`Enbe men Karmo Suryoyo is a chrestomathy intended primarily for students who have covered the essentials of Syriac morphology and syntax, but it should also interest anyone who enjoys Syriac literature in general. The twenty-six selections consist of examples of Syriac prose and poetry from the second until the thirteenth centuries AD. The readings reflect a wide and varied range of subject matter. Inevitably, selections of a religious nature predominate, but historical, ethnographic, chemical, astronomical, and linguistic excerpts produced by famous Syriac authors, as well as less familiar ones, have been included. All three varieties of the Syriac alphabet, namely Estrangelo, Serto, and East Syriac are used.

The readings are presented in chronological order. Although one may start from any passage of his or her choice, it is advisable to start from the vocalized ones. The grammatical notes following each selection are linked by cross references to other selections, where a related grammatical or syntactic feature is encountered. The Syriac-English glossary of approximately two thousand entries covers the vocabulary attested in the readings, and an English-Syriac glossary is also available. Moreover, the index of grammatical points helps the reader to identify grammatical and syntactic features attested in the selections. It is hoped that the present work, apart from consolidating one’s knowledge of the Syriac language, could also fire the interest of Syriacists at large, inducing them to build on the readings dealt with in this book.

Martin R. Zammit obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Malta with the thesis: A Comparative Lexical Study of Qur’anic Arabic published in Brill’s Handbuch Der Orientalistik series. Dr Zammit’s research covers various Semitic languages, with specialization in Arabic and Syriac. He is a senior lecturer at the Department of Arabic and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Malta.