (ed. Friedlieb, viii. 287-296). At the end of part third of the Pauline epistles there is in Add. 14683 a chronological section, terminating with the accession of the 'Abbāsi caliph al-Mahdi in 775, which probably fixes the date of the author. Much later he cannot have lived, as Add. 14683 is a MS. of the 10th century, having been presented to the convent of St Mary Deipara in Skete by the patriarch Abraham (or Ephraim), who sat from 977 to 981. In Brit. Mus. Add. 18295 there is a scholion by Lazarus explanatory of a passage in (pseudo-)Dionysius Areopagita.
About this time too may have lived the chronicler Daniel bar Moses the Jacobite, who is cited as an authority by Elias bar Shināyā in the years 122, 127, and 131 of the Hijrah, i.e., from 740 to 749 A.I).
Theophilus bar Thomas of Edessa is stated by Bar-Hebraeus to have been by religious profession a Maronite. He was addicted to the study of astrology, and an anecdote is related by BarHebraeus of his correspondence with Hasanah, the concubine of the caliph al-Mahdi, which fixes the date of his death in 785. He was the author of a history, which Bar-Hebraeus cites and commends. He also translated into Syriac “the two books of the poet Homer on the conquest of the city of Ilion.” This evidently means a version of the entire Iliad and Odyssey, incredible as it may appear. De Lagarde was, we believe, the first to discover citations of this work by Jacob, or Severas, bar Shakkō, bishop of Mār Matthew, who died in 1241. Cardāhī (Liber Thesauri, p. 40) quotes the rendering of Iliad ii. 204, but without saying where he found it. Theophilus is often spoken of as the first to use the Greek vowels in pointing Syriac words, but we have seen above (p. 840, note 21) instances of their occurrence in MSS. older than his time. Perhaps, however, he may have finally settled some details of the system and assisted in bringing it into more general use.
George of Bē'elthān, a village near Hims, was educated at the convent of Ken-neshrē, and became the syncellus of Theodore, bishop of Samosāta, tvho prophesied great things of him. On the death of Athanasius III. a synod was held at Mabbōgh, at the close of 758, when a large majority of those present raised George, who was only a deacon, to the see of Antioch. At the instigation of the anti-patriarch David, the caliph al-Mansūr scourged him and threw him into prison, where he remained for nine years, till he was set free by his son and successor al-Mahdi. He was taken ill during one of his diocesan journeys at Kalaudiyah (Claudia), in the far north of Mesopotamia, and died in the convent of Bar-saumā near Melitēne (Malatyah), in 790. During his long imprisonment George is said to have composed many discourses and metrical homilies. He was also the author of a commentary on the Gospel of St Matthew, the unique but imperfect MS. of which has been described by Assemani in Catal. Vat., iii. 293.
Cyriacus, a man of Taghritan family and a monk of the convent of Bizōna, otherwise called the convent of the Pillar, near Callinicus, was ordained patriarch of the Jacobites in 793, and died at Mosul in 817. The record of his troubled life may be read in Bar-Ilebraeus’s Chron. Eccles., i. 329 sq.; B.O., ii. 116, 341-344. In the year 798 he endeavoured to effect a union with the Julianists, whose patriarch was Gabriel, and a creed was drawn up and signed by them and sundry other bishops, which has been preserved in Brit. Mus. Add. 17145, f. 27b. Besides an anaphora and canons, he wrote a homily on the parable of the vineyard and a synodical epistle on the Trinity and the incarnation addressed to Mark, patriarch of Alexandria, which is extant only in Arabic.
The number of Nestorian writers during the 7th and 8th centuries is relatively much larger than that of Jacobite, and the loss of many of their writings is much to be regretted, especially those bearing on ecclesiastical and political history. Want of space compels us, however, to omit many names which we would otherwise gladly have noticed.
Our list begins with the name of Bābhai the archimandrite, called Bābhai the Elder, to distinguish him from the later Bābhai bar Nesībhnāyē. He was a native of the village of Bēth 'Aināthā or Bā-'aināthā in Beth Zabhdai, and succeeded Mār Dādhdshō' (see above, p. 838) as abbot of the great convent on Mount Izlā. On the death of the catholicus Gregory of Kashkar in 607 (see above, p. 837) a time of persecution followed, during which the Nestorian Church was ruled by Bābhai with a firm and skilful hand. The bishops of Nisībis, Hedhaiyabh, and Karkhā dliē-Bēth Selōkh (or Bēth Garmai) entrusted him with the duties of inspector of convents, with the express object of rooting out all who held the doctrines of the Mésalléyāné, as well as the followers of Ilannānā of Hedhaiyabh and Joseph of Hazzā. So well did he acquit himself in this post that, after the murder of Khosrau II. in 628, when his successor Kawādh II. Shērōē permitted a synod to be held, he would have been unanimously elected to the dignity of catholicus, had he only given his consent, in default of which the choice fell upon Ishō'-yabh of Gēdhālā (628-644). As a writer Bābhai would seem to have been very prolific, for no less than eighty-three or eighty-four works are set down to his account. The principal of these, as enumerated by 'Abhd-īshō', are—a commentary on the whole text of Scripture; on the commemorations of the Blessed Virgin Mary and St John, and other commemorations and feasts throughout the year; on the reasons of the celebration of Palm Sunday and of the festival of the holy cross; a discourse on the union (of the two natures in our Lord, against the Monophysites); exposition of the Centuries of Evagrius; exposition of the discourses of Mark the monk (on the spiritual law); rules for novices; canons for monks; (controversial) letters to Joseph Hazzāyā; history of Diodore of Tarsus and his followers; on Matthew the wanderer, Abraham of Nisībis, and Gabriel Katrāyā. To these must be added an account of the life and martyrdom of his contemporary
George, a convert from Zoroastrianism, whose heathen name was Mihrāmgushnasp, and a few hymns, contained in Nestorian psalters.
The successor of Bābhai was, as we have just mentioned, Ishō*- yabh II. of Gēdhālā, who was elected in 628 and sat till 644. He studied at Nisībis, and was bishop of Balad at the time of his eleVation to the patriarchate. He was sent in 630 by Bōrān, the daughter of Khosrau II., on an embassy to Heraclius, the emperor of Constantinople, whom he met at Aleppo, and to whom, we are told, he restored the holy cross, which had been carried off by the Persians when they captured Jerusalem in 614. Foreseeing the downfall of the enfeebled Persian monarchy, Ishō'-yabh prudently made conditions on behalf of his flock with the Muhammadan ruler, it is said through the intervention of a Christian chief at Najrān and of Yēshū' (or Ishō'), bishop of that place. The deed or ordinance containing the terms of agreement was renewed and confirmed by Omar ibnal-Khattāb. According to 'Abhd-īshō', the principal writings of Ishō'-yabh were a commentary on the Psalms and sundry epistles, histories, and homilies. A hymn of his occurs in the Nestorian psalter Brit. Mus. Add. 14675.
Sāhdōnā of Halamùn, a village in Bētli Nuhādlirē, was educated at Nisībis, and became a monk under Mār Jacob, the founder of the famous convent of Bēth 'Ābhē. Here he composed a treatise in two volumes on the monastic life, besides a history of his master, and a funeral sermon on him. He became bishop of Māhōzē dh’Arēwān in Bēth Garmai, and was one of the Nestorian clergy who accompanied Ishō ’-yabh of Gēdhālā on his embassy to Heraclius. Whilst halting at Àpamea, Ishō'-yabh, John the Nestorian bishop of Damascus, and Sāhdōnā tried their hand at converting the monks of a neighbouring (Jacobite) convent, the result of which was that Sāhdōnā himself was converted, and afterwards wrote several heterodox works. This incident caused much scandal in the East, as may be seen from the numerous letters which Ishō ’- yabh of Hēdhaiyabh, another member of the embassy, found it necessary to write upon the subject.
This Ishō'-yabh was the son of a wealthy Persian Christian named Bas-tuhmag, of Kuphlānā in Hēdhaiyabh or Adiabēnē, who used often to visit the convent of Bēth 'Abhē. He was educated at the school of Nisībis, became bishop of Mosul, and afterwards metropolitan of Hazzā (Arbēl or Irbil) and Mosul. The chief event of his rule at Mosul seems to have been that he hindered the Jacobites from building a church in that city, notwithstanding that they were supported by all the weight and influence of the Taghritans. Λ Bar-Hebraeus declares that he bribed right and left to effect this. He was one of those who accompanied Ishō'-yabh of Gēdhālā on his embassy to Heraclius, and stole a very costly and beautiful casket, containing relics of the Apostles, from a church at Antioch, the which he conveyed (apparently quite openly and shamelessly) to the convent of Bēth 'Ābhē. On the death of Mār-mmēh (who sat 644-647) he was eleVated to the dignity of catholicus, which he held till 657-658. In his desire to do something for the promotion of learning he wished to found a school in the convent of Bēth 'Abhē, where he had built a magnificent church, but the abbot Kām-ishō' and the rest of the lazy brotherhood would have none of this, and preferred to quit the convent and withdraw to the neighbouring village of Herpā in Saplisāphā. Hereupon the catholicus gave up this part of his plan and built his college in his father’s village of Kuphlānā (or Kulpānā). Soon afterwards he found himself involved in another and more serious dispute with Simeon, the metropolitan of Rēv-Ardashēr in Persis and of the Katrāyē, who refused obedience to him as his diocesan; and this led to a lengthy correspondence, regarding which see B.O., iii. 1, 127-136. His works, as enumerated by 'Abhd-īshō', are— Huppakh Hushshabhe or “Refutation of (Heretical) Opinions,” written for John, metropolitan of Bēth Lapāt, and other controversial tracts, consolatory and other discourses, various hymns, ® and an exhortation to certain novices. He arranged the Hudhrā or service-book for the Sundays of the whole year, for Lent, and for the fast of Nineveh, and drew up offices of baptism, absolution, and consecration. He also wrote a history of the monk Ishō'-sabhran, a convert from the religion of Zoroaster and a Christian martyr. A large collection of his letters is extant in Cod. Vat. clvii. (Catal., iii. 299), a judicious selection from which would be worth printing.
'Ànān-īshō' of Hēdhaiyabh and his brother Ishō'-yabh were fellow-students at Nisībis with Ishō'-yabh III., and afterwards entered the great convent on Mount īzlā. lshō'-yabh subsequently became bishop of Kārdāliyābhādh; but 'Anān-īshō' was seized with a fit of wandering, and visited Jerusalem, whence he went on to the desert of Skete in Egypt, and made himself thoroughly acquainted with the lives and habits of its monks, regarding whom he had read so much in the Paradise of Palladius. On his return he soon forsook the great convent, because of dissensions that had arisen in it, and betook himself with his brother to the convent of Bēth ’ābhē, where he devoted himself to study, and so distinguished himself that he was employed by 1shō'-yabh III. to assist in arranging the Hudhrā (see above). 'ānān-ishō' wrote a volume of philosophical divisions and definitions, with a copious commentary, dedicated to his brother, and compiled a work on the correct reading and pronunciation of difficult words in the writings of the fathers, thus following in the footsteps of Joseph Hūzāyā (see above, p. 836), and anticipating Jacob of Edessa and the monks of the convent of Karkaphēthā (see above, p. 826). He was also the author of a treatise entitled Liber Canonum de Aequilitteris, i.c., on the different pronunciation and signification of words that are spelt with the same letters. This has been published, with the additions of Honain ibn Ishāk of al-Ḥīrah (died in 873) and another compiler, by Hoffmann, Opuscula Nesloriana, pp. 2-49. His greatest work, however, was a new recension or redaction, in two volumes, of the Paradise of Palladius and Jerome, with additions collected by himself from other sources and from his own experience. This he compiled at the request of the patriarch George, and it became the standard work on the subject in the Nestorian convents.
John of Bēth Garmai (Gannēkāyā), called John the Elder, was a disciple of Jacob of Bētli 'ābīiē, and his successor as abbot of that convent. After a few months, however, lie secretly fled from Bēth 'Abhē and betook himself to a hill near Dākūkā in Bēth Garmai, where the monastery of Ezekiel was soon afterwards built, in which he ended his days. His works, according to 'Abhd-īshō', are—a collection of heads of knowledge or maxims, rules for novices, a brief chronicle, histories of Abraham, abbot of the great convent on Mount Izlā, of the monk Bar-'idtā, and of Mār Khodhāhwai, the founder of the convent of Bēth Ilālē (near al- ∏adithah, by Mosul), with a discourse and hymns on the last named.
Sabhr-īshō' Rustam was a native of a village called Hērem, in Hēdhaiyabh, and entered the great convent on Mount īzlā under the abbot Narsai, the successor of Bābhai. Here, at the request of the monks, he wrote a tract on the occasion of the celebration of Golden Friday, and also a large volume of disputations against heresies and other theological questions. He migrated thence, perhaps along with Narsai, to Bēth 'Ābhē, where, however, he resided only for a short time, being invited by the monks of Bēth Ḳūḳā to become their prior. Here he composed eight discourses ou the dispensation of our Lord, the conversion of the various countries by the Apostles, and on continence and the monastic life. Further, at the request of Mar Kardagh, the syncellus of Ishō'- yabh III., he wrote lives of Ishō'-Zēkliā (of the convent of Gassā), of Ishō'-yabh III., of Abraham abbot of Bēth 'Abhē, who came thither from the convent of Zēkhā-īshō', of Kām-īshō' abbot of Bēth 'Ābhē, of Abraham of Nethpar, of rabban 1yōbh (or Job) the Persian, and of the elder Sabhr-īshō', the founder of the convent of Bēth Ḳūḳā, to which may be added the lives of the brothers Joseph and Abraham.
George, the pupil and successor of Ishō'-yabh III., was a native of Kaplirā in Bēth Gēwāya, a district of Bēth Garmai. His parents were wealthy, and owned two farms in the neighbourhood of the convent of Bēth 'Ābhē. Being sent to take charge of these, he got acquainted with the monks and ultimately joined their body. When Ishō'-yabh was promoted to the patriarchate, he appointed George to be metropolitan of Hēdhaiyabh in his stead; and, on the death of his friend, George succeeded to the patriarchate in 661, and sat till 680. As an author he is not of much account, having written merely a few homilies, with hymns and prayers for certain occasions, and published nineteen canons. His too in all probability is the “epistola dogmatica” contained in Cod. Vat. cccclvii., p. 360.
Elias, bishop of Maru or Merv, was one of those who were present at the death of Ishō'-yabh III. and elected George as his successor. He compiled a Catena patrum (Malléphānūthā dhé-Kadhrnāye) on the four Gospels, and wrote commentaries on Genesis, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, Ecclesiasticus, Isaiah, the twelve minoι∙ Prophets, and the epistles of St Paul. His letters would probably be of some interest to us, and the loss of his ecclesiastical history, to which 'Abhd-īshō' applies the epithet of “trustworthy,” is to be regretted.
Of Daniel bar Maryam we can only say that he flourished under Ishō'-yabh III. of Hēdhaiyabh, about 650. He wrote an ecclesiastical history in four volumes, and an explanation of the calendar. The history is cited by George of Arbēl in the 10th century for the date of the destruction of Jerusalem.
Gabriel, surnamed Taurethā, was a native of the province of Siarzūr or Shahrazūr. He studied at Nisībis, and then entered the great convent on Mount īzlā, where he took part in a controversy with the Monophysite monks of the convent of Kartamin (near Mārdīn) and against Sāhdōnā. He afterwards migrated to Bēth 'Abhē, where he wrote a life of Mār Narsai the abbot, an account of the martyrs of Tūr Bērā’īn or Tūr Bērēn (ādhurparwā, Mihrnarsai, and their sister Māhdokht, in the ninth year of Sapor II.), a homily for the washing of the feet, &c. He became abbot of Bēth 'Abhē under the catholicus Henān-ishō' I. (686-701).
Henān-ishō' I., called the Elder or the Lame (hēghīrā), was appointed catholicus in 686, in succession to John bar Mārtā, the follower of George. He was opposed by Ishō'-yabh of al-Basrah, whom he threw into prison, but afterwards released on his making his submission. A more serious rival was John of Dūsen, bishop of Nisībis, suraamed the Leper, who curried favour with the caliph 'Abd al-Malik ibn Marwān and procured the deposition of Henān-ishō', whose place he occupied for nearly two years. Bar-Hebraeus adds that John put him for some days into prison, and then sent him off to a convent among the mountains in charge of two of his disciples, who threw the luckless catholicus down a precipice and left him there for dead. Luckily he was found by some shepherds, who took good care of him, though lie seems to have been lame ever after. On his recovery he withdrew to the convent of Yaunān (or Jonah) near Mosul, where he stayed till the death of his rival. He continued to rale the Nestorian Church till 701, and was buried in the convent of Jonah. Besides composing homilies, sermons, and epistles, he was the author of a life of Sergius Dēwādliā of Daraukarah or Daukarah, near Kashkar, who was a contemporary of his. He also wrote a treatise chi the Twofold Use of the School or university, as a place of moral and religious training as well as of instruction in letters, and a commentary on the Analytics of Aristotle.
Presumably to this century belong two ecclesiastical historians who are known to us only from the Chronicle of Elias bar Shīnāyā. Alāhā-zekhā is quoted by him in regard to events that took place in 594-596 and 606. Perhaps he is identical with that Alāhā-zēkhā to whom we find Ishō'-yabh III. writing a letter whilst he was yet bishop, consequently in the earlier part of the century. Mikhā or Micah is cited by Elias as an authority for the years 594- 596 and 605. β
Passing over into the 8th century, we may mention David of Bēth Rahban, that is, of the convent of Zēkliā-īshō', afterwards of Bēth 'ābhē, who was the author of a monastic history, called The Little Paradise, which is frequently cited by Thomas of Margā. Its first chapter contained anecdotes relative to George Neshrāyā, Nathaniel, and other monks of Bēth 'Abhē, who lived under Hēnān-īshō' I., towards the end of the 7th century. David attained episcopal dignity, though we do not know the name of his see. He wrote also a geographical treatise Upon the Limits of Climates or Countries, and the Variations of the Days and Nights.
Bābhai bar Nēsibhnāyē (so called because his parents were of Nisībis) flourished under the catholicus Sēlībhā-zēkliā (713-729), the successor of Hēnān-īshō'. He was a native of Gēbhīltā or Jabiltā in Tirhān, and is described by Thomas of Margā as being a tall, powerful man, with a magnificent voice, gentle and modest, and learned withal. He devoted himself to the reformation of the musical services of the Nestorian Church, which had fallen into sad confusion, and founded many schools, more particularly in the dioceses of Hēdhaiyabh and Margā, with the special object of promoting the study of church music. The most important of these were at Kēphar-'Uzzēl in Hēdhaiyabh and Bāshūsh in the district of Saphsāphā in Margā. āt the former he took up his residence, but used to visit and inspect the others once a year. In his latter years he returned to Gēbhīltā and died there. He wrote discourses and homilies of different kinds, numerous hymns for various occasions, histories (of holy men), and letters.
Bar-Sāhdē of Karkhā dhē-Bhēth Sēlōkh flourished, according to Assemani, under the catholicus Pethiōn (731-740). 14 ' Abhd-īshō' states that he wrote an ecclesiastical history and a treatise against the Zoroastrian religion.
When Bābhai the Nisibene was residing at Kēphar-'Uzzēl (see above), a woman from the village of Bēth Saiyādhē brought to him her crippled son, whom she called “only half a man,” and begged him to bless him. “This is no half man,” was the gentle monk’s reply; “this shall be a father of fathers and a chief of teachers; his name and his teaching shall be famous throughout the whole East.” This was Abraham bar Dāshandādh “the Larne,” whose works are enumerated by 'Abhd-īshō' as follows —a book of exhortation, discourses on repentance, letters, the book of the king’s way, a disputation with the Jews, and a commentary on the discourses of Mark the monk. He was teacher at the school of Bāshūsh in Saphsāphā, where the future catholicus Timothy I. received his early education, as well as his successor Ishō' bar Nōn and Abū Nūh al-Anbāri.
Mār-abhā, the son of Bērīkh-sebhyānēh, was a native of Kashkar, and became bishop of that town. From this see he was promoted in 741 to the dignity of catholicus. At first he had some difficulties with the emir Yusuf ibn 'Omar ath-Thakafi, but these were settled by a visit to al-Kūfah, which gave him an opportunity of going also to al-Ḥīrah, where he was received with great honour by the aged bishop John Azrak. He shortened his name to Abliā, the better to distinguish himself from his predecessor Mār-abhā I. (see above, p. 836). In the sixth year of his patriarchate he got into a dispute with his clergy about the management of the school at Seleucia, and withdrew to Kashkar, but returned to Seleucia before his death, which took place in 751, at the age, it is said, of 110 years. According to Bar-Hebraeus, “he was learned in ecclesiastical works and in dialectics, and composed a commentary on Theologus (i.e., Gregory Nazianzen), and all his time he was occupied in reading books.” 'Abhd-īshō' mentions him in two places, as Abhā of Kashkar in B.O., iii. 1, 154, and as Abhā bar Bērīkh-sebhyānēh at p. 157. In the former place he ascribes to him expositions, letters, and a commentary on the whole Dialectics of Aristotle, and in the latter, The Book of the Generals, or Military Governors, and other works.
Simeon bar Tabbàkliē (the Butcher) of Kashkar held the important post of chief officer of the treasury under the caliph al-Mansūr, 2, about the same time that his co-religionist George bar Bōkht-ishō' of Gundē-Shābhōr or Beth Lāpāt, in Khūzistān, was court physician. The only work of his mentioned by 'Abhd-īshō' is an ecclesiastical history, which from his position at Baghdādh doubtless contained much valuable information.
Sūrēn or Sūrīn, bishop of Nisībis and afterwards of Halah or Holwān in Bēth Mādhāyē, was raised to the patriarchate in 754, by the orders of Abān, the Muhammadan emir of al-Madāūn (Seleucia). The bishops appealed to the caliph 'Abdallāh as-Saffāh, and not in vain. The election was cancelled, and Jacob, bishop of Gundē-Shābhōr, was chosen in his place (who sat till 773). Their continued squabbles, however, so irritated al-Mansūr that he gave orders to throw them both into prison. Sūrēn made his escape in time, but Jacob was caught and spent the next nine years under strict ward, during which time “the second Judas,” 'Isā ihn Shahlāthā or Shahlāfā, deacon and physician, trampled the rights of the bishops under foot. On his release, he sent Sūrēn as bishop to al-Basrah, at the request of some of the Christian citizens, but others would not receive him, and their quarrels once more attracted the caliph’s attention. Sūrēn, warned by 'Isā, again made his escape, but was captured by the emir of al-Madāīn and died in prison. The epithet of Mephashshekānā, given to him by Αbhd-ishō', implies that he was either a commentator on Scripture or a translator of Greek works into Syriac. He composed a treatise against heretics, but the remainder of 'Abhd-īshō's text is not clear in Assemani’s edition.
Cyprian, bishop of Nisībis, was appointed to that see in 741. The great event of his life was the building of the first Nestorian church in the Jacobite city of Taghrith, just outside of the walls, on the banks of the Tigris. The idea originated with Sēlībhā-zēkliā, bishop of Tirhān, but would never have been realized, had not Cyprian allowed the Jacobites to resume possession of the church of Mār Domitius at Nisībis. The building of the church at Taghrith was commenced in 767. Cyprian also erected a magnificent church at Nisībis, on which he expended the sum of 56,000 dinārs, in 758-759. After this time it so happened that the patriarchs of the three Christian sects, Theodoret the Malkite, George the Jacobite, and Jacob the Nestorian, were all in prison at once at Baghdādh. 'Isā the physician, thinking to improve the occasion to his own advantage, wrote to Cyprian that the caliph al-Mansūr coveted some of the golden and silver vessels of the church of Nisībis, hinting at the same time in pretty plain language that a handsome present to himself might be of some avail at this juncture. Cyprian had the courage to go straight to Baghdādh with the letter and show it to the caliph, who disgraced 'Isā and confiscated his property, releasing the three patriarchs at the same time. Cyprian died in 767. According to 'Abhd-īshō', he wrote a com- mentary on the theological discourses of Gregory Nazianzen and various forms of ordination.
Timothy I. was a native of Hazzā in Hēdhaiyabh, and had been a pupil of Abraham bar Dāshandādh (see above, p. 844) at the school of Bāshūsh in Saphsāphā. He became bishop of Bētli Bāghēsh, and stood well with the Muhammadan governor of Mosul, Abu Mūsā ibn Mus'ab, and his Christian secretary Abu Null al-Anbari. On the death of Henan-ishō ’ II. in 779, several persons presented themselves as candidates for the dignity of catholicus. Timothy got rid of ishō'-yabh, abbot of Beth 'ābhē, by pointing out to him that he was an old man, unfit to withstand his younger rivals, and by promising, if he himself were successful, to make him metropolitan of Hēdhaiyabh, which he afterwards did. Meantime Thomas of Kashkar and other bishops held a synod at the convent of Mār Pethiōn in Baghdādh, and elected the monk George, who had the support of ’Isa the court physician; but this formidable opponent died suddenly. Having by a mean trick obtained the support of the archdeacon Bērōē and the heads of the various colleges, Timothy managed at last to get himself appointed catholicus, about eight months after the death of his predecessor. He still, however, encountered strong opposition. Ephraim metropolitan of Guudē-Sliābhōr, Solomon bishop of al-Ḥadīthah, Joseph metropolitan of Marii or Merv, Sergius bishop of Ma'allēthāyā, and others held a synod at the convent of Bēth Hālē, in which they made Rustam, bishop of Henāithā, metropolitan of Hēdhaiyabh in place of Ishō'-yabh, and excommunicated Timothy, who retorted with the same weapon and deposed Joseph of Merv. Joseph brought the matter before the caliph al-Mahdi, but, failing to gain any redress, in an evil hour for himself became a Muhammadan. Once more Ephraim summoned his bishops to Baghdādh and excommunicated Timothy for the second time, with no other result than a counter-excommunication and some disgraceful rioting, which led to the interference of 'Isā and the restoration of peace. Timothy was duly installed in May 780. He made the bishops of Persia subject to the see of Seleucia, and appointed over them one Simeon as metropolitan with orders to enforce a stricter rule than heretofore. In his days Christianity spread among the Turks, aud the khākān himself is said to have become a convert. Timothy’s disgraceful response to the caliph ar-Rashid in the matter of the divorce of Zubaidah may be seen in B.O., iii. 1,161. He is said to have died in 204 a.h. =819-820 A.D., or 205 = 820-821; but, if he really was catholicus for forty-three years, his death cannot have taken place till 823. 'Abhd-īshō' informs us that Timothy wrote synodical epistles, a volume on questions of ecclesiastical law, another on questions of various sorts, a third containing disputations with a heretic, viz., the Jacobite patriarch George, about 200 letters in two volumes, a disputation with the caliph al-Mahdi or his successor al-Hādī (on matters of religion), and an astronomical work on the stars. Bar-Hebraeus adds hymns for the dominical feasts of the whole year and a commentary on Theologus (Gregory Nazianzen).
In this century too we may place the two following historical writers, whose names and works are unfortunately known to us only through the mention made of them by a later annalist. (1) An anonymous author, the abbot of the great convent (of Abraham on Mount Izlā), cited by Elias bar Shīnāyā in his Chronicle under the years 740-741. (2) An ecclesiastical historian called Pethiōn, identified by Baethgen (Fragmente, p. 2, No. 6) with the catholicus of that name. This is, however, impossible, because the catholicus died in 740, whereas the Ecclesiastical History of Pethion is cited by Elias bar Shīnāyā under the years 765 and 768.
We conclude our enumeration of the Nestorian writers of this century with the name of another historian. In the Bibl. Orient., iii. 1, 195, the text of 'Abhd-īshō', as edited by Assemani, speaks of a writer named Ishō'-denah, bishop of Kasrā. Other MSS., however, read Basra (al-Basrah), which is confirmed by Elias bar Shīnāyā in Baethgen’s Fragmente, p. 2. The variation Dēnah-īshō' in BarHebraeus (Chron. Eccles., i. 334) is of no consequence, and even there the MSS. differ. Besides the usual homilies of sorts and some metrical discourses, he wrote an introduction to logic, a work entitled The Book of Chastity, in which he collected lives and anecdotes of holy men aud founders of monasteries, and an ecclesiastical history in three volumes. This valuable work is known to us only by a few citations in Bar-Hebraeus and Elias bar Shīnāyā. Those in Bar Shīnāyā range from 624 to 714, but the extract in Bar-Hebraeus brings us down to 793.
Reverting now to the Jacobite Church, we shall find that the number of its literary men in the 9th century is not large, though some of them are of real importance as theologians and historians.
Dionysius Tell-Maḥrāyā was, as his surname implies, a native of Tell-Mahrē, a village situated between ar-Raḳḳah and Hisn Mas-lamah, near the river Balikh. He was a student in the convent of Ken-neshrē, and on its destruction by fire and the consequent dispersion of the monks, he went to the convent of Mār Jacob at Kaisūm, in the district of Samosāta. He devoted himself entirely to historical studies, which he seems to have carried on in peace and quiet till 818. The patriarch Cyriacus (see above, p. 842) had got entangled in a controversy with the monks of Cyrrhus and Gubbā Barrāyā about the words lahmā sléémaiyānā (“the heavenly bread”), &c., in the Eucharistic service, which ended in the malcontents setting up as anti-patriarch Abraham, a monk of the convent of Kartamīn. After the death of Cyriacus in 817, a synod was held in June 818 at Callinicus (ar-Raḳḳah), in which, after considerable discussion, Theodore, bishop of Kaisūm, proposed the election of Dionysius, which was approved by most of those present, including Basil I., maphriān of Taghrith. The poor monk was accordingly fetched to Callinicus, received deacon’s orders on Friday in the convent of Estūnā or the Pillar, priest’s orders on Saturday in the convent of Mār Zakkāi or Zacchaeus, and was raised to the patriarchate in the cathedral on Sunday the first of ābh, 818, the officiating bishop being Theodosius of Callinicus. Abraham and his partisans, seeing their hopes disappointed, maintained their hostile attitude, which led afterwards to the usual scandalous scenes before the Mushm authorities. Immediately after his installation, Dionysius commenced a visitation of his vast diocese, going first northwards to Cyrrhus, thence to Antioch, Kirkēsion (Kirkīsiyā), the district of the Khābhūr, Nisībis, Dārā and Kēphar-tūtiiā, and so back to Callinicus, where he enjoyed the protection of 'Abdallāh ibn Tāhir against his rival Abraham. He did not on this occasion visit Mosul and Taghrith, because the maphriān Basil thought the times unfavourable. In 825 ’Abdallāh ibn Tāhir was sent to Egypt to put down the rebellion of Obaidallāh ibn as-Sarī, where he remained as governor till 827. His brother Muhammad ibn Tāhir was by no means so well disposed towards the Christians, and destroyed all that they had been allowed to build in Edessa. Wherefore the patriarch went down into Egypt to beg the emīr 'Abdallāh to write to his brother and bid him moderate his zeal against the church, which he accordingly did. On his return from Egypt the patriarch had troubles with Philoxenus, bishop of Nisībis, who espoused the cause of the antipatriarch Abraham; and he then went to Baghdādh in 829 to confer with the caliph al-Ma’mūn as to an edict that he had issued on the occasion of dissensions between the Palestinian and Babylonian Jews regarding the appointment of an exiliarch. During his stay in the capital disputes took place among the Christians, which ended in a reference to the caliph and in the deposition of the bishop Lazarus bar Sābhēthā. From Baghdādh Dionysius proceeded to Taghrith and Mosul, and nominated Daniel as maphriān in place of the deceased Basil. In 830 al-Ma’mūn made an attack on the Greek territory, and the patriarch tried to see him on his return at Kaisūm, but the caliph had hurried on to Damascus, whither Dionysius followed him and accompanied him to Egypt on a mission to the Bashmuric Copts, who were then in rebellion. Any efforts of his and of the Egyptian patriarch were, however, of no avail, and the unfortunate rebels suffered the last horrors of war at the hands of al-Ma’mūn and his general Afshin. On this journey Dionysius saw and examined the obelisks of Heliopolis, the pyramids, and the Kilometer. In 83ō he revisited Taghrith to settle some disputes between the Taghritans and the monks of Mār Matthew at Mosul, and to ordain Thomas as maphriān in place of the deceased Daniel. In the same year he went once more to Baghdādh to salute al-Ma’mūn’s successor al-Mu'tasim, and met there the son of the king of Nubia, who had come on the same errand. The latter years of Dionysius were embittered by the oppressions and afflictions which the Christians had to endure at the hands of the Muhammadans. He died on 22d August 845, and was buried in the convent of Ken-neshrē. He left behind him one great work, his Annals, covering the whole period of the world’s history from the creation down to his own time. Of this there were two recensions, a longer and a shorter. The longer redaction was dedicated to John, bishop of Dārā, and came down at all events to the year 837, or perhaps a little later. Assemani has published an extract from it, which he was fortunate enough to find in Cod. Vat. cxliv., f. 89, in the B.O., ii. 72-77. It would seem to have been written, after the manner of John of Asia, in a series of chapters dealing with particular topics. The shorter redaction is extant in a single imperfect MS., Cod. Vat. clxii., and is dedicated to George, chorepiscopus of Āmid, Euthalius the abbot (of Zuknin ?), Lazarus the periodeutes, the monk Anastasius, and the rest of the brotherhood. It is arranged by successive years, and ended with the year of the Greeks 1087 = 776 a.d. The author has adopted a division into four parts. Part first extends from the creation to the reign of Constantine. Here the chief authority is the Chronicorum Canonum Liber of Eusebius, supplemented by some extracts from other Greek sources, such as Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History and the Chronographia of Julius Africanus. With these Dionysius has incorporated matter derived from sundry other works, e.g., the Chronicle of Edessa (see above, p. 835), the Mearrath Gazzē or “Cave of Treasures,” Pseudo-Callisthenes’s Life of Alexander the Great, the story of the seven sleepers, and Josephus’s Jewish lVar (see above, p. 823). The second part of Dionysius’s Chronicle reaches from Constantine to Theodosius II., and here he principally followed the Ecclesiastical History of Socrates (compare Cod. Vat. cxlv.). The third part extends from Theodosius II. to Justin II. Here Dionysius acknowledges himself chiefly indebted to his countryman John of Asia (see above, p. 835), but has also incorporated the short Chronicle of Joshua the Stylite (see above, p. 832) and the epistle of Simeon of Both Arshām on the Himyarite Christians (see above, p. 832). The fourth part, coming down to 158 A.η. =774-775 a.d., is his own compilation, partly from such written documents as he could find, partly from the oral statements of aged men, and partly from his own obserVation. Assemani has given an account of the whole work, with an abridgement or excerpt of the fourth part, in the Bibl. Orient., ii. 98-116; but the labours of Dionysius of Tell-Maḥrē will never be appreciated as they deserve till the appearance of the edition which is now being prepared by Guidi.
Under Dionysius flourished his brother Theodosius, bishop of Edessa, also a student of Greek at Ken-neshrē. Bar-Hebraeus makes mention of him as accompanying Dionysius to Egypt in 825-826 to complain to 'Abdallah ibn Tahir of the wrongs of the Christians. At an earlier period (802-803), when only a priest, he translated the homily of Gregory Nazianzen on the miracles of the prophet Elijah, and Bar-Hebraeus says that he also rendered into Syriac the poems of the same author.
A friend of his was Antonius, a monk of Taghrith, surnamed “the Rhetorician.” He was the author of a treatise on rhetoric in seven chapters, of a work on the good providence of God in four discourses, and of various encomia, thanksgivings, consolatory epistles, and prayers, in many of which he makes use not merely of metre but also of rime.
Lazarus bar Sābhetbā, called as bishop Philoxenus and Basil, ruled the see of Baghdādh in the earlier part of the 9th century. As mentioned above, he was deposed by Dionysius in 829. He compiled an anaphora or liturgy, and wrote an exposition of the office of baptism. The latter may be only part of a larger work on the offices of the church, from which Bar-Hebraeus may have derived the information regarding the musical services quoted by Assemani, B.O., i. 166.
Contemporary with these was John, bishop of Dārā, to whom Dionysius dedicated the larger recension of his history (see above). He compiled a liturgy, and was the author of the following works — a commentary on the two books of Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita De Hierarchia Caelesti et Ecclesiastica, ' 16 four books on the priesthood, four books on the resurrection of the dead, and a treatise on the soul.
Nonnus was an archdeacon of the Jacobite Church at Nisībis during the first half of this century, the Nestorian bishop Cyprian having allowed the Monophysites to resume possession of the church of St Domitius in 767 (see above, p. 844). He is mentioned by BarHebraeus as bringing charges against the bishop Philoxenus, who had sided with the anti-patriarch Abraham, and was therefore deposed by a synod held at Rās'ain in 827 or 828. We know also that he was in prison at Nisībis when he wrote his work against Thomas bishop of Margā and metropolitan of Bēth Garmai, who flourished under the Nestorian catholics Abraham (837-850) and Theodosius (852-858). Besides this controversial treatise in four discourses, Nonnus was the writer of sundry letters of a similar character.
Romanus the physician, a monk of the convent of Kartamin, was elected patriarch at Āmid in 887, and took the name of Theodosius. He died in 896. He was the author of a medical syntagma (kunnāshā) of some repute. He wrote a commentary on Pseudo-Hierotheus, On the Hidden Mysteries of the House of God ii and dedicated it to Lazarus, bishop of Cyrrhus. The work is divided into five books, the first and second of which he finished at Āmid, before going down to the East, and the third at Samosata. He also compiled a collection of 112 Pythagorean maxims and proverbs, with brief explanations in Syriac and Arabic, addressed to one George. A synodical epistle of his is extant in Arabic, written to the Egyptian patriarch Michael III., and a Lenten homily in Arabic.
Moses bar Kēphā was the son of Simeon Kēphā (or Peter) and his wife Maryam. The father was from the village of Mashhad al-Kohail, on the Tigris opposite al-Hadithah, the mother a native of Balad, in which town their son was born somewhere about 813. He was taught from his early youth by Rabban Cyriacus, abbot of the convent of Mar Sergius on the Tūrā Sahyā, or Dry Mountain, near Balad, and there assumed the monastic garb. He was elected bishop of Bēth Remmān (Bārimmā), Bēth Kiyōnāyā, and Mosul, about 863, and took the name of Severus. He was also for ten years periodeutes or visitor of the diocese of Taghrith. He died A. Gr. 1214 = 903 a.d., “aged about ninety years, of which he had been bishop for forty,” and was buried in the convent of Mar Sergius. His works are numerous. He wrote commentaries on the whole Old and New Testaments, which are often cited by Bar-Hebraeus in the Ausar Rāzē. Of these that on the book of Genesis survives, though imperfect, in Brit. Mus. 17274, and there are extracts from them in Paris, Ancien fonds 35 (Zotenberg, Catal., p.156), and Bodl. Marsh.101 (P. Smith, Catal., p. 462). The Gospels and Pauline epistles (imperfect) are contained in Brit. Mus. Add. 17274 (Wright, Catal, ,p. 620), the latter only in BodL Or. 703 (P. Smith, Catal., p. 410) and Bodl. Marsh. 86 (ibid. , p. 418). His treatise on the Hexaemeron in five books is preserved to us in the Paris MS. Ane. fonds 120 (Zotenberg, Catal., p. 197), and there are extracts from it in two other MSS. (ibid., pp. 157, 159). The work De Paradiso, in three parts, dedicated to his friend Ignatius of
(?), is known to us only through the Latin translation of Andreas Masius, 1569. The treatise on the soul survives in Cod. Vat. cxlvii. (Catal., iii. 273-274); it consists of 40 chapters, with a supplementary chapter to show that the dead are profited by offerings made on their behalf. That on predestination and freewill, in four discourses, is extant in Brit. Mus. Add. 14731 (Wright, Catal., p. 853). The Disputations against Heresies, spoken of by Moses’s biographer in B.O., ii. 218, col. 2, is probably identical with the work On Sects mentioned by Assemani at p. 131, No. 7. The Festal Homilies for the whole year is extant in several MSS., e.g., Brit. Mus. Add. 21210 (Wright, Catal., p. 877) and 17188 (ibid., p. 621), Paris, Ane. fonds 35 and 123 (Zotenberg, Catal., pp. 156, 159). Besides these we have four funeral sermons, an admonitory discourse to the children of the holy orthodox church, and a discourse showing why the Messiah is called by various epithets and names. Moses also wrote expositions of the sacraments of the church, such as on the holy chrism, in 50 chapters, Cod. Vat. cxlvii. (Catal., iii. 274) and Paris, Ane. fonds 123 (Zotenberg, Catal., p. 159), with which is connected the discourse on the consecration of the chrism in Brit. Mus. Add. 21210 (Wright, Catal., p. 879); on baptism, addressed to his friend Ignatius, in 24 chapters, Cod. Vat. cxlvii. (Catal., iii. 276), in connexion with which we may take the discourse on the mysteries of baptism in Brit. Mus. Add. 21210 (Wright, loc. cit.) and on baptism in Cod. Vat. xcvi. (Catal., ii. 522); exposition of the liturgy, Brit. Mus. Add. 21210 (Wright, Catal., p. 879) and Berlin, Sachau 62 (?); further, expositions of the mysteries in the various ordinations, Cod. Vat. li. (Catal.,∖i. 320); on the ordination of bishops, priests, and deacons, Brit. Mus. Add. 21210 (Wright, Catal., p. 879); on the tonsure of monks, Cod. Vat. li. (Catal., ii. 322). He also compiled two anaphora, one of which has been translated by Renaudot, ii. 391. Lastly, Moses bar Kēphā was the author of a commentary on the dialectics of Aristotle, mentioned by Bar-Hebraeus in Chron. Eccles., ii. 215, and of a commentary on the works of Gregory Nazianzen, and an ecclesiastical history, mentioned by his biographer in B.O., ii. 218, col. 2. The loss of this last book is to be regretted.
The contemporary Nestorian writers of mark are hardly more numerous.
In this century the foundations of Syriac lexicography were laid by the famous physician Abū Zaid Honain ihn Ishāk al-'Ibādī of Hērtā (al-Ḥīrah). He applied himself to medicine at Baghdādh, under Yahyā, or Yuhannā, ibn Māsawaihi (Māsuyah or Mesue); but an ill-feeling soon sprang up between teacher and pupil, and Honain took his departure for the Grecian territory, where he spent a couple of years in acquainting himself with the Greek language and its scientific literature. He afterwards became physician to the caliph al-Mutawakkil. His downfall and excommunication were meanly brought about by a fellow-Christian of the same profession, Isrā’il ibn at-Taifūrī, and Honain died soon after, 260 A.H. =873 A.D. Honain composed most of his original works in Arabic, and likewise many of his translations from the Greek. 'Abhd-īshō' mentions but three books of his, viz., a book on the fear of God (which he wrote as a deacon of the church), a Syriac grammar, and a compendious Syriac lexicon. The lexicon has no doubt been in great part absorbed into the later works of Bar 'Ali and Bar Bahlul. ° The grammar seems to have been entitled Kc-thàbhā dhe-N^akze, or the ‘ ‘ Book of (Diacritical) Points.” It is cited by Bar-Hebraeus in the Aιψ∣,r Raze and by Elias of Tīrhān in his grammar. Honain also wrote a treatise On Synonyms, whether they be “voces aequilitterae” (as réghīz and raggiz) or not (as 'ākéthā and karyuthā). Extracts from this work have been preserved J;o us by a later compiler, who made use also of the canons of ’ Anan-ishō' of Hedhaiyabh (see above, p. 843). In Cod. Vat. ccxvii. (Catal., iii. 504) there are excerpts from a medical treatise of Honain, but no title is given. Honain, his son Ishāk, and his nephew Hobaish ibn al-Hasan al-A'sam (“Stiff-wrist ”) were among the earliest and ablest of those Christians, chiefly Nestorians, ιvho, during the 9th and 10th centuries, making Baghdādh their headquarters, supplied Muhammadan scholars with nearly everything that they knew of Greek science, whether medicine, mathematics, or philosophy. As a rule, they translated the Greek first into Syriac and afterwards into Arabic; but their Syriac versions have unfortunately, as it would appear, perished, without exception.
An elder contemporary of Honain was Gabriel bar Bōkht-ishō', in Arabic Jabra’il ibn Bakhtishιι' (or rather Bokhtīshū'), a member of a family of renowned physicians, beginning with George bar Bōkht-ishō' of Gundē-Shābhōr, whom we have mentioned above (p. 844). He was in practice at Baghdādh in 791, and attended on Ja ’ far ibn Yahyā al-Barmaki, became court physician to ar-Rashid, and maintained this position, with various vicissitudes, till his death in 828. 'Abhd-īshō' says that he was the author of a Syriac lexicon, which is our reason for giving him a place here, but no such work is mentioned by the other authorities to whom we have referred.
Of Ishō' Marūzāyā, in Arabic 'Isa al-Marwazi, from the city of Marri or Merv, little is known to us beyond the fact that he compiled a Syriac lexicon, which was one of the two principal authorities made use of by Bar 'Ali. That he should be identical with the physician al-Marwazi, who lived about 567, seems wholly unlikely. We might rather venture to identify him with Abu Yahyā al-Marwazi, who was an eminent Syrian physician at Baghdādh, wrote in Syriac upon logic and other subjects, and was one of the teachers of Mattā ibn Yaunān or Yunus (who died in 940). In any case, 'Isā al-Marwazi seems to have flourished during the latter part of the 9th century, and therefore to have been a contemporary of Bar ' Ali. _
Ishō', or 'Isā, bar 'Ali is stated in Cod. Vat. ccxvii. (Catal., iii. 504, No. XV.) to have been a pupil of Honain. His father 'Ali and his uncle 'Isā, the sons of Dā’ūd or David, were appointed by the catholicus Sabhr-īshō' II. (832-836) to the charge of the college founded by him in the convent of Mār Pethiōn at Baghdādh. Bar 'All’s lexicon is dedicated to a deacon named Abraham, who made certain additions to it after the death of the author.
Ishō' bar Nōn was a native of the village of Bēth-Gabbārē near Mosul. He was a pupil of Abraham bar Dāshandādh (see above, p. 844) at the same time with Abù Nūh al-Anbāri (see above, p. 845, note 3) and Timothy, his predecessor in the dignity of catholicus (see above, p. 845). He retired first to the convent of Mār Abraham on Mount Izlā, where he devoted himself to study and to refuting the views and writings of his schoolfellow and subsequent diocesan Timothy, whom he spitefully called Ι ’ alem∙otheos (“the wronger of God ”) instead of Timotlιeos. In consequence of a dispute with the monks he left Mount Izlā and went for some months to Baghdādh, where he stayed at the house of George Māsawaihi (Māsuyah or Mesue) and taught his son Yahyā. He then returned to Mosul, where he took up his residence in the convent of Mār Elias, and lived there for thirty years, till the death of Timothy. Through the influence of Gabriel bar Bōkht-ishō' (see above) and his son-in-law Michael bar Māsawaihi (Māsuyah or Mesue), the physician of the caliph al-Ma , mιιn, he was appointed catholicus A.Gr. 1135 = 823-824 A.υ. He sat for only four years, and was buried, like his predecessor, in the convent of Kēlīl-īshō' at Baghdādh. Of his ill-feeling towards Timothy I. we have already made mention; how he kept it up after Timothy’s death, and what troubles he got into in consequence, may be read in the pages of Assemani (B.O., iii. 1, 165). Bar-Hebraeus has preserved some account of a disputation between him and a Monophysite priest named Papa. 'Abhd-īshō' gives the following list of his works —a treatise on theology, questions on the whole text of Scripture, in two volumes, a collection of ecclesiastical canons and decisions, consolatory discourses, epistles, a treatise on the division of the services, turgāme or “interpretations,” and a tract on the efficacy of hymns and anthems. Of the questions on Scripture there is a copy in the collection of the S. P. C. K., and of the consolatory discourses a mutilated MS. in the British Museum, Add. 17217 (Wright, Catal., p. 613). The replies to the questions of Macarius the monk seem to belong to the treatise on the division of the services (purrāsh teshméshātha), if one may judge by the first and only one quoted.
A disciple of Ishō' bar Non was Denhā, or, as he is otherwise called in some MSS. of 'Abhd-īshō's Catalogue, Ihibhā (or rather Hibhā, Ibas). Assemani places him under the catholicus Pethiōn (died in 740), but we prefer to follow the authority of John bar Zō'bi in his Grammar. * Denhā was the author of sermons and tracts on points of ecclesiastical law, and of commentaries on the Psalms, on the works of Gregory Nazianzen (as contained in two vols, in the translation of the abbot Paul), and on the dialectics of Aristotle.
In 217 A.H. =832 a.d., the same year in which Sabhr-īshō' II. succeeded to the patriarchate, lθ a young man named Thomas, the son of one Jacob of Bēth Sherwānāyē, in the district of Salakh, entered the convent of Bēth 'Abhē, which seems at this time to have fallen off sadly in respect of the learning of its inmates. A few years afterwards (222 a.h. = 837 a.d.) we find him acting as secretary to the patriarch Abraham (also a monk of Bēth 'Abhē, who sat from 837 to 850). By him he was promoted to be bishop of Margā, and afterwards metropolitan of Bēth Gannai, in which capacity he was present at the ordination of his own brother Theodosius (bishop of al-Anbar, afterwards metropolitan of Gundē-Shābhōr) as catholicus in 852. Thomas of Margā (as he is commonly called), having been very fond from his youth of the legends and histories of holy men, more especially of those connected with his own convent of Bēth 'Abhē, undertook to commit them to writing at the urgent request of the monk 'Abhd-īshō', to whom he dedicates the ifonastic History. Assemani has given a tolerably full analysis of this work, with a few extracts, in the B.O., iii. 1, 464-501, throughout which volume it is one of his chief authorities. The publication of it in a complete form is much to be desired. The MSS. available in Europe are—Cod. Vat. clxv. (Catal., iii. 331), of which Codd. Vatt. ccclxxxi.-ii. are a copy (Mai, Scripts Vett. Nova Coll., V.); Paris, No. 286 in Zotenberg’s Catal., p. 216 (also copied from Vat. clxv.); Brit. Mus. Orient. 2316 (ff. 182, 17th century, imperfect); Berlin, Sachau 179 (copied in 1882). Thomas also wrote a poem in twelve-syllable metre on the life and deeds of Māran-'ammēh, metropolitan of Hēdhaiyabh, which he introduced into his History, bk. iii. ch. 10; see B.O., iii. 1, 485.
Ishō'-dādh of Marii or Merv, bishop of Hēdhattā or al-Hadithah, was a competitor with Theodosius for the patriarchate in 852. According to 'Abhd-īshō', his principal work was a commentary on the New Testament, of which there are MSS. in Berlin, Sachau 311, and in the collection of the S.P.C.K. It extended, however, to the Old Testament as well, for in Cod. Vat. cccclvii. we find the portions relating to Genesis and Exodus.
In the B.O., iii. 1, 213, 'Abhd-īshō , names a certain Kendi as the author of a lengthy disputation on the faith. Assemani places this “Candius” or “Ebn Canda” under the catholicus John IV., apparently on the authority of 'Amr ibn Mattā. We suspect, however, that the person meant is 'Abd al-Masih (Ya'kūb) ibn Ishāk al-Kindi, the author of a well known apology for the Christian religion, which has been published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. The work dates from the time of the caliph al-Ma’mūn (813-833), and therefore synchronizes with the disputations of Theodore Abu Korrah, bishop of Ilarrān. Being written in Arabic, it hardly belongs to this place, but is mentioned to avoid misapprehension.
Theodore bar Khōni is stated to have been promoted by his uncle John IV. to the bishopric of Lashōm in 893. He was the author ∣ of scholia (on the Scriptures), an ecclesiastical history, and some minor works.
To about this period probably belongs another historian, the loss . of whose work we have to regret. This is a writer named Ahrōn or Aaron, who is mentioned by Elias bar Shīnāyā under 273 a.h.= 886-887 A.D.
In the 10th century the tale of Jacobite authors dwindles away , to almost nothing. Most of the dignitaries of the church composed their synodical epistles and other official writings in Arabic, and the same may be said of the men of science, such as Abu 'Ali ’Isa ibn Ishāk ihn Zur'ah (943-1008) and Abū Zakariyā Yahyā ibn 'Adi, who died in 974 at the age of eighty-one. About the middle of the century we may venture to place the deacon Simeon, whose Chronicle is cited by Elias bai’ Shīnāyā under 6 a.h. =627- 628 A.D. and 310 = 922-923. The 11th century is somewhat more prolific.
A Persian Christian named Gīsā, leaving his native city of Ushnūkh or Ushnū in Adharbāigān, settled, after several removals, in the district of Gūbōs or Gūbās, one of the seven dioceses of the province of Melitēne (Malatiah), and built there a humble church, in which he deposited sundry relics of St Sergius and St Bacchus, and cells for himself and Ids three companions. This happened in 958. As the place grew in importance, other monks gradually resorted to it, and among them “Mār(i) Yōhannān dē-Mārōn,” or John (the son) of Mārōn, a man of learning in both sacred and profane literature, who had studied under Mār Mēkīm at Edessa. Gīsā, the founder of the convent, died at the end of twelve years, and was succeeded as abbot by his disciple Elias, who beautified the church. Meantime its fame increased as a seat of learning under the direction of John of Mārōn, and many scribes found employment there. The patriarch John VII., da-sérīghtā, “He of the Mat” (his only article of furniture), was one of its visitors. Elias, on his retirement, nominated John of Mārōn as his successor, who, aided by the munificence of Emmanuel, a monk of Harrān and a disciple of the maphriān Cyriacus, rebuilt the church on a larger and finer scale, whilst a constant supply of fresh water was provided at the cost of a Taghritan merchant named Mārūthā. This was in 1001. About this time Elias bar Gāghai, a monk of Taghrith, founded a monastery near Melitēne, but died before it was finished. His work was taken up by one Eutychus or Kulaib, who persuaded John of Mārōn to join him. Here again his teaching attracted numbers of pupils. At last, after the lapse of twelve years, when there were 120 priests in the convent, he suddenly withdrew by night from the scene of his labours and retired to the monastery of Mār Aaron near Edessa, where he died at the end of four years, about 1017. His commentary on the book of Wisdom is cited by Bar-Hebraeus in the Ausar Raze. *
Mark bar Kiki was archdeacon of the Taghritan church at Mosul, and was raised to the dignity of maphriān by the name of Ignatius in 991. After holding this office for twenty-five years, he became a Muhammadan in 1016, but recanted before his death, which took place at an advanced age in great poverty. He composed a poem on his own fall, misery, and subsequent repentance, of which BarHebraeus has preserved a few lines.
According to Assemani, B.O., ii. 317 and cl., Bar-Hebraeus mentions in his Chronicle that a monk named Joseph wrote three discourses on the cruel murder of Peter the deacon by the Turks at Melitēne in 1058. The anecdote may be found in the edition of Bruns and Kirsch, p. 252 (transi., p. 258), but the discourses would seem rather to have dealt with the retribution that overtook the retiring Turks at the hands of the Armenians and the wintry weather.
Yēshū' bar Shūshan (or Susanna), syncellus of Theodore or John IX., was chosen patriarch by the eastern bishops, under the name of John X., in opposition to Hāyē or Athanasius Vl., on whom the choice of their western brethren had fallen in 1058. He soon abdicated, however, retired to a convent, and devoted himself to study. On the death of Athanasius he was reelected patriarch in 1064, and sat till 1073. He carried on a controversy with the patriarch of Alexandria, Christodūlus, regarding the mixing of salt and oil with the Eucharistic bread according to the Syrian practice. He compiled an anaphora, issued a collection of twenty-four canons, and wrote many epistles, chiefly controversial. Such are the letters in Arabic to Christodūlus on the oil and salt and the letter to the catholicus of the Armenians. The tract on the oil and salt is extant in Paris, Ane. fonds 54 (Zotenberg, Catal., p. 71), and-there is an extract from it in Suppl. 32 (Zotenberg, Catal., p. 54). Bar-Shūshan also wrote four poems on the sack of Melitēne by the Turks in 1058, and collected and arranged the works of Ephraim and Isaac of Antioch, which he had begun to write out with his own hand when he was interrupted by death.
Sa'id bar Sābūnī lived during the latter part of the 11th century. He was versed in Greek as well as Syriac, and well known as a literary man, especially as a writer of hymns. The patriarch Athanasius VII. Abu ’ 1-Earai bar Khammārē (1091-1129) raised him to the office of bishop of Melitēne (Malatiah) in October 1094. His consecration took place at Kankērath, near Āmid, by the name of John, and he set out for Malatiah, which he entered on the very day that the gates were closed to keep out the Turks, who laid siege to it under Kilij Arslan (Dā’ūd ibn Sulaimān), sultan of Iconium. He was murdered during the course of the siege, in July 1095, by the Greek commandant Gabriel.
The Nestorian writers of these two centuries are both more numerous and more important than the Jacobite.
We may place at the head of our list the name of Hēnān-īshō' bar Sarōshwai, who must have lived quite early in the 10th century, as he is cited by Elias of Anbār, who wrote about 922. He was bishop of Hērtā (al-Ḥīrah), and published questions on the text of Scripture and a vocabulary with glosses or explanations, which is constantly cited by his successor in this department of scholarship, Bar Bahlūl.
With Bar Sarōshwai we naturally connect īshō' bar Bahlūl, in Arabic Abu , 1-Hasan 'Isa ibn al-Bahlūl, the fullest and most valuable of Syriac lexicographers. His date is fixed by that of the election of the catholicus 'Abhd-īshō' I., in which he bore a part, in 963.
'Abhd-īshō' in his Catalogue, B.O., iii. 1, 261, mentions an author Abhzūdh, a teacher in some school or college (eskōlāya), who composed a treatise containing demonstrations on various topics, alphabetically arranged and dedicated to his friend Kurtā. In note 5 Assemani makes the very circumstantial statement, but without giving his authority, that Abhzūdh was head of the college founded at Baghdādh about 832 by Sabhr-īshō' II., ^ under Sergius (860-872). But, if this writer be identical, as seems probable, with the Bazūdh who was the author of a Book of Definitions described at some length by Hoffmann, De Hermeneuticis apud Syros Aristoteleis, pp. 151-153, we must place him nearly a century later, because he cites the “scholia” of Theodore bar Khoni, who was appointed bishop of Lāshōm in 893. The whole matter is, however, very obscure, and Hoffmann has subsequently (Opusc. Nestor., p. xxii.) sought to identify Bazūdh, who was also called Michael (ibid., p. xxi.), with the Michael who is mentioned as a commentator on the Scriptures by 'Abhd-īshō', B.O., iii. 1, 147, and whom Assemani supposed to be the same as Michael bishop of al-Ahwāz (died in 852 or 854). All then that appears to be certain is that the Persian Bazūdh also bore the Christian name of Michael, and that, besides the alphabetically arranged demonstrations and the Book of Definitions, he composed a tract on man as the microcosm.
Elias, bishop of Pērōz-Shābhōr or al-Anbār, flourished about 922, as appears from his disputes with the catholicus Abraham (905-937), and his account of the miserable bishop Theodore of Bēth Garmai, who, after his deposition by John bar Hēghīrē (900-905) and subsequent absolution by Abraham, became a Muhammadan. He was the author of a collection of metrical discourses in three volumes, an apology, epistles, and homilies.
George, metropolitan of Mosul and Arbēl, was promoted to this dignity by the catholicus Emmanuel about 945, and died after 987. He contested the patriarchate three times but in vain, viz.,—in 961, when Isrā’ēl was elected, in 963, when 'Abdh-ishō' I. was the successful candidate, and in 987, when the choice of the synod fell on Mari bar Tōbi. His chief work was an exposition of the ecclesiastical offices for the whole year, in seven sections, of which Assemani has given a full analysis in B. O., iii. 1, 518-540. Some specimens of his l·iirgame or hymns may be found in Codd. Vatt. xc. and xci. (Catal., ii. 487, No. 27, and 490, No. 24), and Berlin, Sachau 167, 2.
The date of Emmanuel bar Shaheārē is fixed by his presence at the consecration of 'Abhd-īshō' I. in 963. He was teacher in the school of Mār Gabriel in the convent called the Dairā 'Ellāitā at Mosul. Cardāhī places his death in 980. Besides some minor expository treatises, he wrote a huge work on the Hexaemeron or six days of creation. The Vatican MS. contains twenty-eight discourses, of which the second is wanting, and a twenty-ninth is added On Baptism. It is dated 1707. The MS. in the Brit. Mus., Orient. 1300, dated 1685, also contains twenty-eight discourses, of which the second is wanting. Some of them are in seven-syllable, others in twelve-syllable metre. Cardāhī has published a specimen in his Liber Thesauri, pp. 68-71. Emmanuel’s brother, 'Abhd-īshō' bar Shahhārē, is mentioned by Assemani, B. O., iii. 540, and by Cardāhī. The latter has printed part of one of his poems, on Michael of Āmid, a companion of Mār Eugenius, in Liber Thesauri, pp. 136-137. It is taken from Cod. Vat. clxxxiv. (Catal., iii. 395). But there the author is called Bar Shi'ārah, and is said to have been a monk of the convent of Michael (at Mosul).
Somewhere about the end of this century we may venture to place a writer named Andrew, to whom 'Abhd-īshō' has given a place in his Catalogue, and whom Assemani has chosen to identify with the well known Andrew, bishop of Samosata, the opponent of Cyril of Alexandria. The words of 'Abhd-īshō', if we understand them rightly, mean that this Andrew wrote turgāmē (or hymns of a particular kind) and a work on puhhām séyāmē, the placing of the diacritical and vowel points and marks of interpunction. He was therefore an inoffensive grammarian.
Elias, the first Nestorian catholicus of the name, was a native of Karkhā dhē-Gheddān, was trained in Baghdādh and al-Madāīn, and became bishop of Tirhān, whence he was advanced to the primacy in 1028, and sat till 10 49. According to 'Abhd-īshō', he compiled canons and ecclesiastical decisions, and composed grammatical tracts. According to Māri ibn Sulaimān, he was the author of a work on the principles of religion in twenty-two chapters, which may be identical with the second of the above, and of a form of consecration of the altar (kuddās al-rnadhbah). His Grammar was composed in his younger days, before he became bishop. It has been edited and translated from a MS. at Berlin by Baethgen. A tract of his on the diacritical points and marks of interpunction is cited and used by John bar Zō'bi.
Abū Sa'id 'Abhd-īshō' bar Bahriz was abbot of the convent of Elias or Sa'id at Mosul, and a candidate for the patriarchate when Elias I. was elected in 1028. He was subsequently promoted to be metropolitan of āthōr or Mosul. He collected ecclesiastical canons and decisions, wrote on the law of inheritance, and an exposition of the offices of the church.
Assemani has assigned the same date to Daniel (the son) of Tūbhānithā, bishop of Tahal in Bētli Garmai, but without any sufficient reason. If he be really identical with the Daniel to whom George, metropolitan of Mosul and Arbēl, dedicated his exposition of the offices of the church, he must have lived about the middle of the previous century. He wrote funeral sermons, metrical homilies, answers to Scriptural questions and enigmas, and other stuff of the same sort. More important probably were his “Book of Flowers,” Kélhābhā dhé-Habbābhe, which may have been a poetical florilegium; his Solution of the Questions in the Fifth Volume of Isaac of Nineveh's Works ; and his commentary on the Heads of Knowledge or maxims (of Evagrius).
Conspicuous among the writers of this century is Elias bar Shināyā, who was born in 975, adopted the monastic life in the convent of Michael at Mosul under the abbot John the Lame, and was ordained priest by Nathaniel, bishop of Shennā (as-Sinn), who afterwards became catholicus under the name of John V. (1001-12). Elias was subsequently in the convent of Simeon on the Tigris opposite Shennā, and was made bishop of Bēth Nuhādhrē in 1002. At the end of 1008 he was advanced to the dignity of metropolitan of Nisībis. β With the next patriarch, John VI. bar Nazōl (1012-20), 7 previously bishop of Hērtā, he was on good terms; but he set his face against Ishō'-yabh bar Ezekiel (1020-25). Under Elias I. (1028-49) all seems to have been quiet again. That our author survived this patriarch is clear from his own words in B. O., iii. 1, 268, col. 2, 11. 19, 20. θ His greatest work is the Annals or Chronicle, of which unfortunately only one imperfect copy exists. Baethgen has published extracts from it under the title of Fragmente syr. u. arab. Historiker, 1884, which have enabled scholars to recognize its real importance. The exact date of the Annals, and probably of the writing of the unique copy, is fixed by the statement of the author, f. 15b, that John, bishop of Hērtā, was ordained catholicus on Wednesday, 19th of the latter Teshπn, A. Gr. 1324 (19th November 1012 A.D.), and that he still ruled the Nestorian Church “down to this year in which this work was composed, namely, A. Gr. 1330” (1018-19). After the Annals we may mention Elias’s Syriac grammar, one of the best of the Nestorian writings on the subject, and his Arabic-Syriac vocabulary, Kitāb at-Tarjumānfī ta'lim lughat as-Suryān or “the Interpreter, to teach the Syriac Language.” It has been edited by De Lagarde in his Praetvrmissorum Libri Duo, 1879, and was the storehouse from which Thomas a Novaria derived his Thesaurus Arabieo-Syro-Latinus, 1636. Elias was also a composer of hymns, some of which occur in the Nestorian service-books, and of metrical homilies, apparently of an artificial character. He edited four volumes of decisions in ecclesiastical law, which are often cited by 'Abhd-īshō' of Nisībis in his Collectio Canonum Synodicorum ιs ; indeed the third section, “On the Division of Inheritances,” is entirely borrowed from the work of Elias. Of his epistles that to the bishops and people of Baghdādh on the illegal ordination of Ishō'-yabh bar Ezekiel is preserved in Cod. Vat. cxxix. (Catal., iii. 191). Six of his Arabic dissertations have been described by Assemani in the B. O., iii. 1, 270-272. The most important of them appears to be No. 5, a disputation, in seven sessions or chapters, with the vizir Abu Ί-Kāsim al-Husain ihn 'Ali al-Maghribi, preceded by a letter to the secretary Abu Ί-'Alā Sā'id ibn Sahl. These meetings took place in 1026, and the work was committed to writing in 1027, after the death of the vizir at Maiyāfārikin in October, and published with the approbation of the celebrated commentator, philosopher, and lawyer Abu ’ 1-Faraj 'Abdallah ibn at-Taiyib, who was secretary to the patriarch Elias I. The anonymous work described in full by Assemani (B. O., iii. 1, 303-306) under the title of Kitabu Ί-Burhān 'alā sahīhi (or rather fi tashīhi) Ί-īmān, “The Demonstration of the Truth of the Faith,” is also by him.
Here we may pause in our enumeration to cast an eye upon some anonymous translations, which we are inclined to ascribe to the 10th and 11th centuries, and which are interesting as showing what the popular literature of the Syrians was, compared with that of their theologians and men of science.
We have already spoken of the older translation of Kalīlagh wé-Damnagh, made by the periodeutes Bōdh in the 6th century of our era (see above, p. 837). About the middle of the 8th century there appeared an independent Arabic translation from the Pahlavi by 'Abdallah ibn al-Mukaffa', which, under the name of Ka i lilah ινa-Dimnah, has been the parent of secondary versions in the Syriac, Persian, Greek, Hebrew, and Spanish languages. The Syriac version was discovered by the present writer in a unique MS. in the library of Trinity College, Dublin, and published by him in 1884. It is evidently the work of a Christian priest, living at a time when the condition of the Syrian Church was one of great degradation, and the power of the caliphate on the wane, so that the state of society was that of complete disorder and licentiousness, a description which would very well apply to the 10th or 11th century. Indeed we could not place it much later, because part of the unique MS. goes back to the 13th century, and even its text is very corrupt, showing that it had passed through the hands of several generations of scribes. “The chief value of this later Syriac version is that it sheds light on the original text of the Arabic K. w. D. The Arabic text which the Syriac translator had before him must have been a better one than De Sacy’s, because numbers of Guidi’s extracts, which are not found at all in De Sacy’s text, appear in their proper places in the later Syriac.”
To about the same period, judging by the similarity of style and language, we would assign the Syriac version of the book of Sindibādh. This work was translated, probably in the latter half of the 8th century, from Pahlavi into Arabic by Mōsā, a Muhammadan Persian. It is, as Nōldeke has shown, the smaller of the two recensions known to the Arabs, the larger, entitled Aslam (1) and Sindibādh, being the work of al-Asbagh ibn 'Abd al-'Aziz as-Sijistānī. The smaller Sindibādh was in its turn done into Syriac, and thence into Greek by Michael Andreopūlus for Gabriel, prince of Melitēne (1086-1100), as discovered by Comparetti, under the name of ~∑υvτiιras (Sindipas), just as Kalīlah wa-Dimnah was translated by Symeon (the son of) Seth for the emperor Alexius Comnenus, who ascended the throne in 1081. The Syriac version, which bears the title of the Story of Sindbān and the Philosophers who were with him, has been edited by Baethgen, with a German translation and notes, from the unique MS. in the Royal Library at Berlin.
A third product of the same age we believe to be the Syriac translation of Pseudo-Callisthenes’s Life of Alexander the Great, made from an Arabic version of a Greek original. Of this, however, we shall be better able to judge when the Syriac text lies before us in print.
Lastly we would place somewhere between the 9th and 11th centuries the Syriac translation of Esop’s (Aesop’s) Fables, which has been edited under a somewhat Jewish garb by Landsberger, who imagined himself to have found the Syriac original of the fables of Syntipas (Sindipas), whereas Geiger clearly showed that we have here to do with a Syriac rendering of one of the forms of the fables of Esop. In fact, as Geiger pointed out, is only a clerical error for. In Syriac MSS. of this collection the title is written, “of Josephus.” In some close relation to these stands the story of Josephus and king Nebuchadnezzar in the Berlin MS. Alt. Bestand 57, ff. 16-57, with which are interwoven a number of Esopic fables. They have been edited (with the exception of two) by Rodiger in his Chrestom. Syr., 2d ed., pp. 97-100.
Resuming our enumeration of Syrian writers, we find that in the 12th century the number of them, whether Jacobite or Nestorian, is small, but two of the former sect are men of real mark.
Abu Ghālib bar Sābūnī, the younger brother of Sa'id bar Sābūnī (see above, p. 849), was almost as unfortunate as his brother. He was raised to the episcopate of Edessa after his brother’s death by Athanasius VII., but speedily deposed on account of a quarrel, although many of the Edessenes, among them the governor Bald- win, brother of Godfrey of Bouillon, took his part. He died of a fall from his horse, shortly after the death of the patriarch in 1129. Though a good scholar and linguist, he does not appear to have written anything that has come down to our times. Assemani, it is true, ascribes to him three poems in twelve-syllable metre on the capture of Edessa by Zengi ibn āk-sunkur; but, as this took place in 1144, the writer must have been his successor, Basil bar Shumnā (1143-69).
John, bishop of Harrān and Mardē or Mārdīn, had charge of the Jacobite churches in the East, his diocese including Tell-Besmē, Kēphar-tūthā, Dārā, Nisībis, Rās'ain, and the Khābhōrā or Khābūr. He was originally a monk of Edessa, was appointed bishop by Athanasius VII. in 1125, and was killed by a fall from his horse in 1165, at the age of seventy-eight. He devoted himself chiefly to the restoration of the decayed churches and monasteries of his diocese, as may be seen from the autobiographical fragment in B.O., ii. 217 sq. From the same document, pp. 224-225, it appears that he was fond of MSS., which he collected, repaired, and bound, and that he wrote with his own hand four small copies of the Gospels in gold and silver. He enjoyed a well earned reputation as a land-surveyor and practical engineer. Bar-Hebraeus notes bis great liberality in redeeming the captive Edessenes who had been carried off by Zengi’s troops. The fall of Edessa (1144), however, was an event that got him into a great deal of trouble. He was ill-advised enough to write a treatise on the Providence of God, in which he maintained that chastisements of that kind were not sent upon men by God, and that, if the troops of the Franks (Crusaders) had been there, Edessa would not have been taken by Zengi. Such rank heresy of course brought down upon him the whole bench of bishops. He was attacked by the priest Salībhā of Karigārah (?), by John bishop of Kaisum, John bar Andreas bishop of Mabbōgh, and Dionysius bar Salibi. u He was also the compiler of an anaphora.
The star of this century among the Jacobites is undeniably Jacob bar Salībī of Melitēne (Malatiah). He was created bishop of Mar'ash, under the name of Dionysius, by Athanasius VIII. (Yēshū' bar Ketrah, 1138-66), in 1145, and the diocese of Mabbōgh was also placed under his charge. Michael I. (1166-99) transferred him to Āmid, where he died in 1171. The list of his works, as quoted by Assemani from a Syriac MS., is very considerable, and he has dealt with them at great length. We may mention the following. (1) Commentary on the Old Testament, of which only one complete MS. exists in Europe. The order of the books is— the Pentateuch, Job, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel, the twelve minor Prophets, and Ecclesiasticus. Each book has a material or literal and a spiritual or mystical commentary. Several of the books have two commentaries, one on the Péshīttā, the other on the Hexaplar text; Jeremiah has actually three, one on the Hexaplar, and two, a shorter and a longer, on the Pēshīttā. (2) Commentary on the New Testament, from which Assemani has given many extracts. The order of the books is—the four Gospels, the Revelation of St John, the Acts of the Apostles, the seven apostolic epistles, and the fourteen epistles of St Paul. (3) A compendium of theology, of which we do not seem to have any MS. in Europe; see B.O., ii. 163 j col. 1, 11. 13-15, and p. 170. (4) A copious treatise against heresies, dealing with the Muhammadans, the Jews, the Nestorians, the Dyophysites or supporters of the council of Chalcedon, and the Armenians. (5) A treatise on the Providence of God, against
John, bishop of Mārdīn, apparently no longer extant. (6) ⅛⅛ggj-tions of the Eucharistic service, of the Nicene creed, of the consecration of the chrism, of the services of consecration, and of the Jacobite confession of faith. (7) Canons on confession and absolution. (8) Two anaphorae or liturgies. (9) Various prayers, prooemia, and sedrās. (10) Homilies, e.g., encomium on the patriarch Michael the Elder, on the Passion of our Lord, and on withholding the sacrament from those who abstain from communicating for a period of more than forty days. (11) A commentary on the six Centuries ofEvagriπs. (12) Two poems on the fall ofEdessa (1144), three on the fall of Mar'ash (1156), and two on another incident (1159). Among the works mentioned in the list in B.O., ii. 210- 211, we cannot find any traces of the Commentarius in Scripta Doctorum, the Compendium Historiarum Patrum et Sanctorum et Martyrιtm, and the Compendium Canonum Aρostolicorurn, nor of the commentaries on the books of Dialectics, ibid., col. 1. Of the epistles two are extant in Arabic, Berlin, Sachau 61, 1, 2. From a treatise O,n the Structure of Man there are two short extracts in Bodl. Marsh. 361, f. 39. Dionysius appears also to have revised the Jacobite order of baptism, and to have drawn up a volume of services for the days of the week.
Michael the Elder, the son of Elias, a priest of Melitēne, of the family of Kindasi, ° was abbot of the convent of Bar-saumā, near Melitene, which we find him supplying with water, with the help of John, bishop of Mārdīn, in 1163. He was elected patriarch in 1166, and held office till 1199. He revised the Jacobite pontifical and ritual, arranging its contents under forty-six heads, as exhibited in Cod. Vat. Ii., drew up an anaphora, wrote a tract setting forth the Jacobite confession of faith, a treatise against a Coptic schismatic, Mark the son of Konbar, on the question of confession, and a poem on a case of persecution in 1159. He also revised in 1185 the life of Abhhai, bishop of Nicaea, having found most copies of it in a very disordered state. His most important work was a Chronicle, from the creation to 1196 a.d., which was translated, with other works of his, into Armenian, and apparently exists in that language alone. Some extracts from it were published by Dulaurier in the Journal Asiatique for 1848, p. 281 sq., and 1849, p. 315 sq., and the whole has been edited in a French translation by V. Langlois, Chronique de Michel le Grand, 1868. According to him the translator of the first part of the work was the vartabed David, and it was finished by the priest Isaac, who completed his task in 1248, continuing it down to his own day. A third person engaged in translating the works of Michael into Armenian was the vartabed Vartan. Appended to the Chronicle is an extract from a treatise of his “On the Sacerdotal Order and its Origin,” or “On the Origin of Sacerdotal Institutions,” with a continuation by Isaac and Vartan, which is followed in the MSS. by the Jacobite “confession of faith.” Michael appears also to have written an ecclesiastical history, which is entirely lost to us. At least Bar-Hebraeus speaks of his recording certain matters in his “Ekklēsiastikē,” which do not appear in the Chronicle.
A thorn in the side of Michael was his disciple Theodore bar Wahbōn. He first appears on the stage in 1170, when the emperor Manuel sent Theorianus to the Armenian catholicus and the Jacobite patriarch with letters. Michael declined an interview, but sent John of Kaisūm to see Theorianus at KaΓat ar-Rūm, and on his coming a second time to the same place selected Theodore bar Wahbōn as his representative. Ten years afterwards, in 1180, when Michael was at Antioch, Ibn Wahbōn was made anti-patriarch at Āmid by certain malcontent bishops, under the name of John. Michael, however, at once took energetic measures, got hold of the anti-patriarch, formally deposed him, and shut him up in the convent of Bar-saumā, whence he was afterwards allowed to make his escape by some of the monks. He fled to Damascus, where he tried in vain to bring his case before Salāh ad-din, and thence to Jerusalem, after the fall of which city in 1187 he joined Gregorius Degha, the Armenian catholicus, at KaΓat ar-Rūm and went with him to Cilicia, where the king, Leo, made him patriarch of the Jacobites in his territories. He died in 1193. According to BarHebraeus, Theodore bar Wahbōn was a good scholar, and could speak and write three foreign languages, Greek, Armenian, and Arabic. He compiled an anaphora, wrote an exposition of the Eucharistic service, and a statement of his case against Michael in Arabic.
Of Nestorian writers there are scarcely any worth naming in this century, for the historian and controversialist Māre bar Shēlēmōn, otherwise Mari ibn Sulaimān, wrote in Arabic; and Elias III., Abu Halim ibn al-Hadithi, of Maiperkat, metropolitan of Nisībis and catholicus from 1175 to 1190, chiefly used the same language in his homilies and letters. He is best remembered for having compiled and arranged the prayers in one of the service books, which is still called by his name, “the Abū Halim.”
Ishō'-yabh bar Malkōn was ordained bishop of Nisībis in 1190 by the catholicus Yabh-alāhā II. (1190-1222), was present at the consecration of his successor Sabhr-īshō' IV. (1222-25), and died under Sabhr-īshō' V. (1226-56), his follower at Nisībis being Makki-khā, who was afterwards catholicus (1257-65). He wrote on questions of grammar, besides homilies, letters, and hymns, in which, however, he chiefly, if not exclusively, employed the Arabic language. '∙ 5
He is the same as Joseph bar Malkōn, bishop of Mārdīn, whose metrical tract on the points, entitled Mésidhtā dhé-Nukzē, or “the Net of the Points,” is found in MSS., along with the grammatical writings of Elias bar Shināyā and John bar Zō'bi. This tract must therefore have been composed before 1190.
Simeon Shankēlabhādhī or Shankelāwi,of Shankēlābhādh or Shan-kēlāwah, near Irbil, must have been a contemporary of Bar Malkōn, and perhaps somewhat senior to him. He was the teacher of John bar Zō'bi, for whom he wrote a Chronikon or chronological treatise in the form of questions and answers, explanatory of the various eras, the calendar, &c. There is a MS. in the British Museum, Add. 25875, and several at Berlin. He was also the author of a moral poem in enigmatical language, of which 'Abhd-īshō' thought it worth his while to write an explanation for his disciple Abraham. To him is likewise ascribed “the questions of Simon Kēphā concerning the Eucharist and Baptism,” which he appears to have introduced to the notice of his pupil John bar Zō , bi.
John bar Zō'bi flourished about the end of the 12th and the beginning of the 13th century. He was a monk of Bēth Ḳūḳā (or Kūke) in Hēdhaiyabh, and numbered among his pupils Jacob bar Shakkō, or Severus, bishop of Mār Matthew (see below). He wrote metrical homilies, partly in seven-syllable, partly in twelve-syllable verse, on the chief points of the Nestorian faith. One of these is mentioned by Assemani, B.O., iii. 1, 309, note l; another, on the four problems of philosophy, is in Berlin, Sachau 72, 15. Bar Zō'bi is, however, better known as a grammarian. The larger of his two grammars is based on the works of previous writers, such as Severus Sēbōkht and Denliā, commentators on Aristotle, and the grammarians Elias I., the catholicus, and Elias bar Shināyā, bishop of Nisībis. The smaller grammar is an epitome in verse, accompanied by a metrical tract on the four chief marks of interρunction.- 7 He seems also to have continued the treatise of Honain De Synonymis, so that he may perhaps be Hoffmann’s “analecta anonymus.”
As the lamp flares up before it expires, so the 13th century witnessed a faint revival of Syriac literature before its extinction.
David bar Paul is cited by Bar-Hebraeus in the Ausar Raze, and may therefore be supposed to have lived early in the 13th century. He was evidently a man of considerable culture, and a versifier. We have from his pen a poem on the letters of the Syriac alphabet, a note on the mutable letters, and a brief enumeration of the categories of Aristotle, a moral poem in twelve-syllable verse, another on repentance in an Arabic translation, and specimens of a third in Cardāhi’s Liber Thesauri, p. 138. Theological are a dialogue between a Malkite and a Jacobite on the hymn Trisagion and a tract in Arabic on matters in dispute between the Jacobites and Malkites.
Jacob bar Shakkō (Shakkdkō ?), or 'Isfi, bar Mark, of Bartellāi or Bartullā, near Mosul, was a monk of the famous convent of Mār Matthew, of which he afterwards became bishop by the name of Severus. He was trained in grammar by John bar Zō'bi (see above) in the convent of Bēth Ḳūḳā (or Kūkē) in Hēdhaiyabh, and in dialectics and philosophy by Kamāl ad-Din Mflsā ibn Yιιnus at Mosul. He composed one of his works, the Book of Treasures, in 1231 and died in 1241, on his way to visit the aged patriarch Ignatius II. (maphriān 1215-22, patriarch 1222-53). He possessed a great many books, which were all conveyed to the dēmosion of the ruler of Mosul. His works are as follows. (1) The Book of Treasures, a theological treatise in four parts, viz., part i., of the three-one God; part ii., of the incarnation of the Son of God; part iii., of the Divine Providence; part iv., of the creation of the universe, the angels, the different kinds of life, the soul of man, the resurrection, and the last judgement. (2) The Dialogτtes, in two hooks. Book i., dial. 1, on grammar, followed by a discourse on the same in twelve-syllable metre; dial. 2, on rhetoric; dial. 3, on the art of poetry or metres; dial. 4, on the eloquence and copiousness of the Syriac language. Book ii., dial. 1, on logic and the syllogism; dial. 2, on philosophy, its kinds, divisions, and subdivisions, in five sections, viz., (a ) on the definitions of philosophy, its divisions, &c.; (b ) on the philosophic life and conduct; (c ) on physics or physiology; (d ) on the four disciplines,—arithmetic, music, geometry, and mathematics; (e ) on metaphysics and theology. Of his letters two are extant, in verse, addressed to Faklιr ad-Daulah Mark bar Thomas and his brother Tāj ad-Daulah Abu Tahir Sa'id. He also wrote a confession of faith regarding the Trinity and the incarnation, which he himself cites in the Book of Treasures, part ii., chap. 14, and an exposition of the services and prayers of the church, which is referred to in the same work, part, ii., chap. 31 (on the addition of the words “who was crucified for us” to the Trisagion). Under the name of Jacob of Maiperkat we have an admonition addressed to persons seeking ordination as priests, which is found in many service books.
Aaron bar Ma'dani (or Ma'dānī ?) had been recently appointed bishop of Mardin, Under the name of John, when he was promoted by the patriarch Ignatius II. to the dignity of maphriān in 1232. His bodily presence seems to have been somewhat insignificant, and he was no orator, for which reasons he was unpopular. In 1237 he went to Baghdādh, where in the following year he composed his panegyric on the holy Mar Aaron, and ingratiated himself with the three brothers Shams ad-Daulah, Fakhr ad-Daulah, and Tāj ad-Daulah, the sons of the archiater Thomas, who were in high favour at the court of al-Mustansir bi’llāh. He learned to speak and write Arabic thoroughly. In ī244 he was recalled to Mosul and received with every mark of respect. On the death of Ignatius in 1252, Dionysius (Aaron 'Angι^ir) was created patriarch, but a rival faction set up John bar Ma'dani; and so the two ruled in a divided church till Dionysius was murdered in the convent of Bar-saumā near Melitēne in 1261, after which time his rival sat alone till 1263. John bar Ma'dani compiled an anaphora and wrote a great many poems, of which Bodl. Hunt. 1 contains no less than 60. Some of the more important of these are the poem on the soul, entitled “the Bird” (Pāra/iéthā), Bodl. Hunt. 1; Poc. 298 (P. Smith, Catal., p. 641); Cod. Vat. cciv. (Catal., iii. 489); Berlin, Sachau 61, 8. 19 on the high origin of the soul and its degradation by sin, on the excellent path of the perfect, and on the capture of Edessa and other places by the Seljūk sultān 'Alā’u ’ d-din Kaikobādh in 1235. Of his homilies Cod. Vat. xcvii. contains eighteen for various feasts in Arabic.
These writers are, however, all cast into the shade by the imposing figure of Bar-Hebraeus, as we are accustomed to call him, one of the most learned and versatile men that Syria ever produced. Abu ’ 1-Faraj Gregory was the child of a physician at Melitēne (Malatiah) named Aaron, a convert from Judaism or of Jewish descent, whence his son got the name of Bar 'Ebhrāyā or Ihn al-
'Ibri, “the son of the Hebrew.” He was born in 1226, and devoted himself from his boyhood to the acquisition of Greek and Arabic. A little later he applied himself also to theology and philosophy, besides practising medicine under his father and other distinguished physicians. His lot was cast, however, in evil days. In 1243 many of the inhabitants of Malatiah fled to Aleppo before the advancing hordes of Hulāgū and his Tatars, and his father would have been among the fugitives, had it not been for a lucky accident. In the following year his father had actually to attend as physician upon one of the Tatar generals, whom he accompanied to Khartabirt, and on his return retired almost immediately from Malatiah to the safer city of Antioch. Here Bar-Hebraeus completed his studies and commenced his monastic life. Thence he went to Tripolis, where he and Salībhā bar Jacob λVagih, of Edessa, were studying medicine and rhetoric with a Nestorian teacher named Jacob, when they were summoned before the patriarch Ignatius II., on 14th September 1246, and ordained bishops, the former of Gubōs (Gūbās) near Malatiah, the latter of 'Akkō. 2s BarHebraeus was then just twenty years of age. In the following year he was transferred to Lakabhin, another diocese adjacent to Malatiah, by the patriarch Ignatius. After the death of Ignatius, Bar-Hebraeus took the part of Dionysius (Aaron 'Angur) against John bar Ma'dani, and was transferred by him in 1253 to Aleppo, but quickly deposed by his old friend Salībhā (who sided with John bar Ma'dani); nor did he recover this see till 1258. The next patriarch, Ignatius III. (Yēshū'), abbot of Gēvīkāth near Mopsuestia, advanced him to the dignity of maphriān in 1264. Henceforth his life was an active and busy one, and it seems almost marvellous that he should have studied and written so much, while in no way neglectful of the vast diocese committed to his charge. The story is told by himself in simple language in his Ecclesiastical History, with a continuation by his surviving brother Bar-saumā Safi, giving a nearly complete list of his works. He died at Marāghah in Adhurbāigān on 30th July 1286, and the greatest respect was shown to his memory by Greeks, Armenians, and Nestorians alike, the shops being closed and no business transacted. His body was conveyed to the convent of Mār Matthew at Mosul, where his grave was seen by Badger in October 1843. Bar-Hebraeus cultiVated nearly every branch of science that was in vogue in his time, his object being on the one hand to reinvigorate and keep alive the Syriac language and literature, and on the other to make available to his co-religionists the learning of the Muhammadans in a suitable form. Hence his treatment of the Aristotelian philosophy, following in the footsteps of Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna) and other Arabian writers. The Kéthābhā clhé-Bhā-bhāthā, or “Book of the Pupils of the Eyes,” is a compendium of the art of logic or dialectics, comprising an introduction on the utility of logic and seven chapters in which the author deals successively with the Isagoge of Porphyry, the Categories, De Interpretatione, Analytica Priora, Topica, Analytica Posteriora, and De Sophisticis Elenchis. In connexion with it we take the Kéthābhā dha-Sūwādh Sophia or “Book of the Speech of Wisdom,” a compendium of dialectics, physics, and metaphysics or theology. The large encyclopaedia entitled Ilēwath Hekhméthā, “Butyrum Sapientiae,” or less correctly Ifekhmath Ilckbmāthā, “Sapientia Sapientiarum,” comprises the whole Aristotelian discipline. The first volume contains the Logic, viz., the Isagoge, Categories, De Interpret., Anal. Pri. and Poster., Dialectica, De Sophist. Elenchis, Rhetoric, and Art of Poetry. The second comprises the Physics, viz., De Auscult. Physica, De Caelo et Mundo, De Meteorit, De Generatione et Corruptione, De Fossilibus, De Plantis, De Animalibus, and De Anima. The third, in its first section, treats of the Metaphysics, viz., of the origin and writers of philosophy, and of theology; in its second section, of ethics, economics, and politics. An abridge- ment of this large work is the Tēgéraih Tēgérāthā or “Mercatura Mercaturarum,” which goes over the same ground in briefer terms. To this class too belongs a poem “On the Soul, according to the views of the Peripatetics,” which is described as “memrā shināyā,” i.e., according to Assemani, riming in the letter sA. Bar-Hebraeus also translated into Syriac Ibn Sīnā’s Kitāb al-ishārāt wa ’ t-tan-bihāt, under the title of Kéthābhā dhé-Remze wa-Meīrānwāihā, and another work of the same class, entitled Zubdat al-Asrār or “the Cream of Secrets,” by his elder contemporary, Athir ad-din Mufaddal ibn Omar al-Abhari (died in 1262). s Nor did he neglect the study of mathematics and astronomy. In 1268 we find him lecturing on Euclid in the new convent at Marāghah, and again in 1272, at the same place, on the Megistc ('H μeya∖η σύνταξις) of Ptolemy. He drew up a κy, i.e., a set of astronomical tables or astronomical almanac, for the use of tiros; but his principal work in this branch of science is the Sullākā Haunānāyā or “Ascent of the Mind,” a complete treatise on astronomy and cosmography, which he composed in 1279. His medical writings are more numerous, for Bar-Hebraeus was famous as a physician and had been in attendance as such on the Tatar “king of kings” in 1263. He made, for example, a translation and an abridgement of Dioscorides’s treatise Veρl i∕ληs ιατρικής (De Medicamentis Simplicibus), under the title of Kéthābhā dhé-Bhioskorīdhīs, and wrote a commentary on the Aphorisms of Hippocrates in Arabic, and on the Quaestiones Medicae of Honain ibn Ishak in Syriac. He also published the Quaestiones in an abridged Syriac translation. Further, he is said to have written commentaries in Arabic on Galen’s treatises De Elementis (∏epι των καθ' Ίττποκράτην στοιχcιωv) and Be Temperamentis (∏epl κράσεων). He made an abridged version in Arabic of al-Ghāfiki’s “Book of Simples” (al-adwiyah al-mτιfradah), and left an unfinished Syriac translation of the Canon Çal-Kānun fi't-Tibb) of Ibn Sīnā. A large medical treatise of his own composition in Syriac is mentioned, but no .special title is given. As a grammarian Bar-Hebraeus deserved well of his country, and his writings on this subject are now well known and appreciated by Orientalists. By making use of the work of previous grammarians, especially Jacob of Edessa, he has succeeded in giving a very full sketch of the language according to the Oriental system, with many valuable obserVations as to dialectic differences, &c. The larger grammar bears the title of Kéthābhā dhé-Semlie, “the Book of Lights” or “Rays.” It has been published, according to the Paris MS. Ancien fonds 166, by the Abbé Martin. The smaller metrical grammar, Kéthābhā dhé-Ghrammaiikī, was edited so long ago as 1843 by Professor Bertheau of Gottingen, according to the MS. Orient. 18 in the library of that university, but without the fifth section Be Vocibus Aequivocis. Martin has republished it in his Oeuvres Grammaticales d’Abou ’ l Faradj, vol. ii., including the fifth section, according to the Paris MS. Ancien fonds 167. A third, still smaller grammar, Kéthābhā dha-Bhélésusīthā or “the Book of the Spark,” was left unfinished by the author. As a theologian, Bar-Hebraeus’s most useful work undeniably is the Ausar Rāzē or “Storehouse of Secrets,” the Horreum Mysteriorum as it is commonly called. This is a critical and doctrinal commentary on the text of the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, based on the Pēshīttā, but taking note of the various readings of the Hebrew text, the LXX. and other Greek versions, the later Syriac translations, and even the Armenian and Coptic, besides noting differences of reading between the Nestorians and Jacobites. The doctrinal portion is drawn from the Greek fathers and previous Syrian theologians, of course of the Monophysite school. The Ménārath Kudhshē, or “Lamp of the Sanctuary,” is a treatise on the “bases” or first principles on which the church is established. It deals in twelve “bases” with the following subjects:—(1) of knowledge in general, (2) of the nature of the universe, (3) of theology, (4) of the incarnation, (5) of the knowledge of celestial substances, i.e., the angels, (6) of the earthly priesthood, (7) of the evil spirits, (8) of the rational soul, (9) of free will and liberty, fate and destiny, (10) of the resurrection, (11) of the end of the world and the last judgement, (12) of paradise. The Kéthābhā dhe-Zalge, or “Book of Rays,” is a compendium of theology, going over nearly the same ground as the previous work, in ten sections. The Kéthābhā dh’lthikōn, or Liber τωv i∣θικωv, was composed at Marāghah in 1279. It has been fully analysed by Assemani in the B. O. , ii. 303 sq. Part i. treats of the exercises of the body and mind, such as prayer, manual work, study, vigils, fasting, &c.; part ii., of the regimen of the body; part iii., of the purifying of the soul from evil passions; part iv., of the adorning of the soul with virtues. The Kéthābhā dhé-Yaunā, or “Book of the Dove,” is a similar work specially intended for the use of ascetics living in solitude as hermits. It is also divided into four parts, viz., (1) of the training of the body, e.g., in alienation from the world, repentance, poverty, humility, patience, fraternal love, &c.; (2) of the training of the soul, e.g., in quiet, religious exercises, prayer, watching, fasting, &c.; (3) of the spiritual rest of the perfect; and (4) an autobiographical sketch of his own spiritual life. Bar-Hebraeus also spent part of his time in excerpting, arranging, and commenting upon the Book of Hierotheus concerning the hidden Mysteries of the House of God. In the commentary he chiefly follows that of Theodosius, patriarch of Antioch (see above, p. 846). He compiled an anaphora, published a confession of faith or creed, and approved the order of baptism of Severns, as translated by Jacob of Edessa. More valuable than these is his Kéthābhā dhé-HuddAyè, “the Book of Directions” or “Nomocanon,” which is·for the Jacobite Church what the Kunnāshā dhé-Kānonē of 'Abhd-īshō' is for the Nestorian, both in ecclesiastical and secular matters. To us Europeans the historical writings of Bar-Hebraeus surpass in interest and value everything else that he has written. He planned and executed a Universal History in three parts. Part i. contains the political History of the World from the creation down to his own times. Part ii. is the history of the church from Aaron downwards, the treatment being exceedingly brief till we reach the post-apostolic period, when it becomes a history of the patriarchs of the church of Antioch, and finally, after the age of Severus, of the patriarchs of the Monophysite branch of that church down to the year 1285. The meagre continuation by a later hand reaches to 1495. Part iii. offers us the history of the Eastern division of the Syrian Church from St Thomas the apostle onwards. From the time of Mārūthā (629) it becomes the history of the Monophysite maphriāns of Taghrith, though a record is always carefully kept of the catholic patriarchs of the Nestorians. It closes with the year 1286, but there is a continuation by Bar-Hebraeus’s brother Bar-saumā to 1288, and thence by another writer to 1496. 3θ In the last years of his life, at the request of some Mushm friends in Marā- glιah, he undertook to make a recension in Arabic of the political history, which he all but finished within the space of one month before his last illness came on. This edition is enriched with many references to Muhammadan writers and literature which are wanting in the Syriac. It is entitled al-Mukhtasar fi 'd-Duwal, or “Compendious History of the Dynasties.” Asa poet Bar-Hebraeus is admired by his countrymen, and even Renan has thought the poem on the theme Bona Lex sed Melior Philosophia to be worthy of publication. Some of the poems were badly edited and translated by Von Lengerke in 1836-38 according to the Paris MS. Ancien fonds 130; others have been published by the Maronite priest Augustinus Scebābi at Rome, 1877. The Carmen de Divina Sapientia was brought out so long ago as 1638 by Gabriel Sionita, and has been republished at Rome in 1880 by Yohannā Notayn
Jθul O *3x
Darauni. In his youth Bar-Hebraeus wrote a book on the interpretation of dreams, pushshālç helmed ; and in his later years he made a collection of entertaining and humorous stories in Syriac, entitled Kéthābhā dléé-Thunnāye Méghahljékhāne, with Arabic counterpart under the title of Daf al-Hamm, “the Driving away of Care.” ® The contents of the Tunnāye are, however, more varied than the title seems to promise, as may be seen from Assemani’s enumeration of the chapters, B.O., ii. 306.
Contemporary with Bar-Hebraeus, though somewhat younger, we may place Daniel bar Khattāb, to whom Assemani has devoted two articles in the B.O., ii., at pp. 244 and 463. Among the poems of Bar-Hebraeus we find verses addressed to this Daniel by the Nestorian Khamis bar Kardāhē with his reply and another by Bar-Hebraeus. He composed abridgements in Arabic of several of Bar-Hebraeus’s works, e.g., the Nomoeanon, a Ethics, Λusar Raze, Ménārath Kudh-she, Kéthābhā dhé-Bhābhāthā, and the larger grammar. An independent work of his, also in Arabic, treats of The Bases, or First Principles, of the Faith and Consolation of the Hearts of Believers.
With Dauiel bar Khattāb we may close our list of Jacobite writers in the literature of Syria. The Nestorians kept the lamp burning for a little, though not much longer, as we shall presently see.
Shēlēmōn, or Solomon, of Khilāt or Akhlāt, on the shores of Lake Van, was present as metropolitan of Pērath dē-Maishān or al-Basrah at the consecration of the catholicus Sabhr-īshō' in 1222. Besides some prayers and short discourses (memrōne), he wrote a treatise on the figure of the heavens and the earth, and compiled a volume of analecta, partly theological, partly historical, which he entitled Kéthābhā dhé-Dhebbārithā or “the Bee.” It is dedicated to his friend Narsai, bishop of Khōni - Shābhōr or Bēth Wāzīk, called by the Arabs al-Bawāzīg or al-Bawāzīj, on the lesser Zāb. Of this work an analysis has been given by Assemani in the B.O., iii. 1, 309-324, and there is a German translation of it by Schōnfelder, 1866. It has been recently edited by Mr E. A. W. Budge, of the British Museum, with an English translation, Oxford, 1886.
This was an age of song with the Nestorians, in which lived some of their favourite writers of hymns. (1) One of the most conspicuous of these is George Wardā (the Rose) of Arbēl or Irbil, whose poems have entered so largely into the use of the Nestorian Church that one of their service books is to this day called the Wardā. ™ His date may be gathered from certain of his hymns, which speak of the calamities of the years 1535-38 = 1224-27 a.d. (2) About the same time flourished Mas ’ ud of the family Bēth Kashshā (in Arabic Ibn al-Kass), who was physician (hakιm) to the caliph al-Musta'sim (1242-58), and outlived his patron. One of his poems for the feast of the Epiphany occurs in Cod. Vat. clxxxiv. (Catal. iii. p. 389). (3) Khamis bar Kardāhē of Arbēl was a younger contemporary of Bar-Hebraeus, as appears from his correspondence with Daniel bar Khattāb (see above). He too has bequeathed his name to one of the Nestorian service books, which is still called the Khamis. (4) Gabriel Kamsā (the Locust) was a monk of Bēth-Kūkā. He became metropolitan of Mosul, and was present at the consecration of Yabh-alāhā III. in 1281. There is a long poem of his in Cod. Vat. clxxx. (Catal., iii. 376), treating of the creation, the incarnation, the life of our Saviour, the preaching of the apostles, and the praises of the fathers of the church, and concluding with an encomium on Sabhr-īshō', the founder of Bēth-Kùkā. (5) John of Mosul was a monk of the convent of St Michael near that city. His work entitled Kéthābhā dhé-Shappār Dubbāre was published at Rome in 1868 by E. J. Millos, archbishop of 'Akrā, as a schoolbook, under the title of Directorium Spirituale. It is, of course, impossible to say to what extent the original has been tampered with in such an edition, but there is a MS. in the Brit. Mus. Or. 2450. The composition of the work is placed by Millos in 1245, and the death of the author by Cardāhī (Lib. Thes., p. 120) in 1270.
'Abhd-īshō' bar Bērikhā holds nearly the same position in regard to the Nestorian Church that Bar-Hebraeus does in relation to the Jacobite, though far inferior in talent and learning to “the Son of the Hebrew.” He flourished under Yabh-alāhā III., being firstly bishop of Shiggār (Sinjār) and Bētli-'Arbāyē about 1285, and afterwards, before 1291, metropolitan of Nisībis and Armenia. He died in 1318. He has left us a list of his own publications at the end of the Catalogus Librorum, in the B.O., iii. 1, 325 sq. Several of these seem to be lost,—at least they do not appear in the cata ; logues of our collections,—such as the commentary on the Old and New Testaments, the Kéthābhā Katholikos on the marvellous dispensation or life of our Lord on earth, the Kéthābhā Skolastikos against all the heresies, the book of the mysteries of the Greek philosophers, the twelve discourses comprising all the sciences, and the eoclesiastical decisions and canons, as also an Arabic work with the title Shah-marwārīd or “the King-pearl.” The Mar-gānīthā or “Pearl” is a theological work in five sections, treating of God, the creation, the Christian dispensation, the sacraments of the church, and the things that prefigure the world to come. There is a careful analysis of its contents in B.O., iii. 1, 352-360. It has been edited, with a Latin translation, in Mai, ScripU. Veit. Nova CoU., x., and done into English by Badger, The Nestorians, ii. 380 sq. The date of composition is 1298. 34 ' Abhd-īshō' himself translated this work into Arabic in 1312, as we learn from 'Amr ibn Mattā in the Majdal, where large portions of it are quoted. The Collection of Synodical Canons or Nomoeanon is also fully analysed by Assemani, B.O., iii. 1, 332-351. It has been edited, with a Latin translation, in Alai, Scriptt. Vett. Nova Coll., x. As a poet 'Abh∙d-ishō' does not shine according to our ideas, although his countrymen admire his verses greatly. Not only is he obscure in vocabulary and style, but he has adopted and even exaggerated all the worst faults of Arabic writers of rimed prose and scribblers of verse. His principal effort in poetry is the Paradise of Eden, a collection of fifty poems on theological subjects, which has been analysed by Assemani, B.O., iii. 1, 325-332. This volume was published by the author in 1291, and in 1316 he found that it was necessary to add an explanatory commentary. Another collection of twenty-two poems, which may be regarded as parts of one composition, treating of the love of wisdom and knowledge, is found in Cod. Vat. clxxiv. (Catal., iii. 359) and Bodl. Marsh. 201 (P. Smith, Catal., p. 510); and a third, including the above and a selection from the Paradise, is contained in Bodl. Marsh., 361. Of his minor works, enumerated in the B. O., iii. 1, 361, the consolatory discourses, the letters, and the commentary on the epistle of Aristotle to Alexander concerning the great art (alchemy) seem to be lost. The turgāmē are collected in a MS. at Berlin, Alter Bestand 41, 4. His commentary on an enigmatical poem of Simeon Shankēlāwī we have already mentioned (see above, p. 852). To us his most useful work decidedly is the Catalogue of Books, which forms the basis of vol. iii. part 1 of Assemani’s Bibl. Orient. There is an older edition of it by Abraham Ecchellensis, Rome, 1653. It has been translated into English by Badger. The Catalogue consists of four parts, viz., (1) the Scriptures of the Old Testament, with sundry apocrypha, B.O., iii. 1, 5; (2) the Scriptures of the New Testament, p. 8; (3) the Greek fathers who were translated into Syriac, p. 13; (4) the Syriac fathers, chiefly, of course, of the Nestorian Church, pp. 65-362. It is to be regretted that 'Abhd-īshō' contented himself merely with enumerating the titles of books, and never thought it worth his while to give the date of the writers, nor even to arrange his notices in any kind of chronological order.
After 'Abhd-īshō' there are hardly any names among the Nestorians worthy of a place in the literary history of the Syrian nation. We may make an exception in favour of the catholicus Timothy II., who was elected in succession to Yabh-alāhā III. in 1318, having previously been metropolitan of Mosul and Irbil under the name of Joseph. He wrote a work on the sacraments of the church, of which Assemani has given an analysis in H.Ο., iii. 1, 572-580. His death took place in 1328. (W. W*.)
