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Geographical 'Aǧā'ib in a Neo-Aramaic Manuscript Of GEOGRAPHICAL ‘AǦĀ’IB IN A NEO-ARAMAIC MANUSCRIPT OF THE LONDON SACHAU COLLECTION The manuscript Or. 9321 of the British Library, Asia Pacific & Africa Collections (formerly Oriental and India Office Collections) contains a prose text (f. 231b-244a) that derives directly or indirectly from Arabic sources and belongs to a genre very popular in the literatures of the Islam- icate world. It is a collection of short descriptions of wonders (Arabic ‘aǧā’ib) to be found in various regions of the world, including Alexandria, Egypt, al-Andalus, Syria, the Caspian Sea, and a few other places that are difficult to identify. The text is divided into two parts, each consisting of twelve descriptions: the first is about wondrous cities and buildings and the second contains wonders about rivers, wells, and seas. Titles or formulae such as ‘A Wonder’, ‘Another’ or ‘There was in...’, ‘There is in...’ introduce the 24 short notices. Structure and contents of the text and the fact that it is preserved in two languages, Neo-Aramaic on the right-hand pages and Arabic on the left-hand pages, raise a number of questions that must be kept distinct and to which we shall try to give provisional answers, at least as working hypotheses. One is the question whether a text preexisted the copy pre- served in this manuscript or it was compiled in this form by the copyist himself, out of his memory or using written sources. Another is what was the language of the Vorlage, its written or oral source(s). Was it Arabic (less probably Persian or Kurdish), Neo-Aramaic or Classical Syriac? Yet a third question is whether the Neo-Aramaic text is the original from which the facing Arabic text was translated or vice versa. However, before addressing nature and contents of the text, a couple of preliminary remarks seem necessary about the multiple-text manuscript in which it has been preserved. 1. Sachau collections of Neo-Aramaic manuscripts Professor of semitic philology and from 1887 first director of the Semi­ nar für Orientalische Sprachen in Berlin, in the last two decades of the 19th century Eduard Sachau (1845-1930) expended much effort in pursu- ing manuscripts or obtaining the compilation of new miscellaneous col- lections of texts to document a variety of Neo-Aramaic dialects. The results of such efforts are two collections of Neo-Aramaic manuscripts Le Muséon 129 (3-4), 423-456. doi: 10.2143/MUS.129.3.3180786 - Tous droits réservés. © Le Muséon, 2016. 99279_Museon_2016_3-4_07_Bellino.indd 423 29/11/16 06:04 424 f. bellino – A. MengoZZi now preserved at the Berliner Staatsbibliothek – Preußischer Kulturbesitz1 and the British Library, Asia Pacific & Africa Collections in London2. Rifaat Ebied and Nicholas Al-Jeloo published a number of letters addressed to Eduard Sachau by the informant, copyist, translator, and book dealer Jeremiah Shamir, preserved in the ms. London B.L. Or. 93263. Unfortunately, we do not have the letters sent by Sachau. However, the replies of his correspondents in the Near East contain valuable information on the books and manuscripts they were collecting, copying, and translat- ing for the German orientalist. At least as far as Neo-Aramaic is con- cerned, the letters are nevertheless rather vague on the sources and crite- ria they used. We have therefore to rely on the manuscripts themselves for a partial reconstruction of Sachau’s methods and criteria in selecting the texts and we do not know with certainty to what extent the texts col- lected by the copyists reflect his actual requests and wishes or if they are materials circulating among these communities in oral or written form. A survey of the dialects and the genres of both collections confirms the description of the Neo-Aramaic materials that Lidzbarski produced on the basis of the Berlin collection only4. A first concern of Sachau must have been to collect texts that might bear witness to the variety of dialects that characterize the largest portion of the Neo-Aramaic continuum (today South-Eastern Turkey, Northern Iraq, and North-Western Iran). Both col- lections include texts in Ṭuroyo as well as varieties of what we now know as North Eastern Neo-Aramaic (henceforth NENA). As far as methods are concerned, Neo-Aramaic texts were usually cop- ied for Sachau in Syriac script, serṭo for Ṭuroyo and East-Syriac script for NENA, and provided with an Arabic translation en face or in a separate manuscript. The choice of the Syriac script possibly derives from Sachau’s aware- ness of the existence of an indigenous tradition of writing vernacular texts in the Classical Syriac alphabet (the earliest manuscripts including Neo- Aramaic texts date from the 18th century) and was certainly well-accepted among copyists faithful to their scribal habit and cultural tradition. Never- theless it soon attracted criticism from Western scholars in search of more precise phonetic transcriptions5. As an exception, the Gospel of St John in 1 LIDZBARSKI, Die neu-aramäischen Handschriften. 2 MENGOZZI, Neo-Aramaic Manuscripts. 3 EBIED, Letters to Sachau and EBIED – Al-JElOO, Letters to Sachau. 4 LIDZBARSKI, Die neu-aramäischen Handschriften, vol. 1, p. VII-XV. 5 HEINRIChS, Written Ṭūrōyo, p. 183; MENGOZZI, Neo-Aramaic Manuscripts, p. 460. On the scarce reliability of Sachau NA manuscripts for dialectological investigations, see MUTZAFI, Ṭyare Neo-Aramaic. 99279_Museon_2016_3-4_07_Bellino.indd 424 29/11/16 06:04 GEOGRAPHICAL ‘AǦĀ’IB IN A NEO-ARAMAIC MANUSCRIPT 425 the Ṭuroyo translation by Isaiah of Qyllith (London B.L. Or. 9327, dated 1889-90) has a synoptic transcription in Roman script with diacritics. Wolfhart Heinrichs identified an 1877 copy of this Ṭuroyo translation of St. John in a manuscript of the Union Theological Seminary in New York6. Lidzbarski observes that the Ṭuroyo texts “were all copied by Isaiah of Qyllith and they might all have been translated from Arabic. All of them except ms. 245 have the Arabic original included en face”7. Ms. Sachau 245 (= Berlin Kgl. Bibliothek 281) contains the transla- tion of the Gospel of St. John. It is, however, difficult to imagine that Isaiah of Qyllith actually translated Biblical texts, such as Genesis 1-108, Psalms 1-20, Ester and Acts 1-10, from an Arabic original rather than from the Peshiṭṯa. Similarly, an Arabic original can be excluded for most NENA texts, with absolute certainty for those belonging to traditional poetic genres such as songs, hymns, dialogue poems, and metrical fables. For NENA texts, the Arabic translations were probably intended as a helping tool for Western scholars to read the Aramaic original and this was indeed their function in the ground-breaking text edition and lexi- cographic work by Lidzbarski. As far as genres are concerned, Isaiah of Qyllith prepared for Sachau 1) the selection of Biblical texts mentioned above and a number of 2) prose texts, including hagiographic tales, geographical notices on Mesopotamia (in form of questions and answers, most probably from a school book), Ṭur-‘Abdin, Midyat and Christian villages, as well as 3) pieces of wisdom and entertainment literature that apparently were very popular and circu- lated among Arabic-speaking Christians, Jews9 and Muslims alike: Islamic versions of the Story of Salomon, Story and Proverbs of Aḥiqar and the beginning of a story of Sindbād the Sailor. Lidzbarski published the Story and Proverbs of Aḥiqar and the Arabic Vorlage of the Ṭuroyo text has 6 HEINRIChS, Written Ṭūrōyo. 7 “Die jakobitischen Texte sind sämtlich vom Lehrer und Diakon Jesaias aus Qyllith niedergeschrieben. Sie dürften sämtlich aus dem Arabischen übersetzt sein, und ihnen allen, bis auf Cod. 245, ist das arabische Original beigegeben” (LIDZBARSKI, Die neu-aramäischen Handschriften, vol. 1, p. VII). Before 1877, Isaiah (Eša‘yō) of Qyllith translated the Gospel of John at the request of the American missionaries. Sachau (Reise, p. 420) presents him as the teacher of the school of Qyllith, founded and supported by the American Mission of Mardin. 8 The Ṭuroyo translation of Genesis 1 was published by GOTThEIl, Salamās, p. 306-310. 9 Small publishers active from 19th-century in Baghdad such as Dangur published along with Biblical texts, such as the Targums and Peshiṭṯa, Judeo-Arabic versions of stories of the Arabian Nights, including the stories of Ḥayqar, Salomon, Sindbād the Sailor, short stories from Hārūn al-Rašīd’s cycle and a whole copy in Judeo-Arabic of the Thousand and One Nights. 99279_Museon_2016_3-4_07_Bellino.indd 425 29/11/16 06:04 426 f. bellino – A. MengoZZi been recognized as one of the three main recensions of the Arabic Ḥayqār10. The oral version recorded and published by Shabo Talay in the Neo-Aramaic dialect of Mlaḥso would also seem to have an Arabic origin11. Biblical texts, hagiography, local history, and sacred geography are rather obvious choices in a Syriac Christian context, whereas the inclusion of the third group of texts may have been elicited by Sachau on the basis of his own literary taste and research interests. In any case we do not know as yet from which Arabic or Garshuni manuscripts Isaiah copied his Ara- bic Salomon, Ḥayqār, and Sindbād and whether those manuscripts had a Christian readership in late 19th-century Ṭur-‘Abdīn or rather belonged to a local node of the Middle-East network of Christian multilingual libraries. Jeremiah Shamir12 was the key figure in collecting NENA texts for Eduard Sachau; he was a copyist, possibly author of the Biblical translations and certainly translator into Arabic of the Neo-Aramaic manuscripts copied by others such as the priest Manṣūr Soro of Alqosh and Fransi Mīri. He also compiled multilingual vocabularies (Arabic, Neo-Aramaic, Kurdish and English), now in Berlin. In 1882 Father Samuel Jamīl13 answered negatively from Mosul to Sachau’s request to find stories in the Neo-Aramaic dialects of Ṭiyare and Jilu (Hakkari mountains)14.
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