In this book Yusuf al-Bakhzani has performed the marvelous task of combing through dozens of different historical sources and studies, many of them published in Arabic in the Middle East and little-known, if at all, to Western scholars, and culled references to Syriac books, manuscripts, and libraries—both East Syrian and West—throughout the Middle East, from the Middle Ages to the present; Syriac manuscripts in India also receive attention.

The main reference for dating Syriac manuscripts and the standard in the field. This Album conveniently brings together two hundred facsimiles, each representing a page of a dated Syriac manuscript.

The book addresses the history of Syrian Orthodoxy during a critical juncture of its history that spans the late Ottoman period and treads well beyond to witness remarkable revival, indeed renaissance. The work uniquely utilizes over 6000 uncatalogued and unpublished archival documents that were made available for it.

Cyrillona (fl. 396) was a younger contemporary of Ephrem the Syrian whose work has been celebrated as comparable in both beauty and its significance for our understanding of early Syriac Christianity. This study reassesses conventional claims about the author’s identity, date, and the constitution of his corpus. It introduces each of Cyrillona’s five surviving poems and examines their poetic form and genre, structure and rhetorical features, and critical questions of text, interpretation, and theology.