The Syriac Alexander Romance (ar) is the most distinguished part of the Syriac and indeed of all eastern literary tradition of Alexander the Great. A notable peculiarity of ar is that a very high number of its versions were produced in late Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the early modern age in Europe, Asia and Africa, usually not as proper translations but rather as variant versions transformed to fit cultural needs and traditions of the target reader, with Pfister registering some two hundred of them (Friedrich Pfister, “Studien zum Alexanderroman”, Würzburger Jahrbücher 1946: 29–66). The ancient and early medieval versions of ar, especially Greek ones (α, β, γ, *δ), are usually called recensions and I will be using this name here.It is generally acknowledged that all surviving eastern versions of ar, attested as far as Mongolia (Francis W. Cleaves, “An early Mongolian version of the Alexander Romance”, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 22 (1959): 1–99), and Malaysia (Pieter J. van Leeuwen, De Maleische Alexanderroman (Meppel: B. ten Brink, 1937); Su F. Ng, “The Alexander Romance in Southeast Asia: Wonder, Islam, and Knowledge of the World”, in Alexander the Great in the Middle Ages: Transcultural Perspectives, ed. Markus Stock (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 104–122), are ultimately derived from its Syriac variant.

1. The Arabic derivatives are perhaps the best researched part of the eastern tradition of ar thanks largely, but not exclusively, to the seminal book of Doufikar-Aerts who has also been conducting a study of the Alexander cycle in Asia and Africa (Faustina Doufikar-Aerts, Alexander Magnus Arabicus: A Survey of the Alexander Tradition through Seven Centuries: From Pseudo-Callisthenesto Ṣūrī (Paris: Peeters, 2010); Faustina Doufikar-Aerts, “King Midas’ Ears on Alexander’s Head: In Search of the Afro-Asiatic Alexander Cycle”, in The Alexander Romance in Persia and the East, ed. Richard Stoneman, Kyle Erickson and Ian R. Netton (Groningen: Barkhuis, 2012), 61–79).
2. The Syriac ar is but a part of the rich Syriac tradition on Alexander the Great, whose other members are traditionally called: Verse history attributed to Jacob of Serūgh, Life of Alexander, Sayings of Alexander, Exploits of Alexander, Alexander’s excerpta in the Chronicle of Ps.-Dionysios of Tell-Mahre, in a ms.369 from Dayr al-Zaʿfrān and in the Syriac version of Palladius’ De gentibus Indiae et Bragmanibus. A thorough, well-referenced discussion of the Syriac literary tradition on Alexander the Great can be found in Monferrer-Sala’s chapter in the Brill’s Companion to Alexander Literature in the Middle Ages and valuable earlier treatments are Czeglédy’s and Gero’s. The Syriac ar is generally accessible to modern readers in the 1889 edition with English translation of E.A.W. Budge, reprinted in 2003 (from which all quotations from the Syriac ar are taken). It is preserved in six manuscripts,6five of which were consulted by Budge who, however, based his edition on the oldest manuscript bl. Add. 25,875 of 1708–1709. The date of Budge’s edition marks the beginning of the systematic modern research of this branch of Alexander legends, as already Budge addressed the questions of the author of the Syriac translation and of the way of its transmission from the original Greek. To him the Syriac text was created by a Christian priest, working between the seventh and the ninth c. and translating from a lost Arabic intermediary ( Budge, History of Alexander, lviii–lxii). The last assertion was demolished by Nöldeke to disappear from the subsequent scholarship (Theodor Nöldeke, Beiträge zur Geschichte des Alexanderromans (Vienna, 1890), 11–17), the first one has developed into the Syriac translator becoming a Nestorian monk working in northern Mesopotamia.

Nöldeke’s linguistic arguments have been critically assessed by Frye and Ciancaglini (in 1998 in Italian and 2001 in English) (Richard N. Frye, “Two Iranian Notes”, in Papers in Honour of Professor Mary Boyce (Leiden: Brill, 1985), vol. i: 185–190). Ciancaglini further notices that confusion in spelling is limited to proper names only, often transcribed in the Syriac ar in variant ways, while common Greek loanwords are spelled correctly. This, Ciangalini shows, is best explained on the grounds of translation directly from Greek into Syriac done by a person with good knowledge of Greek but lacking a Classical educational background. The number of loan words from Middle Persian is about average for Syriac texts and hence too low to be used as an argument supporting Nöldeke’s interpretation. There is also a large number of Grecisms, both as loan words and structural calques in compound words, both disregarded by Nöldeke. A number of places incomprehensible in Syriac can be best explained as mistakes in translation from Greek. Ciancaglini’s paper shows this from the linguistic point of view, and that approach was the cornerstone of Nöldeke’s influential hypothesis of the Middle Persian intermediary translation.

1. Thus the Syriac ar almost certainly came into being as a direct rendering in Syriac of a Greek original. Now the position of Frye and Ciancaglini has been gaining some, but not (yet) universal acceptance: Richard Stoneman, Il romanzo di Alessandro (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 2007), Vol. i: lxxxi; Josef Wiesehöfer, “The ‘Accursed’ and the ‘Adventurer’: Alexander the Great in Iranian Tradition”, in A Companion to Alexander Literature in the Middle Ages, ed. Z. David Zuwiyya (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011), 128, n. 48; Doufikar-Aerts, “King Midas’ Ears”, 62; Emily Cottrell, “Al-Mubaššir ibn Fatik and the α version of the Alexander Romance”, in The Alexander Romance in Persia and the East, ed. Richard Stoneman, Kyle Erickson and Ian R. Netton (Groningen: Barkhuis, 2012), 236, n. 11; Julia Rubanovich,“Re-writing the Episode of Alexander and Candace in Medieval Persian Literature: Patterns, Sources and Motif Transformation”, in Alexander the Great in the Middle Ages: Transcultural Perspectives, ed. Markus Stock (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 125 and n. 10.
2. Dating/Authorship

This brings us back to questions of the authorship of the Syriac ar and of the date of its composition. The fact that the three mss. which preserve it, including the oldest one, are written in a Nestorian hand does not bring support to the Nestorian hypothesis: all mss. are very late, the oldest composed in 1708–1709, hence their Nestorian scripture gives no clue as to the Syriac archetype. The hypothesis of a Nestorian author of the Syriac ar is surely derived from the general knowledge of Christianity in the Roman-Persian border area. To the East of the border the Church was true to the teaching of Theodore of Mopsuetia and in modern scholarship it is labelled (improperly) Nestorian (Christine Shepardson, “Syria, Syriac, Syrian: Negotiating East and West,” in A Companion to Late Antiquity, ed. Philip Rousseau and Jutta Raithel (Malden, Oxford and Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2009), 463), the beginning of the fifth c. the Sasanian kings made every effort to assure the independence of the Christian Church in their realm from ecclesiastic centres in the hostile Roman Empire (Peter Edwell, “Sasanian interactions with Rome and Byzantium”, in The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Iran, ed. Daniel T. Potts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 849). If one follows Nöldeke in the belief of a Middle Persian intermediary ar, attributing its authorship to a “Nestorian” monk might seem logical. Yet with the domination of the “Nestorian” Church among the Christians of the Sasanian Empire, many other denominations are attested in the Syriac speaking lands: (monophysite) Syrian Orthodox taking pride of place in Roman Syria/Northern Mesopotamia with the Jacobite (orthodox) in minority. Both Syrian Orthodox and Jacobite Christians lived in the Sasanian lands too.

1. There is no obvious way to identify the author of the Syriac ar with any of these Churches, albeit the generally held view of him as of a priest/monk seems justified, having in mind that identifiable Syriac authors were almost always clergymen.
2. One significant detail in the Syriac ar calls into question the traditional identification of its author as a Sasanian subject, immersed in the culture of the Persian East: in its rendition of the last days of Alexander, the dying king is carried in his bed to the hippodrome so that his soldiers might see him for the last time (iii.21). This scene differs from the rendition of most other early versions of ar in which the king’s bed is placed in an unspecified place in which his soldiers might see him, but also from the later Persian rendition—both in the Šāh-nāma of Ferdowsī and in the Dārāb-nāma of Ṭārsūsī, Alexander’s bed is placed on the plain. It seems that all later authors adapted the scene to what would be the most appropriate setting in their times and place, thus the Syriac author using the most distinguished place for gatherings in late Roman/Byzantine empire, the hippodrome, which was later erased by Persian authors unfamiliar with the hippodrome as the place where people could see their king. If these details are indicative of the cultural milieu in which the author of the Syriac ar worked, they would point to a multicultural place in Roman rather than in Persian north Mesopotamia, perhaps Edessa, the leading centre of Syriac literature.

Differences between Syriac AR & Greek AR:

In principal the Syriac ar follows very closely the story line of the original Greek ar, as we know it from its oldest version, although not an archetype (known as α), ms. a, beginning with the Egyptian logos which shows king Nectanebo as the father of Alexander, to Alexander’s (spurious) last will and death in Babylon as a result of poison administered by a group of Macedonian conspirators. There is a number of small discrepancies in phrasing, numbers and names, but the same happens in other early versions of the ar, by some modern scholars described as an open text, modified by scribes and translators, so that it might fit the needs of their local culture (David Konstan, “The Alexander Romance: The Cunning of the Open Text”, Lexis 16 (1998): 123–138).

Alexander’s Journey to China as Fiction:

But the story bound to gain the greatest resonance is that of Alexander’s journey to China. It is utterly fictitious, as neither the historical Alexander ever made it so far, nor is there a shred of evidence of the knowledge of China in Alexander’s court or any reflection of Alexander’s exploits in contemporary Chinese sources (Gościwit Malinowski, “Alexander the Great and China”, in Alexander the Great and the East: History, Art, Tradition, ed. Krzysztof Nawotka and Agnieszka Wojciechowska (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2016), 151–157).

It is generally agreed that for most of episodes the Šāh-nāma and later New Persian romances relied on an Arabic intermediary from the Syriac AR (Doufikar-Aerts, Alexander Magnus, 13). Yet the source tradition on Alexander is complex with Persian Romances and medieval historians of Iran including Alexander among Kayanid kings which suggests pre-Islamic roots probably in late Sasanian Xwaday-Namag (Manteghi, “Alexander the Great”, 162–164; Rubanovich, “Why So Many”, 203–204).