The History of the Za’faran Monastery is for the first time offered in English translation to the readers. It was written in 1917 by Patriarch Ignatius Aphram Barsoum (d. 1957) when he was still a monk at the monastery. The book details the history of the monastery from its inception until modern times. It deals with with everything, from construction to its significance as a center of Syriac learning and learned men. Without this small book, the first of its kind, a great and significant page of the history of the Syrian Church of Antioch would have been lamentably lost.

Philoxenos Yuhanna Dolabani (1885-1969), Metropolitan of Mardin, was an important figure in the Syrian Orthodox church in the twentieth century and a prolific scholar, most of whose works remain unpublished and unknown to Western scholarship. Bishop Gregorios Yohanna Ibrahim has here given us a biography of this key figure.

This book is a reproduction of Philoxenos Dolabani’s handwritten catalog of the manuscripts contained at Dayr al-Za‘faran. Dolabani was one of the greatest scholars of Syriac in the twentieth century and he made the catalogue while still a monk. This work, two volumes combined under one cover, is an important resource for all interested in Syriac and Christian Arabic.

This book is a collection of a number of small catalogues and hand-lists of manuscripts held in the possession of Syrian Orthodox churches, monasteries, and even individuals throughout the Middle East. The eminent scholar and bishop, Philoxenos Dolabani, carried out the enormous task of cataloguing and describing these little-known and difficult-to-access collections.