First published in 2003 this is a new edition of a work that remains the only study of the nave platform known as the Syrian Bema to utilise an interdisciplinary approach. By combining archaeological and architectural research with a study of the Syriac Liturgy to explore how worship evolved on the Syrian Limestone Massif in Late Antiquity, this volume proposes a solution to the long debated question of why only approximately 50 of these bemata have been discovered amongst many thousands of late antique churches in Syria. It charts the evolution of the early liturgy in Syria and seeks to...

Basil of Caesarea (c. 328-378) was the great father of Christian monasticism in eastern Anatolia, whose influence spread into all the Greek, Latin and Syriac speaking churches. Basil's counsels for ascetics in community are collected in his Asketikon. The earliest version, the Small Asketikon, did not survive in the Greek, but only in a Latin translation (The Rule of Basil), and in a Syriac translation (The Questions of the Brothers). Silvas presents the first ever edition of the entire Syriac translation, drawn from five manuscripts, the oldest from the late 5th...

The volume contains contributions dedicated to the person and the work of Shalva Nutsubidze and his scholarly interests: the Christian Orient from the fifth to the seventh century, the Georgian eleventh century, the Neoplatonic philosopher Ioane Petritsi and his epoch and Shota Rustaveli and mediaeval Georgian culture. Among the articles are a new edition and translation of the original Georgian author's Preface to the lost Commentary on the Psalms by Ioane Petritsi and the editio princeps with an English translation of an epistle of Nicetas Stethatos (eleventh century), whose...

Created in the twelfth century, the Panoplia Dogmatike is one of the Byzantine anthologies that became a key source for Orthodox theology. The anthology is known in more than 140 Greek manuscripts. In the fourteenth century it was translated into Old Church Slavonic. The Latin translation, prepared by the Italian humanist Pietro Francesco Zini, was published in Venice in 1555 during the years of the Council of Trent. The first printed edition of the Greek text came relatively late - in 1710 in the Romanian Principality of Wallachia. By examining the reasons for this publication, the...

In The Ethiopian Homily on the Ark of the Covenant, Amsalu Tefera offers an editio princeps of the Ethiopic text of Dǝrsana Ṣǝyon together with an annotated English translation. This homily, most likely composed in the fifteenth century, links the term Zion with the Ark of the Covenant and recounts at length its wanderings from Sinai to Ethiopia. As a Christian document, many of the events are interpreted as symbolic of Mary and the heavenly New Jerusalem. First edited by the author for his 2011 doctoral dissertation, the critical text and apparatus...

Severus of Antioch: His Life and Times offers many fresh insights into the life, theology, reception history, exegetical approach, and asceticism of Severus, a key figure in the Oriental Orthodox Church, and central to the current discussions on Oriental Orthodox and Eastern Orthodox reunion. It includes articles from established Syriac scholars and theologians including well-known international authors Pauline Allen, Sebastian Brock, Rifaat Ebied and Ken Parry. The topics covered have immense theological and historical significance for the churches of the Middle East and the history...

This is a thoroughly revised and expanded version of the first edition of the Arabic version of Dimitrie Cantemir's The Divan or the Sage's Dispute with the World (Ṣalāḥ al-ḥakīm wa-fasād al-ʿālam al-ḏamīm) (Iaşi, 1698), his first printed book, the earliest ethical treatise in Romanian literature and a testimony to his wide knowledge, reading, and proficiency in foreign languages. Completed in 1705 by Athanasius III Dabbās, Patriarch of the Antiochian Church (1684-1694, 1720-1724), the Arabic text is accompanied by the...

The East Syriac mystic Joseph Hazzaya (8th century AD) wrote On Providence in an attempt to derive universal salvation (apokatastasis) from Theodore of Mopsuestia, the highest theological authority in the East Syriac Church, and thus to defend himself from heresy accusations coming from that Church's Primate, Catholicos Timothy I, as Nestor Kavvadas draws out in the introduction to this first edition and translation of the treatise. At the same time, in On Providence Joseph Hazzaya reacts, by way of a remodelled Elijah-Apocalypse, to a rising wave of conversions to Islam...

As senders of letters, copyists of literary texts, compilers of accounts, readers, and teachers, the monks of late antique Egypt articulated their interactions with their ascetic and secular environments via their role as authors, scribes, and owners of written text. This volume edited by Malcolm Choat and Maria Chiara Giorda examines the presence and practice of writing, modes of written communication, and the symbolic and spiritual value of the written word in monastic communities. Contributions cover evidence from papyri and inscriptions to literature transmitted in manuscripts, positioned...