International congress of byzantine studies belgrade, 22 27 august 2016

Maria Conterno
Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium; 
[e-mail]
Greek, Arabic, and Syriac in Reconquered Syria (10
th
-11
th
Cent.)
The second Byzantine domination in Syria has been, so far, the object of patchy attention. A 
number of aspects have been addressed, and the period has been taken into account from different 
perspectives in a few substantial publications (such as Honigmann’s volume on the Eastern frontier 
of the Empire, Vest’s three-volume work on the history of the region of Melitene, and number of 
articles by Dagron, Cheynet, and Todt focusing more specifically the 10
th
-11
th
centuries), but a 
comprehensive study of the last hundred years of Byzantine Syria is still missing. Largely overlooked 
by Byzantinists is especially the intellectual production in the reconquered territories. The reason is 
that, in spite of the effort made by Constantinople to ‘re-byzantinise’ the region, Arabic and Syriac 
remained the predominant languages in the cultural and religious life of the local population. As a 
consequence, the study of the intellectual activity and the literary production in Syria between the 
10
th
and the 11
th
centuries has been implicitly left in the hands of Orientalists, who are only recently 
taking an interest in the subject.
The aim of the proposed paper is to draw scholars’ attention to this chapter of Byzantine 
history, focusing notably on that aspect. After a brief presentation of the historical framework 
and an outline of the social, ethnic, and religious landscape under the renewed Byzantine rule, I 
will offer an overview of the cultural centres in the reconquered territories, of their activity, and 
of the literary production in Greek, Arabic, and Syriac. The most remarkable feature of this new 

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cultural efflorescence in Northern Syria is undoubtedly the movement of translation of Greek 
Patristic texts into Arabic, which has been compared – for the amount of texts translated, for the 
prominence of the translators, and for the stimulus it gave to the contemporary and subsequent 
cultural production – to the Baghdad Greco-Arabic translation movement of the 8
th
-10
th
centuries. 
But the production of original works – theological, historical, hagiographical… – in Arabic should 
not be overlooked either. The Syriac sources, on the other hand, attest to a fervent scribal activity in 
the new Miaphysite monasteries established in the region of Melitene, and to a written production 
related to the tensions with the Miaphysite communities living under Muslim rule, as well as to the 
frictions with the Greek Chalcedonian hierarchy. The way in which the three languages interacted, 
and the influence such interaction had on the intellectual life of the region, will be therefore the 
main focus of the presentation.