Chronicle of Edessa

The Chronicle of Edessa (Latin: Chronicon Edessenum) is an anonymous history of the city of Edessa written in the mid-6th century in the Syriac language. "Chronicle of Edessa" is a conventional title; in the manuscript it is titled Histories of Events in Brief (Syriac: ܬܫ̈ܥܝܬܐ ܕܣܘܥܪ̈ܢܐ ܐܝܟ ܕܒܦܣܝ̈ܩܬܐ, Tašʿyātā d-suʿrāne a(y)k da-b-pāsiqātā).[lower-alpha 1]

The Chronicle of Edessa is generally agreed to have been written around 540–550 CE.[lower-alpha 2] The Chronicle primarily used old Edessan royal archives as its source, as well as some more recent church records,[1] and accordingly is thought to be historically reliable.[2][3][4] It may make use of a lost history of Persia.[5]

It is extant only in an abbreviated version in a single manuscript, Vatican Syriac 163 (Vat. Syr. 163).[6][7] This manuscript, from the Syrian Convent of Our Lady in the Wadi El Natrun,[5] was acquired by Giuseppe Simone Assemani during a trip to the Near East from 1715–1717 taken at the request of Pope Clement XI.[6] Some excerpts of the lost full version of the text—sometimes called the Original Chronicle of Edessa—are preserved in other Syriac chronicles.[7]

The Chronicle covers the period from the founding of the kingdom of Osrhoene in 133/132 BCE until 540,[7] but few events are recorded before the 3rd century.[5] The Chronicle picks up with a record of a flood of the river Daysan during the reign of Abgar VIII in November 201, which damaged a Christian church building in Edessa.[8][9] This is the earliest mention of a building dedicated exclusively to Christian worship,[10] as well as one of few records of Christianity in Edessa at this time.[11][9] Unlike other Syriac literature, the Chronicle does not contain any legends of the Apostle Thaddeus.[3][4]

Published editions

Syriac

  • "Vatican Syriac 163" (PDF). Brigham Young University. 2004. Retrieved 26 December 2017.
  • Guidi, Ignatius, ed. (1903). Chronica minora. Corpus scriptorum christianorum orientalium. Leipzig/Paris: Harrassowitz. pp. 1–13. Archived from the original on 6 November 2017. Retrieved 26 December 2017.

English

Notes

  1. Per Griffith 1991; Witakowski 2018, p. 336, translates it as Stories of Events in Brief.
  2. Dates given are: mid-6th century (Ferguson 1999, p. 267), 540 CE (Palmer 1999, p. 421), 550 CE (Schnabel 2004, p. 899; Yamauchi 1983, p. 85). Samuel, Santiago & Thiagarajan (2008) claim without explanation that it was written in 590 CE (p. 97).

Citations

References

Further reading

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