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Without Mushe¯ of Nisibis, Where Would We Be? Some Reflections on the Transmission of Syriac Literature

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Without Mushe¯ of Nisibis, Where Would We Be? Some Reflections on the Transmission of Syriac Literature WITHOUT MUSHE¯ OF NISIBIS, WHERE WOULD WE BE? WITHOUT MUSHE¯ OF NISIBIS, WHERE WOULD WE BE? SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE TRANSMISSION OF SYRIAC LITERATURE SEBASTIAN BROCK Tiresome delays when dealing with tax officials are a familiar enough feature of every age, and so one can have sympathy with Mushe/Moses of Nisibis, the Abbot of the Syrian Orthodox Monastery in Egypt, who experienced a particularly long delay at the tax offices in Baghdad well over a thousand years ago. Without the good use to which Mushe put this delay, however, the topics covered by this, and other Syriac Symposia, would necessarily have been very different from what they are and have been. In this paper I hope to explain why and how. Deir es-Suryan,1 situated in the desert between Alexandria and Cairo, is today a flourishing Coptic Orthodox monastery, and has been in Coptic Orthodox hands since the seventeenth century (1636), but for some 900 years before that it had belonged to the Syrian Orthodox Church, having originally been acquired by Marutha son of Îabbib, a Syrian Orthodox merchant from Tagrit, but based in Fustat (Cairo) in (it seems) the early ninth (or possibly eighth) century.2 At some time in the first decade of the tenth century Mushe of Nisibis was elected abbot, an office he was to hold for over thirty years.3 We learn from inscriptions in the monastery church 1 For the history of the monastery, see above all H.G. Evelyn White, The Monasteries of the Wadi ‘n Natrun, II, The History of the Monasteries of Nitria and of Scetis (New York, 1934); III, The Architecture and Archaeology (New York, 1933), pp. 167-224. 2 The earlier date is preferred by Evelyn White, The Monasteries, II, pp. 312-318, but see J.-M. Fiey, ‘Coptes et syriaques: contacts et échanges’, Studia Orientalia Christiana. Collectanea 15 (1972/3 [1976]), pp. 297-365, esp. 323-326; and K. Innemée and L. Van Rompay, ‘La présence des Syriens dans le Wadi al-Natrun (Egypte)’, Parole de l’Orient, 23 (1998), pp. 167-202, esp. 182-186, 191-193, who point out that there is no definite evi- dence until the ninth century. 3 On him, see Evelyn White, The Monasteries, II, pp. 337-338; J. Leroy, ‘Moise de Nisibe’, in Symposium Syriacum 1972, Orientalia Christiana Analecta, 197 (Rome, 1974), pp. 457- 470; and M. Blanchard, ‘Moses of Nisibis (fl. 906-943) and the Library of Deir Suriani’, in Studies in the Christian East in Memory of Mirrit Boutros Ghali, ed. L.S.B. MacCoull, (Society for Coptic Archaeology North America, 1; Washington D.C., 1955), pp. 13-26. 16 SEBASTIAN BROCK that during his time as abbot Mushe erected a new sanctuary screen and car- ried out various other improvements.4 In 925 the Christian monasteries in Egypt were faced with a dire crisis: a new vizier from the Caliph al-Muqtadir arrived in Egypt and demanded that monks (who had previously been exempted) should now pay the poll- tax.5 The only way of appealing against this new and crippling tax assess- ment was to go to the top (in other words, to the Caliph himself), and it was the abbot of Deir es-Suryan, Mushe, who was chosen to undertake this delicate – and, as it turned out, very lengthy task. He set off for Baghdad in 927 and it was only in 932 that he at last returned, having successfully man- aged to have the vizier's demands overturned. Mushe, however, had not spent all his time endlessly sitting around waiting in different officials' of- fices, as we learn from a note in a manuscript today in the British Library:6 ‘To the honour and glory and magnificence of this Syrian Orthodox monastery of the Mother of God in the Desert of Sketis, Mushe known as “of Nisibis”, an insignificant sinner and abbot, strove to acquire this book, together with 250 others (many of which he himself bought, while others were given to him as a present), when he went to Baghdad on be- half of this holy Desert and the monks dwelling in it. May God, for whose glory, and for the benefit of those who read these books, grant for- giveness to him and to his departed ones, and to everyone who has shared with them. By the living word of God no one is permitted to cause harm to any of them in any way; nor to appropriate them to him- self. Nor should anyone delete this commemorative note, or make any erasure or cut anything out – or order anyone else to do so; nor may they be given away from the monastery. If anyone dares to do so, let him real- ise that he is under an anathema. These books arrived with the above-mentioned abbot Mushe in the year 1243 of the Greeks (= A.D. 932)'. Even before Mushe's time the monastery is known to have received a con- 4 See J. Leroy, ‘Le décor de l’église du couvent des Syriens au Ouady Natroun (Egypte)’, Cahiers Archéologiques, 23 (1974), pp. 151-167. 5 Al-Maqrizi, History of the Copts, cited by Evelyn White, The Monasteries, II, pp. 337- 338. 6 Add. 14445, cited by W. Cureton, The Festal Letters of Athanasius (London, 1848), pp. xxv-xxvi note. WITHOUT MUSHE¯ OF NISIBIS, WHERE WOULD WE BE? 17 siderable number of manuscripts by donation, especially during the last quarter of the ninth century.7 After his death, too, others continued to be donated by visitors, and of course numerous manuscripts were copied in the monastery itself by the monks. What marked out Mushe's collection, how- ever, was both the number and the age of the manuscripts he had acquired in Mesopotamia. Some 60 out of the 250 manuscripts he brought back from Baghdad can definitely be identified by acquisition notes,8 and high proportion of these belong to the seventh century or earlier. By contrast, those known to have been donated either before Mushe's time, or after, are only rarely earlier than the eighth century.9 This makes it very likely that at least the majority of the large number of other very early manuscripts origi- nating from Deir es-Suryan also belong to the collection of 250 manuscripts that Mushe brought back from Baghdad, even though the absence of any specific acquisition note makes it impossible to be certain about this.Much of what I have said so far, by way of background, will be familiar to many and so will the subsequent history of the monastery's library: how a consid- erable number were bought up by the Vatican Library in the eighteenth cen- tury (by which time, of course, they were of no practical use to the monks of the monastery, now solely Coptic Orthodox); and how an even larger number came to the British Museum (now British Library) in the course of the first half of the nineteenth century. Concerning all this, and the impor- tance of abbot Mushe's role, much has already been written, notably by William Wright, H.G. Evelyn White, Jules Leroy and Monica Blanchard.10 All of these have likewise well brought out the significance of the contents of the monastery's manuscript collection, seeing that it has provided us with so many texts that had hitherto been thought lost. I shall not rehearse these again here; instead, I should like to look at the significance of the great age of many of the manuscripts in the collection from a somewhat different per- spective. 7 Evelyn White, The Monasteries, II, pp. 439-443. 8 Ibid., pp. 443-445. 9 Two notable examples are Add. 14650 (Wright, Catalogue, no. 949), of 6th/7th century (Egyptian Fathers), and Add. 14635, ff.1-15 (Wright, Catalogue, no. 568), of sixth cen- tury (Evagrius), bound in the monastery in 894. 10 W. Wright, Catalogue of the Syriac Manuscripts in the British Museum, acquired since the year 1838, III (London, 1872), pp. iv, xvi-xxv; Evelyn White, The Monasteries, II, pp. 443-44; J. Leroy, ‘Moise de Nisibe’ (see n. 3); M. Blanchard, ‘Moses of Nisibis’ (see n. 3); see also Innemée and Van Rompay, ‘La présence’ (n. 2), pp. 186-189. 18 SEBASTIAN BROCK That we are fortunate enough to have such a large number of surviving Syriac manuscripts that belong to the period from the fifth to tenth century is thanks to the combination of Mushe's zeal in collecting them and to the dry climate of Egypt in preserving them. The importance of this second fac- tor quickly becomes apparent if one tries to think of Syriac manuscripts ear- lier than (say) A.D. 1000 which have been preserved outside Egypt: the number is certainly small, as one can see if one takes as a sample only those manuscripts which bear a date. A total of 136 dated Syriac manuscripts whose dates fall prior to A.D. 1000 are at present known to me; of these, all but 17 come from either Deir es-Suryan or from the only other monastery in (modern) Egypt which possesses Syriac manuscripts, namely St Catherine's Monastery, Sinai. It could well be that some of these 17 also reached European libraries from one or other of these Egyptian monasteries, but their exact provenance is not known (or at least, not known to me). Others among these, however, have definitely been preserved over the cen- turies in the Middle East outside Egypt (though probably few, if any, that are earlier than the eighth century).11 What is important here is not the pre- cise numbers but the fact that the vast preponderance of Syriac manuscripts older than the eleventh century comes from (or is still to be found in) either Deir es-Suryan or from St Catherine's Monastery.
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