Mingana Collection

Last updated

Mingana Collection
Established1924 (1924)
CollectionsSyriac and Arabic manuscripts
Collection size> 3,000 documents
Founder Alphonse Mingana
DirectorSusan Worrall
Owner University of Birmingham
Website www.birmingham.ac.uk/facilities/cadbury/archives/mingana

The Mingana Collection of Middle Eastern manuscripts, comprising over 3,000 documents, is held by the University of Birmingham's Cadbury Research Library. [1]

Contents

History

In 1924 Alphonse Mingana, an ethnic Assyrian, made the first of three trips to the Middle East to collect ancient Syriac and Arabic manuscripts. The expedition was sponsored by John Rylands Library and Dr Edward Cadbury, the Quaker owner of the famous chocolate factory at Bournville, Birmingham, who Mingana had met through Rendel Harris. A number of the manuscripts he returned with formed the basis of the Mingana Collection at Woodbrooke College. Mingana added to the collection with manuscripts acquired on two further trips to the Middle East in 1925 and 1929, both financed solely by Edward Cadbury. In 1932 Mingana moved back to Birmingham to focus on cataloguing the collection. The first catalogue describing 606 Syriac manuscripts was published in 1933. A further volume published in 1936 describes 120 Christian Arabic manuscripts and 16 Syriac manuscripts. The third volume, cataloging 152 Christian Arabic manuscripts and 40 Syriac manuscripts was published in 1939, two years after Mingana's death.

The Mingana Collection is housed at the Special Collections at the University of Birmingham where it is available for study. [2] The collection is designated by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council as being of "international importance". A major exhibition of manuscripts from the collection entitled Illuminating Faith was held at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery in 2005.

Collections

The Mingana Collection is made up of:

The manuscripts in the collection have proven to be a significant resource for Western scholarship in regards to the Qu'ran and other religious scriptures. In 2015, a Quranic manuscript in the collection was identified as one of the oldest to have survived, having been written between 568 and 645. [4] [1]

The Virtual Manuscript Room (VMR) project presents full digitized manuscripts from collection. As well as high-resolution images of each page, the VMR provides descriptions from the printed catalogue and from Special Collections' own records.

Related Research Articles

Philoxenus of Mabbug, also known as Xenaias and Philoxenus of Hierapolis, was one of the most notable Syriac prose writers during the Byzantine period and a vehement champion of Miaphysitism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Saint Catherine's Monastery</span> Greek Orthodox monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai, Egypt

Saint Catherine's Monastery, officially the Sacred Autonomous Royal Monastery of Saint Katherine of the Holy and God-Trodden Mount Sinai, is a Christian monastery located in the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt. Located at the foot of Mount Sinai, it was built between 548 and 565, and is the world's oldest continuously inhabited Christian monastery.

James Rendel Harris was an English biblical scholar and curator of manuscripts, who was instrumental in bringing back to light many Syriac Scriptures and other early documents. His contacts at the Saint Catherine's Monastery on Mount Sinai in Egypt enabled twin sisters Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson to discover there the Sinaitic Palimpsest, the oldest Syriac New Testament document in existence. He subsequently accompanied them on a second trip, with Robert Bensly and Francis Crawford Burkitt, to decipher the palimpsest. He himself discovered there other manuscripts. Harris's Biblical Fragments from Mount Sinai appeared in 1890. He was a Quaker.

Dionysius bar Salibi was Syriac Orthodox writer and bishop, who served as metropolitan of Amid, in Upper Mesopotamia, from 1166 to 1171. He was one of the most prominent and prolific writers within the Syriac Orthodox Church during the twelfth century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alphonse Mingana</span> Prominent 20th century Syriacst and scholar

Alphonse Mingana was an Assyrian theologian, historian, Syriacist, orientalist and a former priest who is best known for collecting and preserving the Mingana Collection of ancient Middle Eastern manuscripts at Birmingham. Like the majority of Assyrians in the Zakho region, his family belonged to the Chaldean Catholic Church. Alphonse was born to Paolus and Maryam Nano, and had seven siblings.

John bar Penkaye was a writer of the late seventh century who was a member of the Church of the East. He lived at the time of the fifth Umayyad caliph, Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Christian Palestinian Aramaic</span> Western Aramaic dialect

Christian Palestinian Aramaic (CPA) was a Western Aramaic dialect used by the Melkite Christian community in Palestine and Transjordan between the fifth and thirteenth centuries. It is preserved in inscriptions, manuscripts and amulets. All the medieval Western Aramaic dialects are defined by religious community. CPA is closely related to its counterparts, Jewish Palestinian Aramaic (JPA) and Samaritan Aramaic (SA). CPA shows a specific vocabulary that is often not paralleled in the adjacent Western Aramaic dialects.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Agnes and Margaret Smith</span> Twin scholars and travellers

Agnes Smith Lewis (1843–1926) and Margaret Dunlop Gibson (1843–1920), nées Smith, were English Semitic scholars and travellers. As the twin daughters of John Smith of Irvine, Ayrshire, Scotland, they learned more than 12 languages between them, specialising in Arabic, Christian Palestinian Aramaic, and Syriac, and became acclaimed scholars in their academic fields, and benefactors to the Presbyterian Church of England, especially to Westminster College, Cambridge.

Timothy I was the Patriarch of the Church of the East from 780 to 823 and one of the most influential patriarchs in its history. Respected both as an author, a church leader and a diplomat, Timothy was also an excellent administrator. During his reign he reformed the metropolitan administration of the Church of the East, granting greater independence to the metropolitan bishops of the mission field but excluding them from participation in patriarchal elections. These reforms laid the foundations for the later success of Church of the East missions in Central Asia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Codex Climaci Rescriptus</span> New Testament manuscript

Codex Climaci rescriptus is a collective palimpsest manuscript consisting of several individual manuscripts (eleven) underneath with Christian Palestinian Aramaic texts of the Old and New Testament as well as two apocryphal texts, including the Dormition of the Mother of God, and is known as Uncial 0250 with a Greek uncial text of the New Testament and overwritten by Syriac treatises of Johannes Climacus : the scala paradisi and the liber ad pastorem. Paleographically the Greek text has been assigned to the 7th or 8th century, and the Aramaic text to the 6th century. It originates from Saint Catherine's Monastery going by the News Finds of 1975. Formerly it was classified for CCR 5 and CCR 6 as lectionary manuscript, with Gregory giving the number 1561 to it.

<i>What the Koran Really Says</i> Book by Ibn Warraq

What the Koran Really Says: Language, Text and Commentary (2002) is a book edited by Ibn Warraq and published by Prometheus Books. The book is a collection of classical essays, some translated for the first time, that provide commentary on the traditions and language of the Koran, discussing its grammatical and logical discontinuities, its Syriac and Hebrew foreign vocabulary, and its possible Christian, Coptic and Qumranic sources. The title is taken from German author Manfred Barthel's 1980 book Was wirklich in der Bibel steht.

The History of the Captivity in Babylon is a pseudepigraphical text of the Old Testament that supposedly provides omitted details concerning the prophet Jeremiah. It is preserved in Coptic, Arabic, and Garshuni manuscripts. It was most likely originally written in Greek sometime between 70 and 132 CE by a Jewish author and then subsequently reworked into a second, Christian edition in the form of 4 Baruch. It is no. 227 in the Clavis apocryphorum Veteris Testamenti, where it is referred to as Apocryphon Jeremiae de captivitate Babylonis. However, the simple form Apocryphon of Jeremiah, which is sometimes employed, should be avoided as the latter is used to describe fragments among the Dead Sea Scrolls.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Birmingham Quran manuscript</span> Hijazi-script Quranic manuscript

The Birmingham Quran manuscript is a single sheet of parchment on which two leaves of an early Quranic manuscript or muṣḥaf have been written. In 2015 the manuscript, which is held by the University of Birmingham, was radiocarbon dated to between 568 and 645 CE. It is part of the Mingana Collection of Middle Eastern manuscripts, held by the university's Cadbury Research Library.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Early Quranic manuscripts</span> Documentary texts in Islamic studies

In Muslim tradition the Quran is the final revelation from God, Islam's divine text, delivered to the Islamic prophet Muhammad through the angel Jibril (Gabriel). Muhammad's revelations were said to have been recorded orally and in writing, through Muhammad and his followers up until his death in 632 CE. These revelations were then compiled by first caliph Abu Bakr and codified during the reign of the third caliph Uthman so that the standard codex edition of the Quran or Muṣḥaf was completed around 650 CE, according to Muslim scholars. This has been critiqued by some western scholarship, suggesting the Quran was canonized at a later date, based on the dating of classical Islamic narratives, i.e. hadiths, which were written 150–200 years after the death of Muhammad, and partly because of the textual variations present in the Sana'a manuscript. With the discovery of earlier manuscripts which conform to the Uthmanic standard however, the revisionist view has fallen out of favor and been described as "untenable", with western scholarship generally supporting the classical Muslim view.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arabic miniature</span> Small paintings on paper

Arabic miniatures are small paintings on paper, usually book or manuscript illustrations but also sometimes separate artworks that occupy entire pages. The earliest example dates from around 690 AD, with a flourishing of the art from between 1000 and 1200 AD in the Abbasid caliphate. The art form went through several stages of evolution while witnessing the fall and rise of several Islamic caliphates. Arab miniaturists absorbed Chinese and Persian influences brought by the Mongol destructions, and at last, got totally assimilated and subsequently disappeared due to the Ottoman occupation of the Arab world. Nearly all forms of Islamic miniatures owe their existences to Arabic miniatures, as Arab patrons were the first to demand the production of illuminated manuscripts in the Caliphate, it wasn't until the 14th century that the artistic skill reached the non-Arab regions of the Caliphate.

Shubhalishoʿ was an East Syriac monk, missionary and martyr of the late 8th century.

Dadisho Qatraya or Dadisho of Qatar was a Nestorian monk and author of ascetic literature in Syriac. His works were widely read, from Ethiopia to Central Asia.

Job of Edessa, called the Spotted, was a Christian natural philosopher and physician active in Baghdad and Khurāsān under the Abbasid Caliphate. He played an important role in transmitting Greek science to the Islamic world through his translations into Syriac.

<i>Julian Romance</i>

The Julian Romance is fictionalized prose account of the reign of the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate. It was written sometime between Julian's death in 363 and the copying of the oldest known manuscript in the sixth century. It does not survive complete—parts of the opening section are missing. It was probably written in Edessa in Syriac, the language of all surviving copies. An Arabic adaptation had been made by the tenth century.

Antone Behnam AbdulNour was a judge, a merchant, and a scholar in Mosul during the Ottoman Empire rule.

References

  1. 1 2 "'Oldest' Koran fragments found in Birmingham University". BBC Online . 22 July 2015. Retrieved 22 July 2015.
  2. Special Collections
  3. Samir, Samir Khalil. "ALPHONSE MINGANA 1878-1937" (PDF). Selly Oak Colleges. Retrieved 16 October 2022.
  4. "Birmingham Qur'an manuscript dated among the oldest in the world". University of Birmingham. 22 July 2015. Retrieved 22 July 2015.

Sources