Article Moving through space rather than through time, namely to north Syria and Mesopotamia, we can see that there Aramaic (or the local dialect thereof, called Syriac) exhibited no such embarrassment about showing itself in public. Certainly there were many, as in Palestine, Transjordan, and southern Syria, who were bilingual, who had the privilege of…

Article In many types of Muslim reactions to Christianity two elements come together: Christianity is a flawed religion because it has abandoned its original belief in the one God and, secondly, closely connected to the first point, Islam has come to supersede all earlier religions. Syriac and Arab Christians responded to this triumphalism and counteracted…

Article The Jewish community of Talmudic Babylonia was the largest concentration of Jews in the diaspora from the third to seventh centuries CE (Gafni 2006: 805). It was located in the area surrounding the narrow meeting of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, in close proximity to Ctesiphon, and southward to the Persian Gulf. There were…

BETWEEN CONQUEST AND CIVIL WAR (640–80) Before he died in April 680, Muʿawiya nominated his son Yazid to succeed him as caliph. This action provoked more than a decade of civil strife among the Muslim Arabs, for it gave the impression that Muʿawiya believed that sovereignty belonged to his family alone. During Yazid I’s reign…

Map of the Byzantine and Arab Empires (Kyle Brunner) Map of Northern Mesopotamia (Kyle Brunner) A standing caliph coin from Edessa, early 690s Plan of the city of Amida Muslim Arab raids of the 690s and Byzantine reprisals Miaphysite patriarchs of Antioch

Life of Nestorius:

Although there is no physical “fall” in the narrative of being expelled from the Garden of Eden in the Torah, in both the Quran and the sermons of Jacob of Serugh, Adam falls from above to below along with Satan. Both sources seem to imagine the Garden of Eden at the top of a cosmic…

Around 524, a Jewish king from H. imyar in southeast Arabia (Yemen and southeastern Saudi Arabia) massacred the Ethiopian garrison that was occupying the country in the name of the king of Axum and demanded that all the Christians in his kingdom convert to Judaism. He besieged and captured a great city in the north,…