Monk and Mason on the Tigris Frontier
Monk and Mason on the Tigris Frontier

Author: Andrew Palmer

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1990-04-12

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 9780521360265

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Tur cAdin is a plateau skirted by the Upper Tigris in south-eastern Turkey. Syrian Orthodox Christians of Aramaic tongue still worship in its Late Antique churches. Monks converted the region and the most powerful monastery, founded in the fourth century, is still flourishing today. This book grew out of an attempt to document more fully the early history of this abbey. It aims to rediscover the practical and symbolic function of the monuments of Tur cAdin and place them in their original social context. A recurring theme is the relationship between village and monastery and, within each, between community and individual. The final chapters also contribute to our understanding of the Syrian Orthodox community under the Abbasid caliphate. A 500-page microfiche supplement contains the first editions of the Qartmin Trilogy, a monastic text to which the book refers, constantly, and the Book of Life, a unique quasi-epigraphical document of a Christian village and its will to surive.

From Constantinople to the Frontier: The City and the Cities
From Constantinople to the Frontier: The City and the Cities

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2016-05-30

Total Pages: 546

ISBN-13: 9004307745

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From Constantinople to the Frontier: The City and the Cities provides twenty-five articles addressing the concept of centres and peripheries in the late antique and Byzantine worlds, focusing specifically on urban aspects of this paradigm. Spanning from the fourth to thirteenth centuries, and ranging from the later Roman empires to the early Caliphate and medieval New Rome, the chapters reveal the range of factors involved in the dialectic between City, cities, and frontier. Including contributions on political, social, literary, and artistic history, and covering geographical areas throughout the central and eastern Mediterranean, this volume provides a kaleidoscopic view of how human actions and relationships worked with, within, and between urban spaces and the periphery, and how these spaces and relationships were themselves ideologically constructed and understood. Contributors are Walter F. Beers, Lorenzo M. Bondioli, Christopher Bonura, Lynton Boshoff, Averil Cameron, Jeremiah Coogan, Robson Della Torre, Pavla Drapelova, Nicholas Evans, David Gyllenhaal, Franka Horvat, Theofili Kampianaki, Maximilian Lau, Valeria Flavia Lovato, Byron MacDougall, Nicholas S.M. Matheou, Daniel Neary, Jonas Nilsson, Cecilia Palombo, Maria Alessia Rossi, Roman Shliakhtin, Sarah C. Simmons, Andrew M. Small, Jakub Sypiański, Vincent Tremblay and Philipp Winterhager.

Envisioning Islam
Envisioning Islam

Author: Michael Philip Penn

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2015-06-05

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 0812291441

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The first Christians to encounter Islam were not Latin-speakers from the western Mediterranean or Greek-speakers from Constantinople but Mesopotamian Christians who spoke the Aramaic dialect of Syriac. Under Muslim rule from the seventh century onward, Syriac Christians wrote the most extensive descriptions extant of early Islam. Seldom translated and often omitted from modern historical reconstructions, this vast body of texts reveals a complicated and evolving range of religious and cultural exchanges that took place from the seventh to the ninth century. The first book-length analysis of these earliest encounters, Envisioning Islam highlights the ways these neglected texts challenge the modern scholarly narrative of early Muslim conquests, rulers, and religious practice. Examining Syriac sources including letters, theological tracts, scientific treatises, and histories, Michael Philip Penn reveals a culture of substantial interreligious interaction in which the categorical boundaries between Christianity and Islam were more ambiguous than distinct. The diversity of ancient Syriac images of Islam, he demonstrates, revolutionizes our understanding of the early Islamic world and challenges widespread cultural assumptions about the history of exclusively hostile Christian-Muslim relations.

The Slow Disappearance of the Syriacs from Turkey and of the Grounds of the Mor Gabriel Monastery
The Slow Disappearance of the Syriacs from Turkey and of the Grounds of the Mor Gabriel Monastery

Author: Pieter Omtzigt

Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 3643902689

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"This is an astonishing book which reveals the importance, relevance and the wider significance of Mor Gabriel Monastery not only for the Syriac Orthodox Church of Antioch but also for the Christian Church worldwide. In it, the reader will find an invaluable tool to understand the situation and plight of the Syriac Christians, one of the most important and interesting minorities in the region of the Middle East out of which the Bible & Christianity sprang." -- His Holiness Ignatius Zakka Ist Iwas, Patriarch of the Syriac-Orthodox Church of Antioch and all the East (Series: Geschichte - Vol. 111)

The Church of the East
The Church of the East

Author: Christoph Baumer

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2016-09-05

Total Pages: 696

ISBN-13: 1838609334

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The so-called 'Nestorian' Church (officially known as the Apostolic Assyrian Church of the East, with its See in Baghdad) was one of the most significant Christian communities to develop east of the Roman Empire. In its heyday the Church had 8 million adherents and stretched from the Mediterranean to China. Christoph Baumer is one of the very few Westerners to have visited many of the most important Assyrian sites and has written the only comprehensive history of the Church, which now fights for survival in its country of origin, Iraq, and is almost forgotten in the West. He narrates its rich and colorful trajectory, from its apostolic beginnings to the present day, and discusses the Church's theology, christology, and uniquely vigorous spirituality. He analyzes the Church's turbulent relationship with other Christian chuches and its dialogue with neighboring world religions such as Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Islam, Buddhism, and Taoism. Richly illustrated with maps and over 150 full-color photographs, the book will be essential reading for those interested in a fascinating, but neglected Christian community which has profoundly shaped the history of civilization in both East and West.

Empire and Elites after the Muslim Conquest
Empire and Elites after the Muslim Conquest

Author: Chase F. Robinson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2000-12-21

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 1139426915

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The study of early Islamic historical tradition has flourished with the emergence of an innovative scholarship no longer dependent on more traditional narratival approaches. Chase Robinson's book, first published in 2000, takes full account of the research available and interweaves history and historiography to interpret the political, social and economic transformations in the Mesopotamian region after the Islamic conquests. Using Arabic and Syriac sources to elaborate his argument, the author focuses on the Muslim and Christian élites, demonstrating that the immediate effects of the conquests were in fact modest ones. Significant social change took place only at the end of the seventh century with the imposition of Marwanid rule. Even then, the author argues, social power was diffused in the hands of local élites. This is a sophisticated study in a burgeoning field in Islamic studies.

Wandering, Begging Monks
Wandering, Begging Monks

Author: Daniel Folger Caner

Publisher: University of California Press

Published: 2020-05-12

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 0520344561

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An apostolic lifestyle characterized by total material renunciation, homelessness, and begging was practiced by monks throughout the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries. Such monks often served as spiritual advisors to urban aristocrats whose patronage gave them considerable authority and independence from episcopal control. This book is the first comprehensive study of this type of Christian poverty and the challenge it posed for episcopal authority and the promotion of monasticism in late antiquity. Focusing on devotional practices, Daniel Caner draws together diverse testimony from Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, and elsewhere—including the Pseudo-Clementine Letters to Virgins, Augustine's On the Work of Monks, John Chrysostom's homilies, legal codes—to reveal gospel-inspired patterns of ascetic dependency and teaching from the third to the fifth centuries. Throughout, his point of departure is social and cultural history, especially the urban social history of the late Roman empire. He also introduces many charismatic individuals whose struggle to persist against church suppression of their chosen way of imitating Christ was fought with defiant conviction, and the book includes the first annotated English translation of the biography of Alexander Akoimetos (Alexander the Sleepless). Wandering, Begging Monks allows us to understand these fascinating figures of early Christianity in the full context of late Roman society.

The Monastic World
The Monastic World

Author: Andrew Jotischky

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2025-01-14

Total Pages: 481

ISBN-13: 0300280432

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A major new history of medieval monasticism, from the fourth to the sixteenth century From the late Roman Empire onwards, monasteries and convents were a common sight throughout Europe. But who were monasteries for? What kind of people founded and maintained them? And how did monasticism change over the thousand years or so of the Middle Ages? Andrew Jotischky traces the history of monastic life from its origins in the fourth century to the sixteenth. He shows how religious houses sheltered the poor and elderly, cared for the sick, and educated the young. They were centres of intellectual life that owned property and exercised power but also gave rise to new developments in theology, music, and art. This book brings together the Orthodox and western stories, as well as the experiences of women, to show the full picture of medieval monasticism for the first time. It is a fascinating, wide-ranging account that broadens our understanding of life in holy orders as never before.

Justinian and the Making of the Syrian Orthodox Church
Justinian and the Making of the Syrian Orthodox Church

Author: Volker L. Menze

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2008-07-10

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 019156009X

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The Council of Chalcedon in 451 divided eastern Christianity, with those who were later called Syrian Orthodox among the Christians in the near eastern provinces who refused to accept the decisions of the council. These non-Chalcedonians (still better known under the misleading term Monophysites) separated from the church of the empire after Justin I attempted to enforce Chalcedon in the East in 518. Volker L. Menze historicizes the formation of the Syrian Orthodox Church in the first half of the sixth century. This volume covers the period from the accession of Justin to the second Council of Constantinople in 553. Menze begins with an exploration of imperial and papal policy from a non-Chalcedonian, eastern perspective, then discusses monks, monasteries and the complex issues surrounding non-Chalcedonian church life and sacraments. The volume concludes with a close look at the working of "collective memory" among the non-Chalcedonians and the construction of a Syrian Orthodox identity. This study is a histoire évènementielle of actual religious practice, especially concerning the Eucharist and the diptychs, and of ecclesiastical and imperial policy which modifies the traditional view of how emperors (and in the case of Theodora: empresses) ruled the late Roman/early Byzantine empire. By combining this detailed analysis of secular and ecclesiastical politics with a study of long-term strategies of memorialization, the book also focuses on deep structures of collective memory on which the tradition of the present Syrian Orthodox Church is founded.

After Bardaisan
After Bardaisan

Author: G. J. Reinink

Publisher: Peeters Publishers

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 408

ISBN-13: 9789042907355

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The present collection of twenty-five studies represents the general theme of 'continuity and change', as applied to various topics connected with the rich heritage of Syriac culture. These studies cover the period from the early third to the fourteenth centuries, with an incidental excursion into modern times. The focal areas are early Syriac Christianity and its Umwelt and the later West Syrian and East Syrian traditions. Most of the contributions deal with historical subjects, with the general theme elaborated in two different directions: first, ecclesiastical history, monasticism, hagiography and theology, and second, secular history, literature, scholarship, ideas and religions. In a more specific sense the contributions focus on patterns of cultural continuity and change, such as the influence and reception of Greek secular and theological culture and literature, developments within early and later Syriac asceticism, religious controversy, the interaction between different religious communities, and the effects of major political and social changes on the cultural and religious life of the various Syriac communities. One of the most radical political changes in the Middle East concerns the Arab conquest and the rise of Islam in the seventh century. Some authors explicitly discuss the consequences of these changes for the Christian (Syriac and Armenian) populations. The effects of these historical events on intellectual, social and economic life are some of the topics discussed in this connection. Of particular interest is the number of newly edited Syriac texts in this volume, which make available translations of Greek theological works, works resulting from the reception of pagan philosophy, and magic texts reflecting popular belief.