8vo. Volume I: French text (translation), XLI, [1], 206 pp., index / Volume II: xx Preface by Chabot in French, + Syriac Text (numbered in Syriac), half-calf with marbled boards, slightly rubbed, title gilt on raised spine, biblio, title page browned, light spotting to first few leaves, otherwise copy in very good condition, published from the manuscript CLXII of La Bibliothèque Vaticane with French translation, introduction, and historical and philosophical notes by J. B. Chabot, Bibiothèque de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes 112 Fascicule, Emile Bouillon, Paris, first edition, 1895.

Synopsis

Dionysius I Telmaharoyo was the Patriarch of Antioch, and head of the Syriac Orthodox Church from 818 until his death in 845. He was also the author of the Annals, an important world history, now lost, which was used as a source by the twelfth-century Jacobite historian Michael the Syrian. Dionysius was credited by Joseph Simon Assemani with the authorship of the Zuqnin Chronicle, an anonymous eighth-century Syriac history, but this attribution is now known to have been mistaken.
Dionysius has been mistakenly credited with the authorship of the Zuqnin Chronicle, an eighth-century history in Syriac by an unknown author. In 1715 the Maronite scholar Joseph Simon Assemani discovered a manuscript (now MS Vatican Syriac 162) in the monastery of Saint Mary of the Syrians (Deir al-Suryani) in the Nitrian Desert in Egypt, containing what he thought was a partial text of the Annals of Dionysius. He published a number of extracts from this manuscript in his Bibliotheca Orientalis (ii. 72–7 and 98–116), attributing them to Dionysius of Tel Mahre. Two partial editions of the text of MS Vatican Syriac 162 published in the nineteenth century (by the Swedish scholar Otto Fredrik Tullberg in 1850 and by Jean-Baptiste Chabot in 1895) also credited Dionysius with its authorship. In 1896 the scholars François Nau and Theodor Nöldeke demonstrated independently that Assemani’s attribution of the text to Dionysius was mistaken. The Zuqnin Chronicle appears to have been written towards the end of the eighth century (several decades before Dionysius wrote the Annals) by a monk of the Jacobite monastery of Zuqnin near Amid (Diyarbakir). For much of the twentieth century it was formally known as the Chronicle of Pseudo-Dionysius of Tel Mahre, but is now usually referred to as the Chronicle of Zuqnin or the Zuqnin Chronicle. Its authorship has been attributed by some scholars to Joshua the Stylite, a monk of the monastery of Zuqnin who is known to have written a Syriac history; but this identification, while plausible, is not certain.