Research and publication of Aramaic texts

Another area of work of the MAC is the research and publication of Aramaic manuscripts and epigraphic monuments. The participants of the circle prepared editions on a number of Syrian manuscripts (historical, hagiographic, mystical texts, spell collections), as well as inscriptions on magic bowls in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic.

Historical texts

Yulia Furman translates and publishes the text of John bar Penkāyē.

John bar Penkāyē is an East Syrian ("Nestorian") author who lived and worked at the end of the VII century. We don't know much about his life. He was born in the village of Penek, located in the region of Bēt Zavdai, from where he received his nickname. Bar Penkāyē was a monk at the monastery of Mār Yōḥannan in Qamula. His belonging to monasticism can be learned, in particular, from his work "Book of the Beginning of Words". In addition to this work, he had others (letters and answers to them; a seven-volume essay of ascetic content; "The Book of Seven Trade Speeches"; "The Book Against Cults"; "The Book on Child Education"), but this is the most voluminous and famous. It represents a world history from the creation of the world to 686 AD. As the author himself writes in the title of his work, "we begin to write the Book of the beginning of words, the history of the transient world" - kṯāḇā d-rēš mellē tašʕīṯā ʕal ʕalmā d-zaḇnā.

Parts of the translation are available online in Russian:

Mystical texts

The East Syriac mystical tradition is one of the most striking phenomena in the history of Christian intellectual culture. It covered the territories of modern Iraq, western and southern Iran, South-Eastern Turkey and Qatar. The time of its heyday is the VII-VIII centuries.

Maksim Kalinin, a member of the circle, analyzes and comments on works representing the Eastern Syrian mystical tradition at his seminar in the "Laboratory of unnecessary things". The texts of the most prominent representatives of this tradition were selected, allowing to characterize its most important stages: "Chairs on knowledge" by Afnimaran and an anonymous commentary on them; treatises by Isaac the Syrian from the first and second collections; "Chairs on knowledge" by Isaac the Syrian; conversations and letters of John of Dalyatha; "Book of questions and answers", "Book of chapters on knowledge" and letters from Joseph Hazzaya. In addition, Maksim translates and publishes mystical texts:

Maksim was a co-host of the podcast "Syrian mystics answer" and the author of the course "Syrian mystics about hell, toys, eros and procrastination". These materials are available online in Russian.

Syriac spell collections

Handwritten spells in the classical Syrian language, the birthplace of which is Kurdistan and Iranian Azerbaijan, have been known to science since about the middle of the XIX century, and at the moment there are several dozen works that touch on this topic in one way or another.

However, so far the only fundamental study of these texts is the monograph of the British Hebraist Hermann Gollanz, published in 1912 and based on the analysis of four manuscripts. Meanwhile, as the bibliographic and archival researches of the project participants have shown, at least 60 manuscripts of Syriac spells (spells) are known, stored in museums and private collections around the world. Each such manuscript-book contains several dozen spells for different needs.

The main task of the project "Inventory of Syrian spells" is to help researchers answer the following questions: What is the repertoire of spells in the Syrian tradition? Where can I find parallels to the texts in the newly discovered Syrian manuscript? At first glance, it is not difficult to get answers to these questions, because the title of the spell usually reveals its pragmatism and its identity as a unique text: "For the one who eats and is not saturated", "The spell of Rabban Khurmid from a mad dog", or "For (good luck in) the way and trade". In fact, it is not limited to cataloguing spells by their headlines. Inventory of spells faces a number of difficulties that only a careful study of the texts themselves can overcome.

The work of the project team members as a whole goes in several directions: creation of main descriptions of existing manuscripts and reconciliation of previously published descriptions; creation of a catalog (inventory) of Syriac spells; organizational work related to the acquisition of photographs of manuscripts in museums and private collections; preparation of publications; preparation of materials for the creation of digital editions of Syriac spells (set of text, development of various types of markup). In the future, the project participants plan to prepare for publication a volume that will include the texts of all known types of Syriac spelss, as well as to create an Internet resource with the possibility of various types of search through these texts.

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