REPORTS Beth Mardutho Summer 2011 Internship Report EMILEE WALKER CORNETTA, LOGAN WILMOTH, JAMES E. WALTERS, BETH MARDUTHO During the summer of 2011, three students from Princeton Theological Seminary worked as interns at Beth Mardutho: Emilee Walker Cornetta, Logan Wilmoth, and James E. Walters. These interns completed a number of projects that provide important resources for scholars working in the field of Syriac studies. This project report provides a summary of their tasks. Emilee spent the summer at Beth Mardutho preparing two projects for print publication. The first was an English translation of the articles in Volume 1 of George Awwad’s al-Mabāith al- suryāniyya fī al-majallāt al-ʿarabiyya.1 The list covers Arabic articles on Syriac subjects published in the journal al-Machreq between the years of 1898 and 1970. Its intention is to allow scholars in the field of Syriac studies who do not regularly read Arabic publications to be made aware of articles that may be pertinent to their research. Emilee’s second project was the preparation of the Index of Notable Persons in the Syriac Tradition within Select Arabic Sources: an adaptation of G. Kiraz’s catalogue at the Beth Mardutho Research Library (Gorgias Press, 2011). The volume includes the contents of George Kiraz's catalogue of over 1,300 people and places related to the Syriac tradition and corresponding citations in select Arabic sources of the twentieth century, including Barsoum's al-Luʾluʾ al- manthūr and Tārīkh Tūr ʿAbdīn, Yaʿqub III's Tārīkh al-kanīsah al- suryāniyyah, and the Patriarchal magazines of Damascus and Jerusalem. Emilee transcribed the Arabic names in the catalogue and provided Latin renderings of the names and citations as well as references to corresponding articles in the Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage where applicable. Logan's tasks consisted primarily of two large projects. The first task was the digitization of over 75 audio-tapes containing recordings of Syriac hymns from the Beth Gazo, the Qurbono liturgy, Syriac choir performances, and secular Syriac folk music. Eventually, these recordings will be made available through 1 Reviews listed in the volume were excluded due to time restraints. 205 206 Reports eBethArké, the online resource for Syriac studies maintained by Beth Mardutho (ebetharke.bethmardutho.org). The second task is an on-going project intended to make the content of Cyril Moss’s Catalogue of Syriac Printed Books and Related Literature in the British Museum2 available in an online, searchable format that will aide bibliographic searches through the new Syriac Reference Portal, hosted by the University of Alabama and directed by David Michelson. Logan and James also collaborated on a few projects. They complied, edited, and published an index for the first ten volumes of Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies.3 They also helped manage the creation of the new website for Beth Mardutho.4 In this task, they were primarily responsible for creating the new online home for Hugoye, which included the creation of web pages and the task of uploading each individual article for all volumes of Hugoye in order to provide access through the new e-reader format. Moreover, Logan and James were also responsible for formatting and editing all of the information on the new Beth Mardutho website. In addition to these joint projects with Logan, James continued the work he began in the summer of 2010, cataloguing the many resources held at the Beth Mardutho Research Library. The bibliographic information for these resources will be made available through the new eBethArké web interface. He also began working on writing grant proposals for Beth Mardutho for a number of future projects, including the preservation and digitization of many rare resources in the Beth Mardutho Research Library and the categorization and management of resources that still need to be catalogued. Hopefully, scholars will benefit from the work accomplished by these interns for years to come. Beth Mardutho looks forward to hosting more graduate student internships in the future. 2 Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2008 3 Walters and Wilmoth, eds., Index of Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies, Volumes 1-10, Gorgias Handbooks 22 (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2011). 4 http://www.bethmardutho.org. A Report on the Workshop “Manuscripts from Eastern Christian Traditions” at the SBL Annual Meeting in San Francisco, Nov 2011 ADAM C. MCCOLLUM, HILL MUSEUM & MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY In addition to the sessions dedicated specifically to Syriac at this year’s annual meeting, a new program unit was inaugurated that deals with manuscripts emanating from eastern Christian communities. To clearly explain the scope and purpose of the workshop, I can do no better than cite some lines from its description: The study of any culture or tradition with a textual component relies heavily, in the first instance, on manuscripts that bear witness to those texts. This is no less true of the various traditions of Christianity in the east. While at least a basic initiation to manuscript studies within the context of biblical studies and in terms of Hebrew and Greek manuscripts and within classical studies is not hard to come by, students and scholars of eastern Christianity have not been so fortunate. Manuscript catalogs exist, but the basics of finding, obtaining, reading, using, describing, and cataloging manuscripts are skills that interested individuals are often simply forced to figure out on their own. The field as a whole will profit from any encouragement toward manuscript studies. This workshop will bring together scholars from several different areas of eastern Christianity, here defined minimally to include those communities who used (and use) the following languages in their literature and liturgy: Arabic (including Garshuni), Armenian, Coptic, Gǝ‘ǝz, Georgian, Syriac, and perhaps others (e.g., Old Church Slavonic, Sogdian, Syro-Ottoman). (While Greek is often included among the languages of eastern Christianity, it is here deemed a field enough unto itself to be excluded from this corpus.) The papers and tutorials will not be strictly of a linguistic nature, while knowing any of the languages will naturally prove beneficial; students and 207 208 Reports scholars who have a more general interest in the study and use of manuscripts are also encouraged to attend. The main goal of the workshop is to educate and familiarize both students and scholars, particularly those who have not worked with manuscripts before, about manuscript studies within the broader fields of eastern Christianity. Some presentations will be instructive and informative, that is, they will include relevant teaching points—some general, some language- or genre-specific—, and others may highlight current work or resources in the field, and still others may call for new approaches. The papers and tutorials of the workshop may cover topics such as codicology, paleography, cataloging (descriptive criteria), dating, genre-specific issues, digitization (advantages and disadvantages), present (cataloged and uncataloged) collections, critical editions, Instrumenta studiorum, the history of studying eastern Christian manuscripts, the scribe’s practice, and others. These two initial sessions were blessed with a majority of talks dedicated to Syriac matters. Kristian Heal (Brigham Young University) read a fascinating paper on a hitherto still somewhat neglected area of Syriac scholarship: its history and personalia. With the title “The Growth of Syriac Manuscript collections in Europe and North America,” his presentation served as an historical introduction to the major collections of Syriac manuscripts in Europe. (There was not enough time to treat North American collections.) An especially strong point was his survey of the major periods of European acquisition of Syriac manuscripts. Next, George Kiraz (Beth Mardutho, Gorgias Press) spoke about an as yet uncompleted project to digitize archival material onsite in eastern libraries. He described the project and shared several images. These two papers were part of the first session; the second session began with Columba Stewart’s (Hill Museum & Manuscript Library) “The Rabbula Corpus and its Manuscript Transmission,” in which he gave examples of what can be learned about a text by close inspection of the manuscript tradition and the way that a text is arranged therein instead of merely by studying a printed edition. He also briefly discussed the practical aspects, with some concomitant advantages and disadvantages, of the possible ways of Reports 209 actually laying eyes on manuscripts, whether in autopsy, bitonal microfilm, or high-quality color images. Finally, Jonathan Loopstra (Capital University) in his contribution “‘A Net of Points’: The Challenge of Working with Syriac Educational Manuscripts,” turned our attention to BL Add. 12138, a handbook to the pronunciation and accentuation for reading the Syriac bible that dates to 899 CE and in which the compiler claimed to have preserved the traditions of the maqryānē (“teachers of reading”) passed down in East Syriac schools from the time of Narsai. Loopstra, who included several high-quality images of the manuscript, gave examples of how this complex manuscript served as a learning text for generations, with its glosses, erasures, and other markings, as well as the critique and commentary on the traditional readings by the later East Syriac scribe Rabban Ramišo‘. The other two papers in the workshop were devoted to