A Guide to Syriac Authors

A Guide to Syriac Authors Syriac Biographical Dictionary,Volume II

David A. Michelson and Nathan P. Gibson

A Guide to Syriac Authors is a scholarly manual with entries on nearly 1,000 authors who wrote in Syriac or otherwise had an influence on Syriac literature. A dialect of Aramaic, Syriac flourished as a lingua franca of the Middle East in antiquity and the Middle Ages. Today more than 20,000 manuscripts preserve texts in Syriac pertaining to theology, philosophy, commerce, science, and medicine. As a digital reference work, A Guide to Syriac Authors employs linked data technology to meet the needs of manuscript cataloguers and historical researchers interested in Syriac authors. Relationships between authors and texts, places, or other persons are documented through links to related information in The Syriac Gazetteer and The New Handbook of Syriac Literature. A Guide to Syriac Authors is freely available online as the second volume of The Syriac Biographical Dictionary. Readers can browse entries online, download the entire publication in TEI XML, create permanent links to other digital publications, and offer editorial revisions at syriaca.org/authors.

“This is the first Who’s Who in Syriac Studies, a pioneering tool in a whole range of ancient and modern languages providing information about the individuals through time who created and were part of Syriac culture and still keep it alive today.” —Muriel Debié, Directeur d’études (Sciences Religieuses), École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris Editors: David A. Michelson Vanderbilt University Nathan P. Gibson Vanderbilt University

syriaca.org/authors Open Access CC-BY

About Syriaca.org: Syriaca.org is a collaborative research project publishing digital scholarship on the culture, history, and literature of Syriac communities from antiquity to the present. Funding for A Guide to Syriac Authors has been provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Princeton University, Vanderbilt University, the University of Alabama, and Texas A&M University. Photo Credit: “The Evangelists, St. Luke and St. John.” CFMM 37, f. 6r, Church of the Forty Martyrs, Mardin MS 37 (13th c. CE). Image provided by Syriac Orthodox Diocese of Mardin and the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library, Saint John’s University, Collegeville, Minn. under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Please reuse. Vanderbilt ®, Vanderbilt University ®, V Oak Leaf Design®, Star V Design®, and Anchor Down® are trademarks of The Vanderbilt University. © 2016 Vanderbilt University. All rights reserved. Produced by Vanderbilt University Creative Services and Vanderbilt Printing Services. Printed on paper with 10% post-consumer recycled content with ink made from renewable resources, as part of the university’s commitment to environmental stewardship and natural resource protection. This publication is recyclable. Please recycle it.

A Guide to Syriac Authors Syriac Biographical Dictionary, Volume II Editors: David A. Michelson and Nathan P. Gibson

Introduction: by David A. Michelson A Guide to Syriac Authors is a literary reference work documenting authors relevant to the study of Syriac literature. This guide is designed as an aid for both historical research and cataloguing. The entries in the guide are written to help researchers identify and disambiguate authors related to the history of Syriac literature. This author list can be browsed or searched based on numerous criteria including chronology, geography, and relationships between persons and texts. A Guide to Syriac Authors is also designed to meet the pressing need for a name authority file for use by librarians in cataloguing Syriac manuscripts, texts, and published works. Each individual entry in A Guide to Syriac Authors corresponds to one person who can be identified as an author. These entries are also included in Syriaca.org's larger database of persons, The Syriac Biographical Dictionary (SBD), so that researchers interested in prosopography more broadly will have access to the same entries. The sole criteria for inclusion of a particular author in A Guide to Syriac Authors is relevance to the study of Syriac literature. "Relevant authors" include not only persons who wrote in the classical Syriac language or modern Neo-Aramaic dialects, but also a broader range of authors (ancient and modern) whose works have been translated into Syriac or otherwise influenced Syriac literature. For example, relevant entries have also been made for authors who did not write in Syriac but who are named or cited in Syriac texts. Entries have also been created for authors in dialogue with Syriac literature who wrote in the many languages neighboring the Syriac traditions (Arabic, Armenian, Malayalam, etc). There are no temporal or spatial boundaries for the database, which collects data on authors from any period past or present useful for Syriac studies, from authors credited in Syriac biblical translations to members of the contemporary diaspora communities. Similarly, historicity is not a selection criteria, thus A Guide to Syriac Authors includes entries on pseudonymous, uncertain, anonymous, or collective authors when they are of significance for research on Syriac culture. In all cases, inclusion of an author is based on the collection of sufficient citation information to uniquely distinguish each identity. All authors with entries in A Guide to Syriac Authors can be annotated to show their relationships to persons, places, or other data published by Syriaca.org such as in The Syriac Gazetteer.

As a sub-collection within a larger reference work, The Syriac Biographical Dictionary (SBD), A Guide to Syriac Authors was designed with the same information structure. All entries must include at least one specific primary or secondary source citation sufficient to identify and disambiguate the person. Most entries also contain name variant information. When possible some entries contain greater biographical detail although such detail is not the foremost goal of the publication. The overarching purpose is to provide a unique identifier (a URI, uniform resource identifier) for each Syriac author to facilitate cataloguing of Syriac literary works and the creation of linked data in which author URIs will enable linking not only between Syriaca.org's Guide to Syriac Authors and its forthcoming New Handbook of Syriac Literature but also to external partner projects such as the manuscript catalogues of e-ktobe (Manuscrits syriaques), the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library, and The British Library. These person URIs take the form http://syriaca.org/person/\d+ (where "\d+" indicates a unique string of one or more numerals). As an example, http://syriaca.org/ person/13 represents the noted Syriac author and saint: Ephrem the Syrian. All entries from this reference work are encoded following the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), a best practice used widely in digital scholarship on literary corpora. In addition, the person records of A Guide to Syriac Authors are also serialized into other data formats for use by other projects. For example entries are exported as MADS records and included in OCLC’s The Virtual International Authority File.

Index: This index is up-to-date as of September 15, 2016. New entries and new content in the existing entries are continually being added. Please consult http://syriaca.org/authors for the latest version. To suggest additions or corrections, please click the “Corrections/Additions?” button on the relevant page, or email editors [at] syriaca [dot] org.

A Aaron of Alexandria - !"‫ܪ‬$%&'(‫ܐܗܪܘܢ ܕܐ‬

Ahrun of Alexandria, Aaron of Alexandria, Priester Ahrôn URI: http://syriaca.org/person/980 Aaron the Monk - ‫"! ܐܗܪܘܢ‬."‫( ܕ‬active 12th century)

The Monk Aaron, Ahrun dayroyo, Aaron dayroyo URI: http://syriaca.org/person/215 Aaron the Persian - !/0.1 ‫( ܐܗܪܘܢ‬active 7th century)

Rabban Aaron the Persian, Ahrun the Persian URI: http://syriaca.org/person/107

Aaron - ‫ܐܗܪܘܢ‬

Ahron, Ahrôn URI: http://syriaca.org/person/1012 Aba I, catholicos - !/2$3 !4‫( ܐ‬saint, d. 552, active 540-552)

Aba I, Mar Aba I, Abā I, Catholicos , Aba, Catholicos, ʾAḇā, Aba, catholicos, ĀBĀ (ĀWĀ) Teacher of biblical interpretation, author, Cath. (540-52). URI: http://syriaca.org/person/306 Aba II of Kashkar - 5%/4‫ ܨ‬7".4 .4 !4‫( ܐ‬641 - 751)

Aba II of Kashkar, Mar Aba II, Màr(j) Àb(h)ā II., Mar Aba II Katholikos, Aba bar Brik Ṣebyaneh Scholar, Bp. of Kashkar , and Cath. (741-751). URI: http://syriaca.org/person/307 Aba of Kashkar - !".'89 !4‫( ܐ‬active late 6th/early 7th cent.)

Aba of Kashkar, Àb(h)ā v Kaškar Polymath, author, and diplomat during the reigns of Shah Khusrau II of Persia (r. 590-628), Emperor Maurice of Byzantium (r. 582-602), ... URI: http://syriaca.org/person/1086 Aba - !4‫( ܐ‬, active ca. 400)

Aba, Aba, Mar Aba, Àb(h)ā Disciple of Ephrem , author, and biblical commentator. URI: http://syriaca.org/person/308 Abba Paul - ‫;(;ܣ‬1 !4‫( ܐ‬active 624)

Anba Paul, Abbas Pawla URI: http://syriaca.org/person/86 Abgar the Hagiographer - .