The Independent Recension of the History of Patriarchs of Alexandria. Adaptation and Reception in the Syriac Milieu

The text of "History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria (HP) is a major source of Coptic historiography, characterized by a complex textual transmission written in various epochs in which Coptic authors have recorded the history of their Church and their country. The paper will focus on the biographies that circulate in collections independently, outside the main corpus containing the entirety of biographies of Coptic Patriarchs. First, The paper studies the composition of this independent version and the adaptation of the sources by scribes. Secondly, It will pay special attention to the biographies written in Arabic in the Syriac alphabet (karšūnī), with a focus on the question of the reception of this Egyptian – and thus non-Syriac – material in a Syriac Christian environment, as well as on the karšūnī transcription system used in the manuscripts

The Syriac World History of Michael the Syrian in its Armenian Adaptation (13th c.): A Case Study of Acculturation and Transformation of Shared Christian History in the Near East

Late antique and Medieval Christian historiographical corpuses often result from multi-step composition and transmission processes, accumulating successive layers of historical knowledge. Given the cultural diversity of the Middle East, those derive, in many cases, from older sources composed in a different linguistic (and sometimes religious) environment. In this perspective, this workshop intends to address the issue of the impact of the translation processes on the actual historical content of such corpuses, occurring whether in their composition or in their later transmission. Accordingly, the question of the edition of such multilingual textual traditions will also be addressed. Texts in the following languages will be taken into consideration: Arabic, Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopic, Georgian, Greek and Syriac