Wheeler McIntosh Thackston

Syriac is the Aramaic dialect of Edessa in Mesopotamia. Today it is the classical tongue of the Nestorians and Chaldeans of Iran and Iraq and the liturgical language of the Jacobites of Eastern Anatolia and the Maronites of Greater Syria. Syriac is also the language of the Church of St Thomas on the Malabar Coast of India. Syriac belongs to the Levantine group of the central branch of the West Semitic languages. Syriac played an important role as the intermediary through which Greek learning passed to the Islamic world. Syriac translations also preserve much Middle Iranian wisdom literature that has been lost in the original. Here, the language is presented both in the Syriac script and in transcription, which is given so that the pronunciation of individual words and the structure of the language may be represented as clearly as possible. The majority of the sentences in the exercises -- and all of the readings in later lessons -- are taken directly from the Pitta, the Syriac translation of the Bible. Most students learn Syriac as an adjunct to biblical or theological studies and will be interested primarily in this text. Biblical passages also have the advantage of being familiar, to some degree or other, to most English speaking students.

An Elementary Grammar with Readings from Syriac Literature

Introduction to Syriac

Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad Ibn ʻAṭāʼ Allāh

Victor Danner

Ahmad ibn Muhammad Ibn Ata' Allah

The Book of Wisdom

דר אמדי בר דסתור זבאן פארסי

Wheeler M. Thackston

"Three memoirs of the Mughal emperor Humayun form number eleven in the Intellectual Traditions Series, a series aimed at providing scholars and students of Iranian Islamic heritage with new source materials. With this publication we extend the geographical horizons of the series to include Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent, in both of which Persian has been or was the language of learning and culture for a millennium. In the sixteenth century ""Tajik"" Persian was the lingua franca of all Central Asia, as it is still the common language of Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and cities in Uzbekistan like Bukhara and Samarkand. In the northern subcontinent, from the time of the first lasting Muslim incursions in the tenth century until the mid-nineteen century, when the British replaced Persian with English, the common language was Persian. Introduced by the Ghaznavids and cultivated by all their successors, particularly the Mughals by virtue of their Timurid cultural heritage, Indo-Persian literature represents a large portion of the totality of the wealth of Persian literary output. Of the three texts included in this publication, Bayazid Bayat's account is of special value because it was dictated by an illiterate and must therefore be a fair representation of Persian as it was spoken in the sixteenth century. In this regard it may be unique among medieval texts. It will also be of interest to historians to contrast the three original memoirs by Princess Gulbadan, Jawhar Aftabachi, and Bayazid Bayat with the convoluted accounts of Abu'l-Fazl's Akbarnama, the ""official"" history of Humayun's and Akbar's reigns that was based largely upon such memoirs."

Three Memoirs of Humayun

"A Millennium Of Classical Persian Poetry" is a guide to the reading & understanding of Persian poetry from the tenth to the twentieth century.

A Guide to the Reading & Understanding of Persian Poetry from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century

A Millennium of Classical Persian Poetry

Wheeler McIntosh Thackston

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