In the thirteenth-century, a debate transpired over the course of several days between a monk named Jurjī and several Muslims jurists in the city of Aleppo. This debate represents a careful and sophisticated example of a literary genre that had been developing among the Christians living under Islamic rule since the seventh century. The immense popularity of this work is demonstrated by the sheer volume of surviving manuscripts, which number around hundred. This volume provides a critical edition and translation of the text.

A refereed journal published annually by the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies.

The Journal of Language Relationship is an international periodical publication devoted to the issues of comparative linguistics and the history of the human language. The Journal contains articles written in English and Russian, as well as scientific reviews, discussions and reports from international linguistic conferences and seminars.

The colophon, the ultimate or “crowing touch” paragraphs of a manuscript or a book, provides readers with a the historical context in which the scribe produced the manuscript (or the publisher, a book). At its most fundamental level, the colophon gives us the “metadata” of the manuscript: who was the scribe? When and where was the manuscript produced? For whom was it produced and who paid for it? But colophons are far more rich. They are literary works in their own right, having a style and rhetoric independent of the main literary text of the manuscript. Some are assertive, providing contextual data about the scribe/publisher and manuscript/book; others are expressive, demonstrating the scribe’s feelings and wishes. Some are directive, asking the reader for an action; others declarative, providing all sorts of statements about the scribe/publisher or even the reader. The latter sometimes provide historical facts otherwise lost to histories: wars, earthquakes, religious events, legal agreements, etc. This edited volume brings together scholars from various disciplines to study colophons in various languages and traditions across space and time.

This companion volume to Literary Snippets: Colophons Across Space and Time (Gorgias Press, 2023) gives examples of colophons (and their translations) from the Ancient Near East up to the pre-modern world, in Akkadian, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, and Persian.

An edition and English translation of the "Description of the Prayers", one of the few extant works by Ignatius V Bar Wahib (Patriarch of Antioch from 1293-1333). The text has been taken from a manuscript of the Orthodox Theological Seminary, Kottayam, copied in 1915 from a manuscript of the Konat Library. The treatise offers a description of the external aspects of the canonical prayers, including washing and prostration.