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A comprehensive survey of Syriac Christianity over three thousand years Syriac is often referred to as the third main language of Christianity, along with Latin and Greek, and it remains a foundational classical, literary, and religious language throughout the world. Originating in Mesopotamia along the Roman and Parthian frontiers, it was never the language of a powerful state or ethnic group, but with the coming of Christianity it developed into a rich religious and cultural tradition. At the same time that Christianity was making its way through Europe, Syriac missionaries were founding churches from the Mediterranean coast to Persia, converting the Turkic tribes of Central Asia, and building communities in India and China. This comprehensive work tells the underexplored story of the Syriac world over three thousand years, from its pre-Christian roots in the Aramaic tribes and the ancient Near East to its vibrant expressions in modern diaspora churches. Enhanced with images, songs, poems, and important primary texts, this book shows the importance of Syriac history, theology, and literature in the twenty-first century.
Between Memory and Power intends to demonstrate that a robust culture of historical writing existed in 2nd/8th century Syria, and to offer new methodological approaches to access this now lost history, torn between memory and oblivion. By studying the making of Umayyad heroes or Abbasid origins-myths, this book aims to reveal the successive meanings granted to Syrian history, and to identify the various layers of historical writing and rewriting during the first centuries of Islam. Taken together, these elements make possible a history of meanings of the very space of Syria, articulated around power and its expression, which grants a clear coherence to the period, extending well beyond the dynastic caesura of 132/750.
This volume brings together a set of fundamental contributions, many translated into English for this publication, along with an important introduction. Together these explore the role of Greek among Christian communities in the late antique and Byzantine East (late Roman Oriens), specifically in the areas outside of the immediate sway of Constantinople and imperial Asia Minor. The local identities based around indigenous eastern Christian languages (Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, etc.) and post-Chalcedonian doctrinal confessions (Miaphysite, Church of the East, Melkite, Maronite) were solidifying precisely as the Byzantine polity in the East was extinguished by the Arab conquests of th...
This volume presents the results of the Leiden project on the identity formation of the Syrian Orthodox Christians, which developed from a religious association into an ethnic community. A number of specialists react to the findings and discuss the cases of the East Syrians, Armenians, Copts, and Ethiopians.
A collection of essays from leading historians which explores the ways in which history was written in Europe and Asia between 400 and 1400.
The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Orthodox Christianity is designed to demonstrate how Orthodox Christian, namely, Eastern (Greek, Slavic, Romanian, Antiochene) and Oriental (Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopian and Armenian) communities have received, shaped, and interpreted the Christian Bible. The basic hallmark of Orthodox Christianity, a unique mix of strictness (tradition) and flexibility (innovation, modernity), is detectable at the level of text, canon, Scripture-Tradition relationship, and mostly in the area of biblical hermeneutics.
"As the Roman Empire broke down in western Europe, its stability and prosperity moved decisively to the east, producing history's first truly affluent, multi-faceted Christian society, in what is now known as the Byzantine Empire. What united the twenty-four million people living in this vast realm--Roman citizens all, but as diverse as the landscape itself--was a shared conviction in the Christian ideal of philanthrōpia. In this sweeping cultural and social history of Christian philanthropy, Daniel Caner shows this practice involved more than simply a love of humanity; it required living up to Jesus's injunction to 'Give to all who ask of you' by offering mercy and material aid to every hu...
Catalog of Catalogs provides a comprehensive index of nearly 2,300 publications documenting the exhibition of Judaica over the past 140 years. This vast corpus of material, ranging from simple leaflets to scholarly catalogs, contains textual and visual material as yet unmined for the study of Jewish art, religion, culture and history. Through highly-detailed, fully-indexed catalog entries, William Gross, Orly Tzion and Falk Wiesemann elucidate some 2,000 subjects, geographical locations and Judaica objects (ceremonial objects, illuminated manuscripts, printed books, synagogues, cemeteries et al.) addressed in these catalogs. Descriptions of the catalog's bibliographic components, contributors, exhibition history, and contents, all accessible through the volume's five indices, render this volume an unparalleled new resource for the study of Jewish Art, culture and history.
This volume brings together a set of contributions, many appearing in English for the first time, together with a new introduction, covering the history of the Ethiopian Christian civilization in its formative period (300-1500 AD). Rooted in the late antique kingdom of Aksum (present day Northern Ethiopia and Eritrea), and lying between Byzantium, Africa and the Near East, this civilization is presented in a series of case studies. At a time when philological and linguistic investigations are being challenged by new approaches in Ethiopian studies, this volume emphasizes the necessity of basic research, while avoiding the reduction of cultural questions to matters of fact and detail.