Thomas The Odes of Solomon: Tentatively dated between the 1st and 3rd centuries, the collection of the Odes of Solomon is one of the oldest and most extraordinary Syriac texts. These forty-two Christian poems, deeply imbued with Gnosticism, were discovered at the beginning of the 20th century in two Syriac manuscripts and contain passages of…

Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic, a Semitic language that is most notably related to Hebrew and Arabic but which is more precisely part of the Northwest Semitic language group. The culture that is known as “Syriac” is the heir to a millennium of Aramaic culture and history. The fact that the Syriac language can…

The Aramaic World at the Beginning of the First Millennium: The Spread of Aramaic in the Greek and Persian Eras: The Cradle of Syriac: Centers of Syriac Culture in the Pre-Islamic Period: Centers of Syriac Culture in the Pre-Islamic Period: Areas of Syriac Influence in the South: Arabia, the Arab-Persian Gulf, Ethiopia (5th-8th centuries): Greatest…

To define the conflict between Cyril and Hypatia,historians often speak of “trag edy”. Now, the genre of martyrdom in Christian literature is often an application and legal sublimation of the classical dramatic genre, with parts assigned and fixed characters.Such agenre thereforeisonlyapparentlyobjective and written as achroni cle, but it is in reality eminentlypolitical and propagandistic. The…

Porphyry says we shouldn’t eat animals. Porphyry’s commentaries on Homer are some of the earliest and best-preserved examples of figurative readings of Greek poetry and myth: Porphyry’s attack on the Christians (Against the Christians): Porphyry also attacked Christianity in his Philosophy from Oracles: The Date and Attribution of Porphyry’s Anti-Christian Fragments (early 300s): (Porphyry, Lactantius’s…

Porphyry, emphasizes a pivotal point embraced by vegetarians: animals inherently possess perceptions, experience distress, fear, and pain. This underscores our stronger emotional connection with animals we interact with compared to humans who exhibit antisocial behavior.

Article The so-called Alexander Romance (also known as Pseudo-Kallisthenes, from the name of its putative author) is a heavily fictionalized composition concerning the life, exploits and death of Alexander the Great. The Alexander Romance is transmitted in a series of successive versions, which preserve the same essential storyline, but widely vary in terms of particular…

al-Mubaššir ibn Fātik’s Choicest Maxims and Best Sayings (Muḫtār alḤikam wa Maḥāsin al-kilam) on the life of Alexander the Great at the end of the nineteenth century, not much has been made of this important source of information on the Arabic transmission of the Alexander Romance, which became wrongly attributed on a medieval manuscript and…