Borbone History of Mar Yahballaha and Rabban Sauma

Edited, translated, and annotated by Pier Giorgio Borbone
1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-3-7497-1298-4
Verlag: tredition
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 424 Seiten

This book tells a story of serendipity. Two Christian monks left China about 1274, headed to Jerusalem. Travelling on an itinerary similar to that Marco Polo had taken, they reached Iran, ruled by a Mongol dynasty, the Ilkhans. There, what they never had expected happened: one of them, Mark by name, was elected Patriarch of the Church of the East (with the name Yahballaha), while the other, Rabban Sauma, was sent as ambassador to the pope and the courts of France and England by the Mongol Ilkhan Arghun. From Rabban Sauma's report of his embassy, and the two monk's memories of their journey from China to Mesopotamia, an anonymous author compiled a biography of Sauma and Mark. He interspersed their report and memories with a narrative about 'the occurrences of their time - what happened to them, through them or because of them, relating everything just as it happened'. The result was a chronicle entitled 'History of Mar Yahballaha and Rabban Sauma', a rich and lively testimony of a time of unprecedented interconnectedness in the history of Eurasia at the epoch of the Mongol Empire.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Borbone, Pier Giorgio

Weitere Mitwirkende

E. Parodi, Laura

Leseproben

The Syriac Text

Bedjan’s second edition (1895)

In the Introduction to his second edition of the History (pp. XIII-XIV) Paul Bedjan listed all the manuscripts known to him at the time, designating each by a letter in the apparatus of his new edition: 1) S, that is, the copy Brother Salomon had sent him, made in Urmia in March 1887; 2) P (“Première”), the manuscript from which S had been copied; 3) A, “the copy of the American missionaries in Urmia, made at Ambi in 1884”; 4) L, “the London copy, made in 1889, add. 3636”. 5) T, in possession of the deacon Osha‘na1 in Tkhuma; copied in Qodshanis by the monk Rabban Yonan of Tkhuma from the manuscript owned by the Patriarch. Bedjan remarked that all these manuscripts appear to be copies of one another. He regarded P and S, its direct copy, the source of the first edition (1888), as defective, while T is according to him the best, and thought that all five of them derived from the archetype of that manuscript. Bedjan had direct access to a single manuscript, S. The manuscripts “of Urmia”, apparently A and T, given that Bedjan already owned S, a direct copy of P, were compared for him in Urmia by Benyamin son of the priest Jacob of Ardishay, and L was checked for him in London by the deacon Augustin of Kiossabad. Bedjan rearranged the material he received, on which he worked with acumen, providing numerous sensible conjectures, as well as making the vocalization uniform and continuous, and marking the narrative sequence by inserting titles, in addition to those already present in the manuscripts.

The present edition

Our earlier edition was based on Bedjan’s second (BORBONE 2009), because at that time we only had access to one manuscript (London, British Library, Or. 3636, Bedjan’s L). Later, however, through the kind cooperation of Christopher J. Anderson, Special Collections Librarian of the Divinity Library, Yale University, we received a copy of the manuscript Andover-Harvard Library, Ms. 327, and subsequently found a third witness which had previously escaped our attention (London, British Library, Or. 9379). Hence, we decided to provide here a new edition, based on the three manuscripts which are, to the best of our knowledge, the only extant copies of the History.2

Besides Bedjan’s evaluation of the tradition as derived from a single source, the comparison of the three manuscripts confirms Hall’s report about the discovery of the History in a single manuscript found in the church of the village Minyanish about 1884, a copy of which was brought to Urmia in 1885 by the priest Osha‘na.1 From this defective archetype a copying activity soon developed in Urmia, resulting in the production of at least six or seven copies.2 This explains why our edition does not differ dramatically from Bedjan’s. When faced with an evident corruption, in many cases we found his proposed emendations convincing and adopted them; at times we suggested our own. We found the titles he introduced meaningful in most cases, and therefore retained most of them in our edition as well.

The extant manuscripts

Y = New Haven, CT, Andover Newton Theological Seminary, Yale Syriac MS 3273

Date: 1886.

Paper; size: 22 x 17 cm; 84 folios; nine numbered fascicles (nn. 1-8 quinions, n. 9 ternion; the fascicles from 1 to 8 are numbered with Syriac letters – estrangelo, with decorations on both sides of the letter/number [black crosses with red dots], in the centre of the bottom margin; at the end of fascicle 1, the number , mistakenly written on fol. 9r, is repeated in the correct position on fol. 9v, with a different decoration [rosettes similar tothose found in Ms. L1]); ruled with mis?ara, one column, 18 lines per page; stylized “ mark” on each page (right corner of the upper margin). Numbering: recent folio numbering in Arabic numbers written in ink on the recto (left corner of the upper margin); more recent desultory page numbering in pencil, on the centre of the upper margin; from fol. 31v to fol. 32v only, page numbers in Syriac letters (: 61, 62, 63). East-Syriac script, clear and very standardized; fully vocalized.

Decorations: a typical East-Syriac portal at the beginning, fol. 1r (monochromatic: the same brown ink of the text) and a short horizontal twist (monochromatic) on the last folio after the colophon. Rubrics for titles (embedded in the text) and dates.

Colophon (fol. 84v):

This history of Mar Yahballaha, Catholicos Patriarch of the East, and of Rabban Sauma, Visitor General, is finished. To God glory, and to the sinner, miserable and unfortunate Dawid son of the deacon Ya‘qob of Targawar, who wrote [it], remission of the debts and pardon of the sins in the awful tribunal. Amen!

A note of three lines in English after the colophon (fol. 84v):

from David of Targawar | the son of Deacand Jacob | year of 1886

Ownership notes in ink are found on the cover page: a first one, “Benj. Labaree | Oorumiah. Persia”, followed by a second: “Isaac H. Hall | New York”, by the stamp of the “Andover Theol. Seminary Library”, dated “Mar[ch] 2 1900”, the accession Number “50,744” and the present shelf number “MS 327”.

On the last page the name “Isaac H. Hall” is repeated by the same hand, apparently Hall’s. On the pasted ex-libris of the Andover Theological Seminary a handwritten note on four lines says: “A Gift. | Purchased from the library | of | Prof Isaac H. Hall, PhD”.

L1 = London, British Library, Or. 36361

Date: before 29 November 1888.

Paper; size: 21,5 x 16,5 cm; 70 folios; eight numbered fascicles (nn. 1-7 quinions, n. 8 a bifolio; from 1 to 7 numbered with Syriac letters – estrangelo, with decorations on both sides of the letter/number [black rosettes], in the centre of the bottom margin); ruled with mis?ara, one column, 19 lines per page; stylized “mark” on each page (inner corner of the upper margin). Numbering: original page numbering in Syriac letters on the upper outer corner; recent folio numbering in pencil in Arabic numbers.

East-Syriac script, clear and very standardized; almost fully vocalized (unvocalized words desultorily appear, without any apparent reason).

Rubrics for titles (embedded in the text) and dates. No decoration.

Colophon (fol. 70r):

This history of Mar Yahballaha, Catholicos Patriarch of the East, and of Rabban Sauma, Visitor General, is finished. To God glory, and to the sinner Dawid, who wrote these lines, remission of the debts and pardon of the sins.

Notes: on the first unnumbered folio (ink): “Mar Yavallaha”; on the last unnumbered folio, recto (ink): “70 folios Feb. 1889.”; on the last unnumbered folio, verso: stamped shelf-mark: “OR. 3636.”, and a note of two lines (ink): “B[ough]t of Rev. J. H. Shedd | 29 Nov. 1888”.

L2 = London, British Library, Or. 93791

A miscellaneous manuscript, containing three different works, which the List entitled Syriac manuscripts in the British Museum acquired since 1899 names as: 1) “Theological discourses of Simeon Redipha. Nestorian hand, copied at Arubi [sic] by David bar Jacob of Targawar, and dated 29 Ilul 1889”;2 2) “Tash‘itha dhe-Mar Iabh-Alaha, the anonymous biographies of Jabh-Alaha III and Rabban Sauma. Nestorian hand, copied by Joel bar Warda and dated 5 ?abba? 1889”;3 3) “Tash‘itha dhe-Mar [sic] Maryam, a history of the Virgin;4 Nestorian hand, copied by Sargis bar Josip, and dated 22 Tammuz 1889”. Considering it as a codicological unit, we are going to provide a short description of the whole manuscript.

Paper; size: no measurements are given in the short description of the List and it is impossible to estimate the actual size from the digitized copy we received from the British Library, in the absence of a scale ruler. The format is unusually oblong, the height/width ratio being 1.6 (as against 1.3 of Y and L1, representative of the standard size of East-Syrian manuscripts at the time); 269 folios; about twenty-seven fascicles, the first eighteen being quinions, numbered with Syriac letters – estrangelo, with decorations on both sides of the letter/number until the sixth fascicle (black rosettes); they contain the first work, fols. 1r-174v; the fascicles of the second,...