Yury Arzhanov

_English summary:_ In antiquity and the Middle Ages, collections of sayings were a popular form of everyday literature. As texts, they did not claim any high literary standard. That does not mean, however, that their content was always easy to understand. They often deal with densely written insights and admonitions which presuppose far more than they say. That opens up a wide field of interpretation and re-reading, which took place in the open form of the collection, above all through the proliferation, reduction or the regrouping of the material. The sayings attributed to the philosopher Sextus present a remarkable example of a revised Christian collection of Imperial Era sayings. They possess Pythagorean precursors and continued to have an effect in Christian monasticism via Evagrius of Pontus. This volume traces these lines of development._ German description:_ In Antike und Mittelalter waren Sammlungen von Spruchen (Gnomen/Sentenzen) eine beliebte Form der Gebrauchsliteratur. Als Texte erhoben sie keinen hohen literarischen Anspruch. Das heisst aber nicht, dass ihr Inhalt immer leicht zu verstehen ware. Oft handelt es sich um sprachlich verdichtete Einsichten und Ermahnungen, die weit mehr voraussetzen als sie sagen. Das offnet ein weites Feld der Interpretation und Relecture, die in der offenen Form der Sammlung vor allem durch Vermehrung, Verminderung oder Umgruppierung des Spruchmaterials stattfindet. Die dem Philosophen Sextus zugeschriebenen Spruche stellen ein bemerkenswertes Beispiel fur eine christlich uberarbeitete Spruchsammlung der Kaiserzeit dar. Sie haben pythagoreische Vorlaufer und wirken uber Evagrius Ponticus im christlichen Monchtum fort. Der Band zeichnet diese Entwicklungslinien nach.

Daniel King’s book The Earliest Syriac Translation of Aristotle’s Categories may be considered the first critical edition of a Syriac translation of Aristotle’s works. Thus, it raises a number of questions of textual criticism that may be discussed against the background of D. Gutas’ research in the field of Graeco-Arabic studies. This article provides a critical review of the book and a description of the new online publication of the anonymous Syriac translation of Aristotle’s Categories in the HUNAYNNET database.

This article surveys the tools available for those interested in the study of Greek-Syriac-Arabic translations of Greek scientific literature. Presenting both standard printed works and the available digital databases, it identifies the respective advantages and disadvantages of each. Thereafter, it sets out the work-in-progress of the ERC project Transmission of Classical Scientific and Philosophical Literature from Greek into Syriac and Arabic. The remit of this project is to offer a new approach for research into translation techniques and into the history of the transmission of classical Greek literature in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, building upon the methods of digital philology and computational linguistics.

Sergius of Reshaina (d. 536) is a major figure in the history of the Syriac reception of Aristotle's logic. He studied philosophy and medicine in the late 5th century in Alexandria with the famous Ammonius Hermeiou, whose lectures formed the basis for Sergius' main philosophical work, his extensive Commentary on the Categories. In this treatise, Sergius adapted for his Christian audience the Alexandrian educational model and exegesis of Aristotle logical writings and in this way influenced subsequent centuries of Aristotelian studies in Syriac. The commentary contains an extensive introductory part which deals with the traditional set of preliminaries (prolegomena), e.g., the general division of sciences, the scope of Aristotle's logic in general and of his treatise Categories in particular, etc. Moreover, it includes excurses in natural philosophy and contains extensive quotations from Aristotle's Physics. Thus, Sergius' treatise not only introduced the tradition of exegesis of Aristotle to the Syriac world, but provided Syriac readers with a general introduction to philosophy and logic and thus paved the way for the transmission of Greek sciences and philosophy from Alexandria to Baghdad.