From Tigris to Jerusalem: East Syriac Poetic Notes from the Ottoman Time

Abstract

Abstract The poems published and studied here - most of them for the first time - represent literary tastes of East Syriac educated circles of the Ottoman period. These text collections appeared as later additions in the manuscripts written by ʿAbdīšōʿ of Gāzartā, the Uniate East Syriac Church poet and the second patriarch (1555-1570). These small texts, usually having very little or even nothing to do with the main manuscript text, represent a kind of verse notes made by different pilgrims, and reflect popular poetic tastes of the period. Short poems, especially quatrains, are an ideal form for such poetic activities. Judging from their great number, the spread of short poems was constantly increasing since the time the Syriac Renaissance, when they were first borrowed from Arabic and Persian poetry. Apparently, the multi-lingual poems of the Mongol period (second half of the 13th-early 14thcentury) - the heyday of the Syriac tradition in the Islamic period - were treated as appropriate models to portray contemporary cultural life of the multi-lingual Christian communities in the Ottoman Empire.