The Anonymous Syriac Chronicle of 1234 and Its Sources (Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta: Bibliotheque De Byzantion, 18)

In the late 1230s or in the 1240s, a Syriac Orthodox historian continued a Syriac Chronicle up to the Year 1204. The result, the Anonymous Syriac Chronicle up to the Year 1234, is the subject of this monograph. While accepting the chronicle's import for the history of the city of Edessa, the Syriac Orthodox Church and the Crusades, this study approaches the text from a literary historical standpoint, as a valuable source for historical, hagiographical, apocryphal, exegetical and epistolary traditions, taken from extant as well as now lost sources. Through the deconstruction of a process of intercultural transmission that began in the fourth or third century BC, it reveals the influence of a wide range of Jewish, Christian and Islamic sources, written in Syriac, Hebrew, Greek and Arabic, and reconstructs some of the chronicle's now lost sources such as the chronicle of Andronicus and a medieval Greek history along the way. TABLE OF CONTENTS 6 CHAPTER 1 34 CHAPTER 2 62 CHAPTER 3 68 CHAPTER 4 102 CHAPTER 5 114 CHAPTER 6 124 CHAPTER 7 130 CHAPTER 8 146 CHAPTER 9 154 CHAPTER 10 162 CHAPTER 11 174 CHAPTER 12 178 CHAPTER 13 180 CHAPTER 14 194 CHAPTER 15 204 CHAPTER 16 208 CHAPTER 17 246 CHAPTER 18 282 CHAPTER 19 284 CHAPTER 20 298 CHAPTER 21 310 CHAPTER 22 322 CHAPTER 23 332 CHAPTER 24 334 CONCLUSION 342 INDEX 348