If the Armenological scholarship of the past five decades is any indication, close and deep examination has tended to reveal shared concerns, broader cultural horizons, and a strong sense of Armenia’s connectedness to other traditions and places. This could be shown for virtually all periods of Armenian history, but this essay focuses on the seventh to tenth centuries. Exploring some points of convergence between Armenian and Byzantine artistic traditions, I ask three very specific questions: 1) Is there such a thing as an Armenian imperial image? 2) What if an Armenian church were constructed in the imperial palace at Constantinople? and 3) What if an early medieval Armenian icon panel was shown to have survived? These are all hypothetical scenarios, but they are not entirely fantastical; each finds at least some support in historical evidence. Moreover, all of them urge a broader, more complex, and more dynamic conceptualization of visual culture than most studies of Byzantine and Armenian art have allowed.

A retrospective look at the 1980 Dumbarton Oaks Symposium “Beyond Byzantium” noting its groundbreaking aspects, omissions, and the evolution of the field in subsequent years. A particular emphasis is the increasing breadth of topics in the study of the Byzantine Near East as scholarly interest has moved beyond primarily philological and religious topics. The community of scholars interested in these traditions has also changed. At the 1980 Symposium several presenters were clergy who came to the field via the study of biblical languages. Few were women. Today the field is much more diverse, with many active scholars who belong to Near Eastern Christian communities. Manuscripts are used to illustrate cultural exchanges among Eastern Christian traditions and to highlight issues of ownership and removal of cultural heritage from its original context. A particular emphasis is placed on liturgical manuscripts as a source of information about language acquisition.

This chapter traces the way that questions of authorship and authenticity have shaped scholarly reception of Ephrem the Syrian (d. 373 CE). Faced with an unreliable biographical tradition, and a poetic corpus in which the boundaries between the authentic and inauthentic blurred, scholars have constructed a history, a chronology, and a notion of literary genius and consequent decline to map this corpus. I suggest that such a focus has often rested on questionable assumptions about the context of the poetry and has been pursued at the expense of other modes of organising this corpus. Within the context of this volume, I use the case of the reception of Ephrem to ask how our own histories of scholarship have shaped, and at times even determined, the patterns we see in the literature we study, and the models we build to organise the past.

This chapter considers the Book of the Laws of the Countries, attributed to Bardaisan of Edessa (d. c. 222), as an exemplar of modes of knowing in early Syriac literature. Despite reports of a wide-ranging corpus, the only work surviving under Bardaisan’s name is this text, which innovatively combines two genres into one. The first half, a dialogue in a Platonic mode transcribed by his student Philip, considers the question of free will. Bardaisan insists that human behaviour is not determined by the stars, an argument which serves his broader commitment to divine goodness in theodicy. The second half is a catalogue, a pseudo-ethnography of peoples to the east of Edessa. The crux of the catalogue comes with a report of King Abgar VIII who ‘believed’, meaning, potentially, converted to Christianity. Regardless of confession, Abgar’s ‘belief’ serves as the culmination of both halves of this work and the ultimate proof against astral determinism. The unique and experimental work shows a foundational Syriac author wrestling with perennial questions and modes of expression at the beginning of late antiquity.

In his discourse On Gluttony, the Syrian metropolitan Philoxenos of Mabbug shows that a glutton’s behaviour and attitude towards food and drink are rooted in false epistemologies of the self and God. This chapter shows that within this discourse Philoxenos tells the story of a gluttonous monk. By studying this embedded narrative of an imagined gluttonous monk, this chapter uncovers how Philoxenos uses rhetorical strategies to advance his thesis about the danger of gluttony: it perverts the monk and prevents the knowledge of God. Gluttony leads to heresy and death.

Information about the Mongols in Syriac is found in chronicles, exegetical works, poems, colophons, and marginal notes on manuscripts and inscriptions, from southeastern Anatolia, Syria, Mesopotamia, Iran, the territories of the Ilkhans, the lands of both the Syrian Orthodox (or West Syrian) Church and the Church of the East (East Syrian). The Mongols are first mentioned in a chronicle referring to 1218/1219 as “Huns” and “Tatars,” as the destroyers of Persia. The chapters on the history of the Mongols in the chronicles of Bar Hebraeus (d. 1286) depend directly on Juwaynī’s work; more original insights are found in poetry, colophons, and inscriptions. In general, the Syriac sources inform us about the feelings and attitudes of Syriac people towards the Mongols, and their policy towards religions. In this respect and from the perspective of social and economic history, the History of Mar Yahballaha and Rabban Sauma offers most valuable original data.

This chapter deals with the development of early hymnography (c. 400–600 CE), including the Syriac and Georgian texts that influenced, or witnessed to, the Greek tradition. After an introductory section that deals with the second-century Odes of Solomon and fourth-century hymns of Ephrem the Syrian, the chapter moves on to fifth- and sixth-century Syriac poetry and dialogues, followed by important Greek hymns such as the Akathistos. The chapter concludes with sections on the Akathistos Hymn and on the sixth-century hymnographer Romanos the Melodist, who was responsible for creating a more human, as opposed to symbolic, literary image of the Virgin. Romanos remained influential for both hymnography and homiletics in subsequent centuries, as liturgical writers elaborated the image of the Virgin Mary as human mother and intercessor for their audiences.

The introduction briefly surveys Alexander’s historical career before going on to describe the development of his legend in the various Greek and Latin versions of the Alexander Romance, which continued to be rewritten (as the Historia de Proeliis) to the end of the Middle Ages. It also provides the context for the contributions surveying the Jewish, Persian, Arabic, Spanish, Slavic, French and German receptions of Alexander in literature, as well as his impact as a political role model in the Crusades, Muslim expansion and the world-dominating ambitions of early modern Europe. It concludes with a glance at the contested figure of Alexander and his homeland of Macedonia, in the present-day Balkans.

The chapter explores language ideologies and various solutions to which Greek, Latin, and Syriac intellectuals resorted when they needed to articulate their attitudes to the alloglottic Other, while forging their distinctly Christian and specific confessional identities. The discussion starts with the views of early Christian apologists on foreign languages and continues by inquiring into further transformations that their initial universalist views underwent in the post-Constantinian era. The chapter highlights the main points of the cultural dialogue between the “Christian universalists” and “cultural isolationists” and analyzes the formation of a distinct rhetoric of alienation of foreign language speakers in Christian discourse. The trend was most visible in the Greek milieu, where the feeling of cultural superiority over “barbarians” had been especially deep-rooted. Then, the chapter explores how representatives of different literary traditions – this especially concerns Latin writers – attempted to promote the status of their own tongues as legitimate and authoritative vehicles for Christian self-expression. The final section analyzes metalinguistic remarks in Syriac literature – remarks that bear witness to acute linguistic awareness among local writers and their ability to resist the major cultural biases of their colleagues from the Classical tradition.

This chapter deals with the development of early hymnography (c. 400–600 CE), including the Syriac and Georgian texts that influenced, or witnessed to, the Greek tradition. After an introductory section that deals with the second-century Odes of Solomon and fourth-century hymns of Ephrem the Syrian, the chapter moves on to fifth- and sixth-century Syriac poetry and dialogues, followed by important Greek hymns such as the Akathistos. The chapter concludes with sections on the Akathistos Hymn and on the sixth-century hymnographer Romanos the Melodist, who was responsible for creating a more human, as opposed to symbolic, literary image of the Virgin. Romanos remained influential for both hymnography and homiletics in subsequent centuries, as liturgical writers elaborated the image of the Virgin Mary as human mother and intercessor for their audiences.

Early attempts by Parthian rulers to take Babylon were short-lived, but in 141 BC they established their kingship by celebrating the New Year festival. Chronicles and astronomical diaries continued to be written. An independent ruler of Maysan in the Sealand, Hyspaosines, captured the port on the Tigris, took control of Bahrain and Failaka to control Gulf trade, and briefly claimed kingship of Babylon. He wrote in Aramaic. The Parthians regained control and rebuilt the Greek theatre. The old buildings and city plan continued to be in use, although the Summer Palace had been reroofed with terracotta tiles. New kinds of text were written on clay in cuneiform, astronomical science developed; an archive shows that temples were still active, and much older literature was still prized. Greek knowledge of the Epic of Creation was still alive in Athens from the time of Alexander until the sixth century AD. The cult of Bēl had spread west to Palmyra, to the Aegean island of Kos, and north to Edessa. In AD 116 Trajan visited the Summer Palace on a pilgrimage to the place where Alexander had died.

This chapter analyses the little-known fifth-century Syriac romance Euphemia and the Goth, bringing out its narrative richness to allow it to become part of a wider discourse about identity, violence, and the role of women in the late antique eastern Empire. By employing a structuralist methodology, the story is viewed as containing highly developed and also subtle contrasts, ultimately used by the author to articulate a view of an ideal Edessa. Through the use of distance, dichotomies of barbarian and civilised are set and reinforced with the complimentary distinctions of legitimate and illegitimate violence. These contrasts also allow the primary benefit of Roman rule for Edessa to be made clear, namely the rule of law which ensures justice for vulnerable female-only households against outsiders who attempt to disrupt them, albeit with a strong Edessan identity retained. The analysis finishes by shedding light on the position of women within Edessa at the turn of the fifth century and concludes that options for female-only living were perhaps more positive than for women elsewhere in the Empire.