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Theophilus of Edessa's Chronicle and the Circulation of Historical Knowledge in Late Antiquity and Early Islam (Paperback)
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Theophilus of Edessa's Chronicle and the Circulation of Historical Knowledge in Late Antiquity and Early Islam (Paperback)
Series: Translated Texts for Historians, 57
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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Theophilus of Edessa was an astrologer in the court of the Muslim
caliphs from the 750s to the 780s, a time when their capital,
Baghdad, was a thriving cosmopolitan centre of culture and trade
and one of the most populous and prosperous cities of the world. He
was fluent in Greek, Syriac and Arabic, and he used this ability to
bring together a number of historical sources in each of these
languages and blend them into a single chronicle that charted
events in the Near East from 590 to the 750s. His work is no longer
extant, but it was cited extensively by a number of later
historians and Robert Hoyland has collected and translated all
these citations so as to give an impression of the scope and
content of the original text. This is important, because this
chronicle underlies much of our historical knowledge about the
seventh and eighth century Near East, which was a crucial period in
the region, witnessing as it did the devastating war between the
two superpowers of Byzantium and Iran, the Arab conquests and the
rise to power of the first Muslim Arab dynasty, the Umayyads
(660-750), and their subsequent overthrow by a new dynasty, the
Abbasids, who moved the capital of the Muslim Empire from Damascus
to Baghdad. Hoyland also indicates the links between Theophilus'
chronicle and other historical works, by Muslims as well as
Christians, in order to illustrate the considerable degree of
sharing of historical ideas and information that occurred among the
various communities of the Near East. The material translated
consists of the sections of four chroniclers that deal with the
period 590-750s: one in Greek (Theophanes the Confessor, d. 818),
one in Arabic (Agapius of Manbij, fl. 940s) and two in Syriac
(Michael the Syrian, d. 1199, and an anonymous author, fl. 1230s,
who were both relying on the chronicle of Dionysius of Telmahre, d.
845). The latter three either had not been translated into English
before (thus Agapius and Michael the Syrian) or had only partially
been translated (the anonymous chronicler of the 1230s).
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