DISCOVER
Short entries written from scholarly encyclopedias and official records, each linked to places in this atlas. Tradition is labelled as tradition, and every entry names its sources.
26 reviewed facts. Step through them one at a time, or filter the full list by topic or country.
Fact 1 of 26
Manuscripts and printing
Saint Catherine’s Monastery keeps the most important collection of early Syriac manuscripts after that of Dayr al-Suryān. Its best known, Sinai Syriac 30, is a palimpsest: the Old Syriac Gospels lie beneath a later text. Unlike many of the monastery’s manuscripts, now in western libraries, it remains at Sinai.
Places: Saint Catherine’s Monastery
Manuscripts and printing
Saint Catherine’s Monastery keeps the most important collection of early Syriac manuscripts after that of Dayr al-Suryān. Its best known, Sinai Syriac 30, is a palimpsest: the Old Syriac Gospels lie beneath a later text. Unlike many of the monastery’s manuscripts, now in western libraries, it remains at Sinai.
Places: Saint Catherine’s Monastery
Buildings and art
Inscriptions on three beams of the monastery church at Sinai invoke Emperor Justinian, Empress Theodora and the architect Stephanus. One implies that Justinian was still alive and another that Theodora had died, so the church was built between 548 and 565. Carbon-14 tests confirm that the roof trusses are of the sixth century.
Places: Saint Catherine’s Monastery
Manuscripts and printing
Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson, twin sisters born in Irvine, Scotland, in 1843, were self-taught scholars. In 1894 Agnes published the catalogue of the Syriac manuscripts at Saint Catherine’s and Margaret that of the Arabic ones. The librarian, impressed by their Modern Greek, had given them access.
Places: Saint Catherine’s Monastery
Languages
Christian Palestinian Aramaic was used by Chalcedonian Christian communities in Palestine and Transjordan from about the 5th to the 14th century, after which it disappeared. Its oldest texts survive mainly as inscriptions and as erased under-writing in reused manuscripts, many of them connected with Saint Catherine’s Monastery.
Places: Saint Catherine’s Monastery
Buildings and art
At Dura-Europos on the Euphrates, in today’s Syria, excavators found a Christian assembly house with a baptistery painted with scenes such as the Good Shepherd and Christ walking on the water. The city was abandoned after its destruction in 256 and was rediscovered only in 1920.
Tradition and evidence
Mor Gabriel’s official foundation date is 397, but Andrew Palmer shows that the community began earlier, with the hermit Shmuel and his disciple Shemʿun. He also rejects a later story that Empress Theodora gave the monastery the domed building named after her.
Places: Mor Gabriel Monastery
Monasteries and monks
From the 14th century the monastery outside Mardin was popularly named after saffron (zaʿfarān), though the reason is not recorded. It was the seat of the Syriac Orthodox patriarchate from 1293 until after the First World War.
Places: Deyrulzafaran Monastery
Monasteries and monks
Patriarchs of the Church of the East’s Eliya line had their residence at Rabban Hormizd near Alqosh, and most were buried there; their gravestones span 1497 to 1804. In 1552 its abbot, Yoḥannan Sullaqa, was elected a rival patriarch and sought recognition from Rome, beginning a Catholic line.
Places: Rabban Hormizd Monastery
Sources: Heleen L. Murre-van den Berg, “Hormizd, Monastery of Rabban”, Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage (Entry “Hormizd, Monastery of Rabban”); Herman G. B. Teule, “Yoḥannan Sullaqa”, Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage (Entry “Yoḥannan Sullaqa”)
Connections across Asia and Arabia
Inscriptions recorded at Mar Behnam, dating from the 12th to the 20th century, are mainly in Syriac but also in Arabic, Armenian and Uighur. One records that a Mongol army looted the monastery in 1295 and that the abbot persuaded Khan Baidu to return what had been taken.
Places: Mar Behnam Monastery
Manuscripts and printing
Bar Hebraeus (Bar ʿEbroyo), Syriac Orthodox maphrian and author of more than forty works, died in Maragha in 1286. His remains were later moved to Mor Mattai, where they rest with those of his brother. A manuscript note records that in 1298 the monastery library held all his writings.
Places: Mor Mattai Monastery
Sources: Hidemi Takahashi, “Bar ʿEbroyo, Grigorios”, Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage (Entry “Bar ʿEbroyo, Grigorios”); George A. Kiraz, “Matay, Dayro d-Mor”, Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage (Entry “Matay, Dayro d-Mor”)
Monasteries and monks
Simeon the Stylite (about 380–459) lived on a series of ever higher pillars, the last about 20 metres tall, for 47 years. Pilgrims came from every level of society, and his fame reached from the Persian Empire to Britain. His novel form of asceticism was criticised at first and later imitated.
Places: Church of Saint Simeon Stylites
Manuscripts and printing
After an administrative career, John of Damascus (died about 750) became a monk of Mar Saba near Jerusalem. His theology barely reached Syriac, but his liturgical poetry did: several of his canons were soon translated, and his Resurrection canon appears almost in full in a Syriac Catholic service book printed in Mosul in 1892.
Places: Mar Saba Monastery
Connections across Asia and Arabia
Isaac of Nineveh, a 7th-century monastic author of the Church of the East, came from Beth Qaṭraye, the Syriac name for a Gulf coast region that included Qatar. Monks at Mar Saba translated much of his work into Greek, and from Greek it reached Slavonic and the Russian Philokalia.
Places: Mar Saba Monastery
Sources: Sebastian P. Brock, “Isḥaq of Nineveh”, Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage (Entry “Isḥaq of Nineveh”); Lucas Van Rompay, “Beth Qaṭraye”, Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage (Entry “Beth Qaṭraye”)
Connections across Asia and Arabia
Eliya, bishop of Mashmahig in Beth Qaṭraye, attended the first synod of the Church of the East at Seleucia-Ctesiphon in 410. From the 6th century there were further bishops along the Gulf coast, and a metropolitan is attested in 676. Christianity may have disappeared from the region after the 9th century.
Places: Church and Monastery of Sir Bani Yas · Jubail Church ruins
Sources: Lucas Van Rompay, “Beth Qaṭraye”, Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage (Entry “Beth Qaṭraye”); Marica C. Cassis, “Seleucia-Ctesiphon”, Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage (Entry “Seleucia-Ctesiphon”)
Connections across Asia and Arabia
In 781 a stone stele inscribed in Chinese and Syriac was dedicated in China. It tells of the mission of Aluoben, a monk of the Church of the East who had imperial permission to teach by 635, and lists the names of 74 bishops, priests and deacons. Jesuit missionaries found it in the 1620s.
Sources: Jeff W. Childers, “Xi’an”, Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage (Entry “Xi’an”)
Manuscripts and printing
A patriarchal visit to Urmia’s Church of Mart Maryam is recorded in 1284, though it does not date the present building. In the 19th century the American mission press in the city printed the first vernacular Bible translations in modern Aramaic, the New Testament in 1846 and the Old Testament in 1852, and the first magazine in 1849.
Places: Saint Mary Church (Naneh Maryam)
Manuscripts and printing
In 1636 Khachatur Kesaratsi, primate of New Julfa, set up a printing press at All Saviour’s Monastery, the Vank, introducing European letterpress printing to Persia. The colophons of its books record that their paper and ink were also made at the monastery. Its first titles included a Psalter in 1638.
Places: Holy Saviour Cathedral (Vank)
Monasteries and monks
Antony, born about 251 in Middle Egypt, withdrew into the Eastern Desert near Mount Qulzum, close to where his monastery now stands. He died in 356; a monastic settlement was founded there after his death, under Emperor Julian (361–363). The main source for his life is a biography by Athanasius, who knew him.
Places: Saint Anthony Monastery
Sources: Antoine Guillaumont, “Antony of Egypt, Saint”, The Coptic Encyclopedia (CE:149a–151a); Otto Meinardus & Maurice Martin & Peter Grossmann, “Dayr Anba Antuniyus”, The Coptic Encyclopedia (CE:719b–729a)
Buildings and art
Of the monastery near Sohag dedicated to Anba Bishoi, only the church survives. It is built of red brick, which gave the site its popular name, Dayr al-Ahmar, the Red Monastery. The Coptic Encyclopedia describes the carved decoration of its sanctuary as unique among the monuments preserved from early Christian Egypt.
Places: Red Monastery
Tradition and evidence
A tradition holds that the Holy Family sheltered in the crypt beneath Abu Serga in Old Cairo. Peter Grossmann notes that the story has circulated since the later Middle Ages, that al-Maqrizi in the 15th century is the first serious historian to report it, and that the major Coptic histories of the Holy Family’s stops do not mention this crypt.
Places: Saints Sergius & Bacchus
Sources: Peter Grossmann, “Babylon”, The Coptic Encyclopedia (CE:317a–323b)
Buildings and art
The Hanging Church, al-Muʿallaqah (“the suspended one”), stands over the south gate of the Roman fortress of Babylon in Old Cairo, so it can only have been built after the Arab conquest. It is first mentioned in the time of the 9th-century patriarch Yusab I, and its basilica was heavily restored in the 19th century.
Places: The Hanging Church
Sources: Peter Grossmann, “Babylon”, The Coptic Encyclopedia (CE:317a–323b)
Buildings and art
A church was first completed at Bethlehem in 339. The present Church of the Nativity is essentially a mid-6th-century building with later alterations, and parts of the first church, including floor mosaics, survive below it. UNESCO inscribed the site on the World Heritage List in 2012.
Places: Church of the Nativity
Buildings and art
UNESCO lists ten painted churches in the Troodos mountains of Cyprus which together give an overview of some 500 years of Byzantine and post-Byzantine painting. They range from small rural churches with steep timber roofs to the Monastery of Saint John Lampadistis, and all ten have profiles in this atlas.
Places: Saint Nicholas of the Roof Church · Monastery of Saint John Lampadistis · Panagia Asinou Church · Panagia tou Araka Church · Panagia tou Moutoulla Church · Archangel Michael Church, Pedoulas · Timios Stavros Church · Panagia Podithou Church · Stavros tou Agiasmati Church · Church of the Transfiguration of the Saviour (Agia Sotira)
Tradition and evidence
Ephrem (died 373), deacon and poet of Nisibis and Edessa, wrote hymns called madrāshe: nearly 400 survive, in some 50 different metres. Consecrated women sang such hymns in the liturgy of the city churches; the claim that Ephrem himself founded these women’s choirs comes from later tradition, beginning with Jacob of Serugh.
Sources: Sebastian P. Brock, “Ephrem”, Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage (Entry “Ephrem”); Susan Ashbrook Harvey, “Women in the Syriac Tradition”, Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage (Entry “Women in the Syriac Tradition”)
Manuscripts and printing
The Rabbula Gospels were completed in February 586 at the Monastery of Beth Mar Yuḥanon of Beth Zagba in northern Syria, which no longer exists. Famous for their paintings, they were kept for at least two centuries at the Maronite monastery of Qannubin in Lebanon before reaching Florence in the 16th century. Scholars debate whether the painted pages always belonged to the book.
Languages
Ṭuroyo is the name for the modern Aramaic dialects of Tur Abdin, the upland region of Mor Gabriel. It was first written down in the late 19th century, often for western scholars, and came into wider written use in the second half of the 20th century. An edition of the four Gospels in Ṭuroyo appeared in 1995.
Places: Mor Gabriel Monastery
Encyclopedia entries were read in full in their electronic editions; each is credited to its author. Page and column references appear only where the source prints them; the Gorgias dictionary is cited by entry title.