Newest Releases (SALE)

A long-awaited and essential tool for the study of one of the earliest texts of the Christian Apocrypha and an important text in Syriac literature, theology, and history.

This volume is part of a series of English translations of the Syriac Peshitta along with the Syriac text carried out by an international team of scholars.

As part of the Gorgias Handbook Series, this book provides a political and military history of the Sasanian Empire in Late Antiquity (220s to 651 CE). The book takes the form of a narrative, which situates Sasanian Iran as a continental power between Rome and the world of the steppe nomad.

Early Islamic historical literature attributes several hundred pragmatic documents to the Prophet Muḥammad. The consistent use of epistolary and legal formulae, which are found only in these documents, encourages us to treat these texts as a corpus. In addition to consistent terminology, formulaic structure, and formulae, these texts show remarkable stability through transmission. A comparison of these texts with Umayyad and ʿAbbasid papyri reveals that the Prophet's documents reflect obsolete or otherwise unattested formulae. This study will demonstrate through three case studies the particular functions of these documents in the history of social relations in late antique Arabia.

Die folgende Studie beschäftigt sich mit der Rezeption Konstantins in der arabischen Historiographie, sowoh christlicher- als auch muslimischerseits. Eine genauere Analyse der Texte wird zeigen, wie die Geschichte des ersten christlichen Kaisers eine Projektionsfläche für Identitätskonstrutkionen werden konnte, auch über Religionsgrenzen hinaus.

The Kitāb al-Aghānī (the Book of the Songs) stands as one of the most important extant sources for Arabic literature and Islamic history. Compiled during the first half of the tenth century, the Kitāb al-Aghānī emerges from a pivotal period in the formation of Islamic sectarian identities, a subject of keen and ongoing scholarly debate that is fundamental to our understanding of the later development of Shīʿī Islam. The present study addresses the question of whether or not its compiler, Abū al-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī’s, sectarian leanings can be discerned from the Kitāb al-Aghānī through an analysis based primarily on redaction criticism. By examining the compiler’s editorial interventions, this book argues that al-Iṣfahānī, to some extent at least, presents past people and events central to the Shīʿī worldview in accordance with his sectarian affiliation.

George was one of the last scholarly Syrian Orthodox bishops to live in the early Islamic period. His metrical homily, probably composed to be sung during the consecration of the Myron, is presented here with the vocalised Syriac text and English translation on facing pages.

The theotokias are prayers dedicated to the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God (Theotokos). In the early fourteenth century, the Patriarch of the Coptic Church, Ibn Qiddis, composed and paraphrased – in Coptic – the Theotokias. His work has only survived in a single manuscript. This book introduces the author, John Ibn Qiddis, his liturgical, pastoral, and literary activities, and the Coptic language of his time, followed by the texts and an English translation.

Judean hagiographies are unusual. Some are unexpectedly structured: a saint’s life in the form of a history text. Others offer surprising content. Expected hagiographic stylizations, for example, often depict moments in which the saint is offered money for a miracle. In such cases the saint invariably refuses. Judean saints, however, accept gratitude willingly – often with cash amounts recorded. The peculiarities of these works have regularly been examined on literary and theological grounds. The monasteries that produced these texts were utterly dominated by the environment of Christian Jerusalem. Although often commented upon, the unmined implications of this reality hold the key to understanding these hagiographies. It is only by examining these monasteries’ ties to – and embeddedness within – their peculiar context that we can perceive the mindset that produced such baffling texts.

Drawn from Akkadian and Sumerian tablets in the Yale Babylonian Collection, many of them previously unpublished, this collection of readings brings to life the vibrancy of ancient Mesopotamian literature, beyond its better-known myths and epics.