East Syriac Literary Life in the mid-16th Century: ʿAbdīšōʿ of Gāzartā and Older Contemporary Poets

Abstract

The article discusses the East Syriac literary circle of the of the early Ottoman Empire period. Its most important representative is ʿAbdīšōʿ of Gāzartā, the second patriarch of the new Church (1555-1570), and also an outstanding poet, whose legacy remains to a large extent unstudied, though. Even less is known about the works of his contemporaries, such as Darwīš of Gāzartā, Abrāhām of Bēt Slōk and ʿAṭāyā of Gāzartā. They communicated with him, and devoted his poems at least to the first two of them, despite their belonging to the traditionalist (“Nestorian”) patriarchate. Based on the texts and manuscripts unknown before, the paper shows in the article that the literary circle of that period was determined not by the Church affiliation, but rather geographically. ʿAbdīšōʿ as well as the poets he communicated with originated from the town of Gāzartā (North Mesopotamia, present Turkey) or from its neighbourhood, and some of them might have been his relatives. As a result of the long coexistence with Persian and Arabic Islamic culture, the sphere of use of poetry in the Syriac tradition was expanding in the next centuries. Its further development in the 16th century is one of numerous examples of wide use of the literary canons created in the period of so-called Syriac Renaissance (11th-14th centuries). In the Ottoman time, the extension of poetry use reached its apogee, taking into consideration also numerous short poems written by the scribes as verse additions to various manuscripts.