Unpublished texts from the Arab Orthodox Tradition (1) : On the Origin Of the Term "Melkite" and on the Destruction of the Maryamiyya Cathedral in Damascus

Abstract

The purpose of the present article—the first installment in what I hope will become a series—is to make accessible two documents from the Orthodox Christian tradition in Arabic. The two texts share a number of features and therefore deserve to be studied together. They are both anonymous, written in a fairly colloquial style, and are extant in the same unicum seventeenth- century manuscript—Saint Petersburg, Institute of Oriental Manuscripts, B 1220—copied in 1642 by the famous Arab Orthodox writer Paul of Aleppo, the author of the celebrated account of the travels of his father, the Patriarch of Antioch Macarius III Ibn al-Za‘īm (r. 1647-1672), to the Romanian principalities, Ukraine, and Russia In what follows, I shall introduce the two texts in the order in which they appear in the manuscript and offer an edition and an annotated English translation of each.