Abstracts

For most of the 120 years since we started recovering primary Manichaean literature, there has been a disconnect between the recovered fragments of that literature and its still missing original historical core: the writings Mani himself composed in an Aramaic/Syriac dialect.  Fragments in Latin, Greek, Coptic, Parthian, Middle Persian, Old Turkic, and Chinese that could be identified with a specific composition belong mostly to post-Mani scholastic and liturgical compositions, while the host of other fragments could not be securely placed in the history and development of Manichaean literature.  Recent new text editions combined with theoretical insights into how Mani’s writings may have served as resources for later compositions, have the prospect of dramatically changing this situation.  This workshop contribution will summarize these recent developments and explain how they help us to partially recover the heretofore missing core of the tradition.  Consequently, we are able to outline an emerging picture of the beginnings of Manichaean literature as an institutionally-driven initiative that might be compared with other bodies of literature in late antiquity. 

The study of Ethiopic literature from Late Antiquity faces a number of challenges. Native compositions from this period are rare; most texts are translations from Greek. Very little is known about the circumstances of these translations, including such basic information as when, where, and by whom they were produced. Moreover, the vast majority of Ethiopic manuscripts date to after 1500, with a smaller number dating between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, and only a few before that. This problem with later manuscript attestation is further exacerbated by the fact that many Ethiopic texts that were translated from Greek in Late Antiquity were revised later in the medieval period against different Ethiopic translations from Arabic. These and other factors have conspired to leave much unknown—and potentially unknowable—about the Ethiopic literature of Late Antiquity. In this lecture, I review these many challenges, some of which I aim to put into particular relief through comparisons with Late Antique Syriac literature, where the situation is vastly different. I also suggest some potential ways forward.

Syriac writing was born in Upper Mesopotamia, on the borders of two empires and two cultures, in a world of multiple influences. It is this plural rootedness that this contribution seeks to highlight, as it has contributed to the originality and vitality of an extraordinarily rich literary tradition.

The first part of my paper will deal with the beginnings of the Armenian literature immediately after the creation of the Armenian alphabet by Mashtots around 405. It originated in the Syriac cities of Samosata and Edessa, where Mashtots and his disciples began a huge activity of translation from Syriac into Armenian. Cultural contacts with Syriac milieus did not end in the fifth century but persisted over the following centuries. In the second part of my talk, I will focus on the issue of the transmission of Greek philosophical books after the closure of the Neoplatonic schools of Athens and Alexandria, taking into consideration, in parallel, both the Armenian and Syriac corpora.

If by ‘literarization’ we mean the process through which a vernacular language, already endowed with a written form for everyday contexts (‘literization’), gives rise to a written literature, we can propose two different contexts for the origins of Syriac and Coptic literatures. These are here compared in order to try to identify common traits but also different profiles: both are used to express a Christian worldview (or, in the case of Marcionism, Gnosticism and Manichaeism, a vision connected to it in a more or less polemical manner) and are connected with the concrete common life of Christian (para-Christian) congregations; both are used for translations from other languages of texts relevant from a religious point of view; both, at a certain point in their development, express original texts. But no less relevant are the differences that concern the following socio-cultural aspects: the sociolinguistic context of each of the two languages, with peculiarities in the epigraphic and documentary expressions indicating the social and cultural diversity of the environments responsible for the creation of the literary language; the degree of diglossia, with different forms of coexistence between the vernacular language and the Greek language; finally, looking at the development of the two literatures, the reasons for the different chronology in the production of original works in the two languages and the different selection of literary genres (poetry, philosophical dialogue, treatise, homily, euchological expressions).

TBC

The trajectory of Armenian literary production is usually structured around two familiar turning points: the missionary activities of Gregory the Illuminator at the start of the fourth century, resulting in the conversion to Christianity of king Trdat, his wife and daughter, and vast numbers of others; and the invention of the Armenian script by Mesrop Maštoc‘ at the start of the fifth century. The first has come to be viewed as foundational in Armenian historical memory but this formative era in Christian Armenian history is only accessible through works composed after the second. This paper reassesses the earliest works of Armenian literature, individually and in comparative perspective, starting with the Life of Maštoc‘, written by one of his pupils, Koriwn, perhaps for a memorial service in 443 CE. It then considers the complex traditions featuring Gregory and Trdat attributed to Agathangelos, assembled in the 460s; the Buzandaran Patmut‘iwnk‘ or Epic Histories, preserving accounts of fourth-century Armenia from 330–387 CE but compiled in the 470s; and the History of Łazar P‘arpec‘i, picking up from the end of the Buzandaran and extending to 485 CE, completed in c. 500 CE. Several propositions will be advanced. Firstly, although their narrative coverage extends over two centuries, these works were all assembled in a much narrower window of time, broadly the second half of the fifth century. They are products of that time, even if they are rarely treated as such. What prompted this development at this time? Secondly, while they were all composed in Armenian, it does not follow that Armenian literary tradition was singular. These works display a wide variety of forms, attitudes and perspectives, some of which resonate with literature in Syriac and Greek as well as Iranian epic. And thirdly, they can be studied in two dimensions, both as products of the second half of the fifth century and as collections of older traditions, vestiges of which can still be discerned. Several illustrations will be introduced. In sum, the research potential of these literary sources is far from exhausted.

The study of Coptic has a historiographical baggage that combines Orientalist conceptions, identity politics, imperial categorisations, and the weight of several different western disciplinary traditions. Today its study is becoming more and more sophisticated, especially concerning its internal evolution, as well as its contextualisation within the East Christian world. After reviewing some of the main historiographic themes on the subject, this talk will attempt to go a bit further by using some ideas developed more recently on indigenous languages in imperial contexts, which focus among other things on the tropes and categories used to describe them.

This talk aims to provide a tour d’horizon of the text universe of the Egyptian language coded in the Greek-based Coptic alphabet throughout the millennium of its productive use from the 4th to the 14th century. Major phases to be considered are

-       the allographic practices of writing Egyptian with the 24 letters of the Greek alphabet and different sets of Egyptian (Demotic) signs in the first centuries CE;

-       the standardization of the Coptic alphabet and the beginnings of a Coptic literature based on translation from Greek, and diversified in up to twelve written dialects, around 300;

-       the rise of an Upper Egyptian dialect (Sahidic) as a standard language and the emergence of a Coptic original literature in the 5th and 6th centuries;

-       the flourishing Coptic text production and the increase of functional domains accessible to Coptic due to the recession and drop-out of Greek in Egypt during the 7th and 8th centuries;

-       the growth of Coptic monastic libraries and the Sahidic manuscript industry in the time of starting Arabization of Christian Egyptians, 9th and 10th centuries;

-       the withdrawal of Coptic from mundane domains of writing, the rise of the dialect of Lower Egypt (Bohairic) as Coptic standard language, and the start of the translation movement from Coptic into Arabic in the 11th century;

-       the sublimation of (Bohairic) Coptic into a sacred language of liturgy and the launch of tools for Coptic second-language learning, Arabo-Coptic allographic experiments, and a Coptic learned poetry in the “golden age” of Christian Arabic literature in Egypt (12th to 14th centuries).

A significant proportion of the earliest Syriac literature and theology is written in poetry and song, and this is arguably its most distinctive and valuable contribution to world literature. But what was the social and literary context for the creation of this corpus of poetry? Why was it written? What can be learned from a comparative study of early Syriac Christian verse with contemporary (or earlier) Syriac verse of gnostic or Manichaean origins, and that of other non-Syriac speaking Christian and non-Christian groups? This paper will assess the surviving poetic texts and anecdotal evidence for poetry and song, and also the many gaps in our knowledge and data, and will see if this in any way advances our understanding of Syriac poetic continuity and connection, or discontinuity and disconnection.