Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 22.djvu/886

 850 SYRIAC LITERATURE [10TH CENT.- whom George, metropolitan of Mosul and Arbel, dedicated his ex- position of the offices of the church, he must have lived about the - middle of the previous century. He wrote funeral sermons, metri- cal homilies, answers to Scriptural questions and enigmas, and other stuff of the same sort. More important probably were his " Book of Flowers," Kethdbhd dhe-Habbdbhe, 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). 1 Elias bar Conspicuous among the writers of this century is Elias bar Shinaya. Shinaya, who was born in 975, 2 adopted the monastic life in the convent of Michael at Mosul under the abbot John the Lame, 3 and was ordained priest by Nathaniel, bishop of Shenna (as-Sinn), who afterwards became catholicus under the name of John V. (1001-12). 4 Elias was subsequently in the convent of Simeon on the Tigris opposite Shenna, and was made bishop of Beth Nuhadhre in 1002. 5 At the end of 1008 he was advanced to the dignity of metropolitan of Nisibis. 8 With the next patriarch, John VI. bar Nazol (1012-20), 7 previously bishop of Herta, he was on good terms ; but he set his face against Isho'-yab'h bar Ezekiel (1020-25). 8 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. 9 His greatest work is the Annals or Chronicle, of which unfortunately only one imperfect copy exists. 10 Baethgen has published extracts from it under the title of Frag- mente syr. u. arab. Historiker, 1884, which have enabled scholars to recognize its real importance. 11 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 Herta, was ordained catholicus on Wednesday, 19th of the latter Teshrln, 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). 12 After the Annals we may mention Elias's Syriac grammar, one of the best of the Nestorian writings on the subject, 13 and his Arabic-Syriac vocabu- lary, Kitab at-Tarjumdnfl ta'lim lughat as-Suryan or " the Inter- Ereter, to teach the Syriac Language." It has been edited by De agarde in his PraRtermissorum Libri Duo, 1879, and was the store- house from which Thomas a Novaria derived his Thesaurus Arabico- Syro-Latinus, 1636. Elias was also a composer of hymns, some of which occur in the Nestorian service -books, 14 and of metrical homilies, apparently of an artificial character. 15 He edited four volumes of decisions in ecclesiastical law, which are often cited by 'Abhd-isho' of Nisibis in his Collcctio Canonum Synodicorum 16 ; indeed the third section, "On the Division of Inheritances," is en- tirely borrowed from the work of Elias. 17 Of his epistles that to the bishops and people of Baghdadh on the illegal ordination of Isho'-yabh bar Ezekiel is preserved in Cod. Vat. cxxix. (Catal., iii. 191 ). 18 Six of his Arabic dissertations have been described by Assemani in the B. 0., 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 '1-Kasim al-Husain ibn 'All al-Maghribi, pre- ceded by a letter to the secretary Abu 'l-'Ala Sa'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 Maiyafiirikin in October, and published with the approbation of the celebrated commentator, philosopher, and lawyer Abu '1-Faraj 'Abdallah ibn at-Taiyib, 19 who was secretary to the patriarch Elias I. The anonymous work de- scribed in full by Assemani (B.O., iii. 1, 303-306) under the title of Kitdbu 'l-Burhdn 'aid sahlhi (or rather/? tashlhi) 'l-lman, "Tli Demonstration of the Truth of the Faith," is also by him. 20 Here we may pause in our enumeration to cast an eye upon some I B.O., iii. 1, 174. 2 Rosen, Catal., p. 89, col. 2. 3 B.O., iii. 1,266 note 3, 271 col. 1. Baethgen, Fragmente, pp. 101, 151 ; 104, 153 ; compare Bar-Hebrseus, Chron. Eccles., ii. 261, 281 ; B.O., ii. 444. 5 Baethgen, Fragment*, pp. 101, 152. 6 nid., pp. 103, 152. 7 Ibid., pp. 104, 153 ; Bar-Hebreus, Chron. Eccles., ii. 283 ; Ji.O., ii. 44(5. 8 B.O., iii. 1, 272. 9 Consequently the statement in B.O., ii. 447, is inaccurate. Cardahi (Liber Thesauri, p. 84) names 10.j6. 10 Brit. Mus. Add. 7197 (Rosen, Catal, pp. 8C-90 ; Wright, Catal, p. 1206). II Baethgen has overlooked Wright's Catal., p. 1206, and the plate in the Oriental Series of the Palssographical Society, No. Ixxvi. The Syriac text was evidently written by an amanuensis, whereas the older Arabic text was prob- ably written by Elias himself. 12 There are some extracts from the Annals in Berlin, Sachau 108, 2. 13 There are MSS. in the Brit. Mus. Add. 2. r .87C, Or. 2314 (frag.); Vat. Cod. cxciv. (Catal., iii. 410), Codd. ccccx. oct-el. (Mai, Scriptt. Veil. Nova Coll., v.); Palat. Medic, ccclxi. (Catal., p. 419) ; Berlin, Sachau 5, 2, also 216, 1, and 306, 1 ; and in the collection of the S.P.C.K. Part of the work (sections 1-4) has been edited by Dr. R. Gottheil, Leipsic. ISSfi. i E.g., Cod. Vat. xc. (Catal., ii. 487), Nos. 13. 15, 17, 18 ; Cod. Vat. xci. (Catal, ii. 491), Nos. 12, 14, 16, 17 ; Berlin, Sachau 64, 10. 15 See Cod. Vat. clxxxiv. (Catal, iii. 390), a poem on the love of learning, in which the letter Alaph does not occur. It is printed by Cardahi in the Liber Thesauri, pp. 83-84. 18 Mai, Scriptt. Veil. Nova Coll., x. 17 B.O., iii. 1, 267-269 ; Mai, op. cit., v. pp. 54, 220. 18 jj.o., iii. 1, 272-273. 19 He died in 1043; see B.O., iii. 1,544; Wustenfeld, Gesch. d. arab. Aerzte, No. 132; Ibn Abi Osaibi'ah, ed. Miiller, i. 230; Bar-Hebraeus, Hist. Dynast., p. 355 (transl., p. 233) ; Chron. Syr., p. 239 (transl., p. 244) ; Chron. Eccles., ii. 283. 20 Seethe German translation by L. Horst, Des Metropoliten Elias von Nisibis Buch vom Beweis der Wahrheit d. Glaubens, Colinar, 188G. anonymous translations, which we are inclined to ascribe to the 10th Anony- and llth centuries, and which are interesting as showing what the inous popular literature of the Syrians was, compared with that of their transla- theologians and men of science. tions. We have already spoken of the older translation of Kalllagh w'e- Kalilah Damnagh, made by the periodeutes Bodh in the 6th century of our wa-Dim- era (see above, p. 837). About the middle of the 8th century there ma h. appeared an independent Arabic translation from the Pahlavi by 'Abdallah ibn al-Mukaffa', which, under the name of Kalilah wa- Vimnah, has been the parent of secondary versions in the Syriac, Persian, Greek, Hebrew, and Spanish languages. 21 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 licentious- ness, 23 a description which would very well apply to the 10th or llth 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, 24 which are not found at all in De Sacy's text, appear in their proper places in the later Syriac." 25 To about the same period, judging by the similarity of style and Sindban. language, we would assign the Syriac version of the book of Sindi- bddh. This work was translated, probably in the latter half of the 8th century, from Pahlavi into Arabic by Musa, a Muham- madan Persian. It is, as Noldeke has shown, 26 the smaller of the two recensions known to the Arabs, the larger, entitled Aslam (?) and Sindibddh, being the work of al-Asbagh ibn 'Abd al-'Aziz as- Sijistiini. The smaller Sindibddh was in its turn done into Syriac, and thence into Greek by Michael Andreopulus for Gabriel, prince of Melitene (1086-1100), as discovered by Comparetti, 27 under the name of ZwnVas (Sindipas), just as Kalilah wa-Dimnah was trans- lated by Symeon (the son of) Seth for the emperor Alexius Com- nenus, who ascended the throne in 1081. The Syriac version, which bears the title of the Story of Sindban and the Phftosoplicrs 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. 28 A third product of the same age we believe to be the Syriac trans- Life of lation of Pseudo-Callisthenes's Life of Alexander the Great, made Alexan- from an Arabic version of a Greek original. Of this, however, we der the shall be better able to judge when the Svriac text lies before us in Great. print. 29 Lastly we would place somewhere between the 9th and llth cen- sRsop's turies the Syriac translation of Esop's (^Esop's) Fallcs, which has Fables. been edited under a somewhat Jewish garb by Landsberger, 30 who imagined himself to have found the Syriac original of the fables of Syntipas (Sindipas), whereas Geiger 31 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, D1D1DT is only a clerical error for D131DS1. In Syriac MSS. of this collection the title is written t-^OSUCDQ*;, "of Josephus." 32 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 inter- woven a number of Esopic fables. They have been edited (with the exception of two) by Rbdiger in his Clirestom. 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 Ghalib bar Sabuni, the younger brother of Sa'id bar Sabiinl Abu (see above, p. 849), was almost as unfortunate as his brother. He Ghalib was raised to the episcopate of Edessa after his brother's death by bar Athanasius VII., but speedily deposed on account of a quarrel, Sabuni. although many of the Edessenes, among them the governor Bald- 21 See Keith -Falconer, Kalilah and Dimnah or the Fables of Bidpai, 1885, Introduction. a Wright, The Bonk of Kalilah and Dimnah, translated from Arabic into Syriac. 23 See Wright's Preface, p. xi. sq. 24 See Guidi, Studii sul Testo Arabo del Libra di Kalila e Dimna, 1873. 25 Keith-Falconer, op. cit., p. Ix. 26 z.DM.G., xxxiii. (1879), pp. 521-522. 27 Ricerche intnrno al Libra di Sindibdd, 1869, p. 28 sq. ; The Folk-lore Society, vol. ix. 1, p. 57 ./. 28 Alt. Bestand 57, ff. 60-87. A small specimen had already been published by Rcidiger, Clirestom. Syr., 2d ed., pp. 100-101. 29 An edition of it is in preparation by Mr E. A. W. Budge, of the British Museum, from five MSS. See Rodiger, Clirestom. Si/r., 2d ed., pp. 112-120, and Perkins in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, iv. p. 359 sq. 30 D1D1DT X vHD, Die Fabeln des Sophos, Syrisches Original der Griechischen Fabeln des Si/ntipas, 1859. Compare his earlier dissertation, Fabulie aliquot AramtKiB, 1846. 31 Z.D.M.G., xiv. (18fiO), p. 586 sq. 32 B.O.. iii. 1, 7, with note 2. So, for example, MS. Trin. Coll. Dublin, B. 5, 32 (Wright, Kalilah and Dimnah, pp. ix., x.).