A Hilkens Anonymous Syriac Chronicle of 1234 and its Sources

Annotation

In the late 1230s or in the 1240s, a Syriac Orthodox historian continued a Syriac Chronicle up to the Year 1204. The result, the Anonymous Syriac Chronicle up to the Year 1234, is the subject of this monograph. While accepting the chronicle's import for the history of the city of Edessa, the Syriac Orthodox Church and the Crusades, this study approaches the text from a literary historical standpoint, as a valuable source for historical, hagiographical, apocryphal, exegetical and epistolary traditions, taken from extant as well as now lost sources. Through the deconstruction of a process of intercultural transmission that began in the fourth or third century BC, it reveals the influence of a wide range of Jewish, Christian and Islamic sources, written in Syriac, Hebrew, Greek and Arabic, and reconstructs some of the chronicle's now lost sources such as the chronicle of Andronicus and a medieval Greek history along the way.