The Encyclopedia of Ancient History, First Edition. Edited by Roger S. Bagnall, Kai Brodersen, Craige B. Champion, Andrew Erskine, and Sabine R. Huebner, Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., pages 6063–6065.
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The revolution of 1821 shares certain features with resistance movements in the Islamic eighth and ninth centuries. Examples include the successful Abbasid revolution (an intra-Muslim struggle) and the unsuccessful uprisings by Christians in Bashmur and African slaves (Zanj) in Iraq. The revolutionaries do not always share the same ethnicity or religious creed but are retrospectively viewed as ethnically and/or religiously homogeneous groups to serve the purposes of posterity. Taxation plays a decisive role in inciting resistance. Both the Ottoman and the Abbasid empire used religious creed to determine levels of taxation, which turns religious institutions into tax collecting organizations and inevitably implicates them in the suppression or encouragement of revolutionary movements. Revolutionary movements start at some distance from the imperial center. Successful revolutionary movements are prepared in secrecy and capitalize on broader instability that reigns before they break out.
These observations undermine the exceptionalism of any revolutionary phenomenon and preclude us from viewing the preparation and eventual outcome of1821 as determined by modernity. They also discourage us from labeling any revolutionary leader as either saintly or villainous. Both portrayals are oversimplifications that serve political populism rather than serious historical analysis.
SUMMARY: The article outlines how the study of Byzantium and the Arabs developed during the twentieth century. It emphasizes the importance of a deep commitment to language and philology in order for broader historical conclusions to emerge and how these conclusions are, for each generation of Graeco-Arabists since the nineteenth century, subject to the political realities of their time and place. It also explains why interest in the Byzantine-Arabic intellectual interaction emerged only in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Overall, modern scholars have perceived Byzantium as culturally introverted and unable to interact at the intellectual level with any of its neighbors. It was presumably consumed by its own ancient heritage, which it endlessly reproduced without creative elaboration. Most research on Byzantium’s relations with its neighbors focused on the Latin West (presented as a positive influence on Byzantium) and the Slavic world (conceived as retrograde under the negative influence of Byzantium). Byzantium’s interaction with the Arabs received considerably less attention. This contrasts sharply with the volume of modern studies on the reception of ancient Greek literature into Arabic. The reason for the disparity has to do with modern perceptions of different cultural spheres: Byzantino-Arabica is presumably an “oriental” phenomenon that did not contribute anything to the development of modern Western culture. In contrast, Graeco-Arabica supposedly investigates how ancient Greek philosophy and science (a cornerstone of Western modernity) passed from antiquity to the Middle Ages.
The first effort to charter the territory of Byzantino-Arabica was Alexander Vasiliev’s Byzantium and the Arabs, originally published in Russian in 1900–1902. It covers the 9th–11th centuries, a period marked by the greatest military antagonism between the two powers. It heavily concentrates on military and political history and translates extensive excerpts from Arabic narrative sources that can help chronicle the phases of this history. It is conceived as a “history of events.”
In the 1990s and early 2000s, the study of Byzantium and the Arabs adopted different methodologies: the emerging “history of alterity” or cultural history enabled by philological tools. Further nuance to the study of Byzantino-Arabica is possible with the help of other disciplines: Greek, Arabic and Coptic papyrology; Christian Arabic, Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, and Georgian literature; the study of Christian Nubia.
The final section of the paper asks whether, and under what conditions, highly specialized research tools dedicated to the retrieval of the past may lead to insight that modern societies can recognize as valuable.
By comparing the Oneirocriticon with the 2nd-century A.D. dreambook of Artemidoros (translated into Arabic in the 9th century) and five medieval Arabic dreambooks, this study demonstrates that the Oneirocriticon is a Christian Greek adaption of Islamic Arabic material and that the similarities between it and Artemidoros are due to the influence of Artemidoros on the Arabic sources of the Byzantine work.
The Oneirocriticon's textual tradition, its language, the identities of its author and patron, and its position among other Byzantine translations from Arabic into Greek are also investigated.
The final chapter of the book (uploaded here) offers the first list of the Byzantine translations from Arabic into Greek drawn in modern scholarship and discusses the position of these translations as a group within Byzantine literary culture.
The most important German intellectual influence on Homer’s reception in Greece and the Balkans during the nineteenth century had to do with the key position of epic poetry in the development of romantic nationalism. Around Western Europe, medieval epic poetry written in various vernaculars was interpreted as an early literary expression of modern national identities. Since the earliest epic poetry in the Greek language is Homer’s, it became possible to imagine modern “folk” poetry at large as a continuation of an ancient tradition of oral poetry. Particularly in the Greek case, it helped highlight the roots of the modern Greek nation in Greek antiquity. Accordingly, nineteenth-century Greek poets writing about the military struggle for independence from the Ottoman empire cast its figures as successors to the Homeric heroes.
This conceptualization of the past had broader consequences in the Balkans: throughout the nineteenth century, Orthodox Christians living in Ottoman lands irrespective of ethnicity would frequently receive a Greek education. This meant that they also became acquainted with key concepts of Greek nationalism (the oldest and most intellectually robust among Balkan nationalisms) including German-derived Greek concepts about Homeric and folk epic poetry. This generated a desire to translate Homer in Balkan languages. Translations of Homer’s epics into Ottoman Turkish, Albanian, Bulgarian, and Serbian were made in the closing decades of the nineteenth and the first decade of the twentieth century by non-Greek graduates of Greek schools. Although their authors had different motivations, collectively they indicate a Balkan desire to become directly acquainted with literary works considered foundational to Western European modernity. A similar desire for contact with Western European modernity and an effort to parse Arabic poetry through the lens applied by Western scholarship to Homer inspired the earliest Arabic translation of the Iliad by Sulaymān al-Busṭānī, a Maronite Christian intellectual. A largely unknown component of Busṭānī’s translation project is his collaboration with the Greek scholar Pavlos Karolidis.
Varying degrees of acquaintance with Homeric plots and heroes are evident in several medieval literatures (Latin and various Western European vernaculars, but also Syriac, Arabic, Armenian, Georgian, Slavic), where they entered through other venues. The most diffused are known translations of world chronicles, in which Homer’s royal figures regularly appear as part of a universal history of kingship. Chronicles and belletristic writing (e.g. romances of chivalry from the later Middle Ages) outlined genealogies of nations or aristocratic houses going back to Homeric figures (most famously, the Trojan Aeneas who fled the sack of Troy by the Greeks counts as the progenitor of the Romans and a number of medieval peoples and royal clans claiming the imperial heritage of ancient Rome). As is well known, genealogies going back to an ancient past serve as narratives of identity that articulate or help negotiate political and social realities in the present. Accordingly, it is possible to interpret the retelling of Homeric plots in Byzantine and other medieval literatures as part of an international dialogue through which Byzantium and its neighbors debated their individual political and cultural claims.
In addition, allegorical readings of Homeric plots (equating Homeric figures with cosmic elements or qualities of the human soul) were widely diffused in philosophy and the natural sciences. The naturalization of such texts in Arabic through Greek-to-Arabic translation in the ninth and tenth centuries clearly created a venue for the importation of Homeric elements in the literatures of the Islamic world. The significance of allegory within Byzantine literary culture (it was an omnipresent mode of interpreting Homeric literature throughout the Byzantine millenium) appears to have played a role in the development of allegory in the Islamic context. Allegory continued to be important in early modern European philosophy and the natural sciences until the seventeenth century because of the extent to which ancient Greek technical literature was embraced for these purposes. Early modern Europe read this literature not simply in Byzantine manuscripts, but with the help of Byzantine educational tools and therefore through the lens of a Byzantine interpretative framework.
The revolution of 1821 shares certain features with resistance movements in the Islamic eighth and ninth centuries. Examples include the successful Abbasid revolution (an intra-Muslim struggle) and the unsuccessful uprisings by Christians in Bashmur and African slaves (Zanj) in Iraq. The revolutionaries do not always share the same ethnicity or religious creed but are retrospectively viewed as ethnically and/or religiously homogeneous groups to serve the purposes of posterity. Taxation plays a decisive role in inciting resistance. Both the Ottoman and the Abbasid empire used religious creed to determine levels of taxation, which turns religious institutions into tax collecting organizations and inevitably implicates them in the suppression or encouragement of revolutionary movements. Revolutionary movements start at some distance from the imperial center. Successful revolutionary movements are prepared in secrecy and capitalize on broader instability that reigns before they break out.
These observations undermine the exceptionalism of any revolutionary phenomenon and preclude us from viewing the preparation and eventual outcome of1821 as determined by modernity. They also discourage us from labeling any revolutionary leader as either saintly or villainous. Both portrayals are oversimplifications that serve political populism rather than serious historical analysis.
SUMMARY: The article outlines how the study of Byzantium and the Arabs developed during the twentieth century. It emphasizes the importance of a deep commitment to language and philology in order for broader historical conclusions to emerge and how these conclusions are, for each generation of Graeco-Arabists since the nineteenth century, subject to the political realities of their time and place. It also explains why interest in the Byzantine-Arabic intellectual interaction emerged only in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Overall, modern scholars have perceived Byzantium as culturally introverted and unable to interact at the intellectual level with any of its neighbors. It was presumably consumed by its own ancient heritage, which it endlessly reproduced without creative elaboration. Most research on Byzantium’s relations with its neighbors focused on the Latin West (presented as a positive influence on Byzantium) and the Slavic world (conceived as retrograde under the negative influence of Byzantium). Byzantium’s interaction with the Arabs received considerably less attention. This contrasts sharply with the volume of modern studies on the reception of ancient Greek literature into Arabic. The reason for the disparity has to do with modern perceptions of different cultural spheres: Byzantino-Arabica is presumably an “oriental” phenomenon that did not contribute anything to the development of modern Western culture. In contrast, Graeco-Arabica supposedly investigates how ancient Greek philosophy and science (a cornerstone of Western modernity) passed from antiquity to the Middle Ages.
The first effort to charter the territory of Byzantino-Arabica was Alexander Vasiliev’s Byzantium and the Arabs, originally published in Russian in 1900–1902. It covers the 9th–11th centuries, a period marked by the greatest military antagonism between the two powers. It heavily concentrates on military and political history and translates extensive excerpts from Arabic narrative sources that can help chronicle the phases of this history. It is conceived as a “history of events.”
In the 1990s and early 2000s, the study of Byzantium and the Arabs adopted different methodologies: the emerging “history of alterity” or cultural history enabled by philological tools. Further nuance to the study of Byzantino-Arabica is possible with the help of other disciplines: Greek, Arabic and Coptic papyrology; Christian Arabic, Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, and Georgian literature; the study of Christian Nubia.
The final section of the paper asks whether, and under what conditions, highly specialized research tools dedicated to the retrieval of the past may lead to insight that modern societies can recognize as valuable.
By comparing the Oneirocriticon with the 2nd-century A.D. dreambook of Artemidoros (translated into Arabic in the 9th century) and five medieval Arabic dreambooks, this study demonstrates that the Oneirocriticon is a Christian Greek adaption of Islamic Arabic material and that the similarities between it and Artemidoros are due to the influence of Artemidoros on the Arabic sources of the Byzantine work.
The Oneirocriticon's textual tradition, its language, the identities of its author and patron, and its position among other Byzantine translations from Arabic into Greek are also investigated.
The final chapter of the book (uploaded here) offers the first list of the Byzantine translations from Arabic into Greek drawn in modern scholarship and discusses the position of these translations as a group within Byzantine literary culture.
The most important German intellectual influence on Homer’s reception in Greece and the Balkans during the nineteenth century had to do with the key position of epic poetry in the development of romantic nationalism. Around Western Europe, medieval epic poetry written in various vernaculars was interpreted as an early literary expression of modern national identities. Since the earliest epic poetry in the Greek language is Homer’s, it became possible to imagine modern “folk” poetry at large as a continuation of an ancient tradition of oral poetry. Particularly in the Greek case, it helped highlight the roots of the modern Greek nation in Greek antiquity. Accordingly, nineteenth-century Greek poets writing about the military struggle for independence from the Ottoman empire cast its figures as successors to the Homeric heroes.
This conceptualization of the past had broader consequences in the Balkans: throughout the nineteenth century, Orthodox Christians living in Ottoman lands irrespective of ethnicity would frequently receive a Greek education. This meant that they also became acquainted with key concepts of Greek nationalism (the oldest and most intellectually robust among Balkan nationalisms) including German-derived Greek concepts about Homeric and folk epic poetry. This generated a desire to translate Homer in Balkan languages. Translations of Homer’s epics into Ottoman Turkish, Albanian, Bulgarian, and Serbian were made in the closing decades of the nineteenth and the first decade of the twentieth century by non-Greek graduates of Greek schools. Although their authors had different motivations, collectively they indicate a Balkan desire to become directly acquainted with literary works considered foundational to Western European modernity. A similar desire for contact with Western European modernity and an effort to parse Arabic poetry through the lens applied by Western scholarship to Homer inspired the earliest Arabic translation of the Iliad by Sulaymān al-Busṭānī, a Maronite Christian intellectual. A largely unknown component of Busṭānī’s translation project is his collaboration with the Greek scholar Pavlos Karolidis.
Varying degrees of acquaintance with Homeric plots and heroes are evident in several medieval literatures (Latin and various Western European vernaculars, but also Syriac, Arabic, Armenian, Georgian, Slavic), where they entered through other venues. The most diffused are known translations of world chronicles, in which Homer’s royal figures regularly appear as part of a universal history of kingship. Chronicles and belletristic writing (e.g. romances of chivalry from the later Middle Ages) outlined genealogies of nations or aristocratic houses going back to Homeric figures (most famously, the Trojan Aeneas who fled the sack of Troy by the Greeks counts as the progenitor of the Romans and a number of medieval peoples and royal clans claiming the imperial heritage of ancient Rome). As is well known, genealogies going back to an ancient past serve as narratives of identity that articulate or help negotiate political and social realities in the present. Accordingly, it is possible to interpret the retelling of Homeric plots in Byzantine and other medieval literatures as part of an international dialogue through which Byzantium and its neighbors debated their individual political and cultural claims.
In addition, allegorical readings of Homeric plots (equating Homeric figures with cosmic elements or qualities of the human soul) were widely diffused in philosophy and the natural sciences. The naturalization of such texts in Arabic through Greek-to-Arabic translation in the ninth and tenth centuries clearly created a venue for the importation of Homeric elements in the literatures of the Islamic world. The significance of allegory within Byzantine literary culture (it was an omnipresent mode of interpreting Homeric literature throughout the Byzantine millenium) appears to have played a role in the development of allegory in the Islamic context. Allegory continued to be important in early modern European philosophy and the natural sciences until the seventeenth century because of the extent to which ancient Greek technical literature was embraced for these purposes. Early modern Europe read this literature not simply in Byzantine manuscripts, but with the help of Byzantine educational tools and therefore through the lens of a Byzantine interpretative framework.
This course will explore magic as an experimental science within the learned traditions of civilizations that we consider as fundamental for a modern Western identity: from ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome to the medieval and early modern Middle East, Byzantium, and Europe. The primary sources used for this exploration will be texts on demons, magic, divination, and the sophisticated philosophical background to such beliefs. In addition, archeological remains pertinent to these practices such as talismans, amulets, and other magical objects will be discussed.
Η εκδήλωση θα πραγματοποιηθεί μέσω zoom στα ελληνικά, με εικοσάλεπτη εισήγηση κάθε ομιλητή και θα ακολουθήσει συζήτηση.
https://www.ascsa.edu.gr/events/details/1821_from_the_East
The sessions will take place online. Register in advance:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMrcO6uqzIpHdcJJOA1FsDBx6VhXbgQjXqd