Literary exchanges between the Christian Middle East and the Caucasus in late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Example of reception of Isaac of Nineveh’s (7th cent.) work in Georgia

Type: 
Seminar
Audience: 
CEU Community + Invited Guests
Wednesday, March 27, 2013 - 11:00am
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Date: 
Wednesday, March 27, 2013 - 11:00am to 3:50pm

My talk will focus on the complex phenomenon of literary exchanges between the Semitic (Syriac and Christian Arabic) and Georgian literatures. In fact, the translations made from Semitic languages into Georgian are very rare but extremely important for the study of Syro-Palestinian Christianity. An important role in these literary relations was played by the significant Monastery of Mar Saba (near Bethlehem): thus, I will try to reconstruct the general image of a multilingual and multicultural context of Mar Saba’s communities, a condition which was very favorable for the emergence of such translations. More specifically, I will be focusing on the example of Isaac of Nineveh (7th century), the very influential East Syriac monastic author, whose work, largely spread at Mar Saba, was translated there into the Greek, Arabic and Georgian at least in a very short period of time.

Tamar Pataridze received her second PhD from the Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium) in oriental philology in 2012, thesis awarded by Alexander-Böhlig-Preis for “outstanding academic achievement in the field of Oriental Languages”. Her main research interests are literary exchanges between the Christian Middle East and the Caucasus in late Antiquity and the Middle Ages and the Syriac Christianity. She has written several contributions, published in the field of Byzantium, Karthvelologie and Semitic Studies. She is involved in a number of international projects, including Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies, 2010-2015 (European Science Foundation) and others.