Page:The Nestorians and their rituals, volume 2.djvu/37

Rh But, besides the above, other lamentable events have contributed their full share in bringing about this literary destitution. It is traditionally recorded, that on more than one occasion the Mohammedan rulers of Baghdad seized the books of the Nestorian patriarchate there, and committed them to the flames upon the same ground that Omar is said to have burnt the famous library of Alexandria. A similar auto-da-fé is said to have been perpetrated at Jezeerah; but the last occurred so late as 1832, when Mohammed Pasha, the Coordish chief of Rawandooz, entered the convent of Mar Rabban Hormuzd, near Mosul, where a goodly number of volumes had been preserved, and after pillaging and desecrating the church, and slaughtering several of the monks, ordered every book found there to be destroyed.

The Nestorians of the present day have scarcely any other books beside the Church Rituals, all the remaining MSS. being in the possession of the so-called Chaldeans. At the patriarchate in Mosul there are about fifty volumes, several of which are imperfect, and few of much value. At Baghdad and Mardeen there are also small collections, and report says that a good library still exists at Sert under the Chaldean Bishop of that diocese, and that among them is a very ancient MS. of the New Testament written on vellum. During my residence in the country I succeeded in collecting upwards of a hundred MSS. for the Christian Knowledge Society, among which was an entire series of the Church Rituals, one or two copies of the Syriac New Testament written about the tenth century, a copy of the Old Testament and Apocrypha in separate parts, besides some other valuable and rare works. The Chaldeans have at length learned to lament the folly of their fathers, and the few books which they now possess are guarded with such jealous care, that it is somewhat difficult to obtain them even on loan.

Grateful, as we should be, for the mass of learning and devotion hitherto preserved to this ancient community in their Rituals and other ecclesiastical compositions, still one cannot forbear deeply regretting the irreparable shipwreck of so large an amount of Nestorian science and genius. For although it cannot be fairly presumed that any important truth, or any useful discovery in art or nature, has been snatched away from the