An English translation, with the complete Syriac text.

The Chronicle of Joshua the Stylite, composed in A.D. 507, is generally acknowledged to be one of the most valuable authorities for the period for which it deals. The Syriac title reads, "The History of the Calamities that Befell Edessa, Amid [Diarbakir], and all of Mesopotamia." The Chronicle is preserved thanks to the care of a later historian, Dionysius of Tell-Mahre, Syrian Orthodox Patriarch (d. 845), who incorporated it with his own larger Chronicle. The manuscript from which the text is derived is a palimpsest, the underlying text being Coptic, and was copied between 907 and 944.

William Wright was professor of Arabic in Cambridge from 1870 to 1889. He was a distinguished Syriac scholar known for his History of Syriac Literature (1894), catalogues of the Syriac manuscripts at the British Museum and the University of Cambridge, and numerous other works. A number of his works have been made available again by Gorgias Press.