TeTra | Benjamin Sharkey "Epigraphic evidence of an East Syriac community in Mongol-era Kyrgyzstan"

TeTra Research Seminar | May 23rd, 2024
Benjamin Sharkey (University of Oxford)
Literacy, transmission and translation: the epigraphic evidence of an East Syriac community in Mongol-era Kyrgyzstan
Between 1885 and 1892 Russian imperial authorities recovered some 600 gravestones from two sites in the Chuy River valley in what is today Kyrgyzstan. Carved crosses and Syriac inscriptions identified these as the remnants of a community of the Church of the East that had been present in the region between at least 1201 and 1345 during the period of Mongol-Chaghatai rule. This epigraphic corpus serves as one of the best glimpses available into the life and society of a Central Asian Christian community in the medieval period. In it we see individuals with high degrees of literacy, in both Syriac and vernacular Turkic, engaged in education and study. Other individuals evidence the community’s engagement with a wide network of connections and allow us to retrace paths of transmission across Central Asia. There are also those engaged in translation and adaptation between Syriac and Turkic, some of whose efforts are visible in the corpus. These all offer us a unique view on the nature of textual culture in Central Asian Christian society.
oxford.academia.edu/BSharkey