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New Texts Added in 2019

The Digital Syriac Corpus was launched in May of 2018 with several hundred texts already available. Since then, even more texts have been added, so I thought it would be useful to provide a list format of everything that was added in 2019.

These are arranged in the order in which they were added:

  • Nestorius, Book of Heraclides
  • Isaac of Nineveh, Ascetical Discourses (Part 1)
  • Moshe bar Kepha, On the Soul
  • The Doctrine of Addai
  • Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History
  • The Chronicle of Ps.-Joshua the Stylite
  • History of Karka d-beth Slok
  • Life of Jacob of Serugh
  • Letter of Mara bar Serapion
  • Martyrdom of Miles and his Companions
  • Joseph Hazzaya, On Prayer
  • Anton of Tagrit, On Divine Providence
  • Balai, On the Dedication of the Church at Qenneshrin; On Bishop Acacius
  • The Cause of All Causes
  • Simeon of Beth Arsham, Letter concerning Barsawma
  • Thomas of Edessa, On the Birth of the Lord Jesus Christ
  • Letter exchange between Barlaha and Simeon, abbot of Mart Maryam
  • Chronicle of Zuqnin
  • John Rufus, Life of Peter the Iberian; Plerophoriae
  • Testament of Adam
  • Disputation between the Apostle Peter and Nero
  • Ambrose (Ps.-Justin Martyr), Hypomnemata: Against the Greeks
  • Ephrem the Syrian, Madrashe on Nisibis
  • Julian Romance
  • Ephrem the Syrian, Prose Refutations of Mani, Bardaisan, and Marcion
  • Gregory bar Hebraeus, Metrical Grammar
  • Gregory bar Hebraeus, Treatise of Treatises
  • Patriarch Timothy II, On the Ecclesiastical Mysteries
  • Eusebius, Theophania
  • Ephrem the Syrian, Madrashe on the Nativity

Stay tuned for many more texts to come in 2020!

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How to Browse What Is Available in the Corpus

Are you curious about what texts are currently available in the Digital Syriac Corpus? This brief tutorial will walk you through the process of browsing the texts.

First, you can navigate to the home page of the Digital Syriac Corpus: syriaccorpus.org. Then, click the “Browse” button at the top of the page:

Home page for syriac corpus

On the Browse page, you will see the following display, which offers the possibility to toggle the browse results in three categories: Ancient Author, Title, and Syriac Title:

Corpus Browse page

In the default Author display, you will see a list of every single author who is represented in the corpus, including an “anonymous” category for texts that do not have attributed authors.

Next to the name of each author, there is a collapse button (+/-) which, when clicked, will expand to show the list of works associated with that author:

Expanded author list view

The Title view, seen below, allows federated search results so that the use can sort results by author and catalog (“catalog” here refers to the title of a work that contains smaller constitutive works):title browse display

Clicking on a single author or catalog will then limit the results displayed to the right:

federated title search view

And finally, the contents of the Corpus can also be sorted by Syriac titles, which also offers federated sorting options:

syriac title view

Hopefully this brief tutorial has helped orient you to how to search the contents of the Digital Syriac Corpus. Our catalog will expand quickly over the next several months, so this will be a helpful way to stay informed about our collection.

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Conference Presentations

It has been a very busy year for the Digital Syriac Corpus. We launched the project officially earlier this year in May (2018). In order to help publicize the launch, I (James E. Walters) have been working the circuit of conferences and workshops giving presentations on how the Corpus works. Here is the full list of conferences that included presentations on the Corpus:

  1. LinkSyr: Linked Syriac Data and Syriac Sources, Vrije Universität, Amsterdam (March 2018) – conference report available here
  2. Global Digital Humanities Symposium, Michigan State University (March 2018)
  3. International Congress of Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University (May 2018)
  4. North American Patristics Society (pre-conference digital humanities workshop), Chicago, IL (May 2018)
  5. Society of Biblical Literature/American Academy of Religion annual meeting, Denver, CO (November 2018)
  6. Material of Christian Apocrypha, University of Virginia (November/December 2018)

Hopefully with this schedule we have sufficiently publicized the project!

In addition to following along with this blog, please feel free to follow us on Twitter for more updates: @syriaccorpus

 

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Welcome!

The goal for this blog is to provide information about and resources pertaining to the Digital Syriac Corpus, a new digital resource for the preservation and study of Syriac texts.

Ultimately, this site will serve as a public blog to inform the public about the status of the project and point users to resources we are developing.

For anyone on Twitter, you can also find the Digital Syriac Corpus on Twitter: @syriaccorpus.