Byzantine News

  The so-called 'Nestorian' Church (officially known as the Apostolic Assyrian Church of the East, with its See in Baghdad) was one of the most significant Christian communities to develop east of the Roman Empire. In its heyday the Church had 8 million adherents and stretched from the Mediterranean to China. Christoph Baumer is one of the very few Westerners to have visited many of the most important Assyrian sites and has written the only comprehensive history of the Church, which now fights for survival in its country of origin, Iraq, and is almost forgotten in the West. He narrates its rich and colorful trajectory, from its apostolic beginnings to the present day, and discusses the Church's theology, christology, and uniquely vigorous spirituality. He analyzes the Church's turbulent relationship with other Christian chuches and its dialogue with neighboring world religions such as Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Islam, Buddhism, and Taoism. Richly illustrated with...

An article from the Greek newspaper Kathimerini:  The Syrian Mosaic Pavement Documentation project, which was signed in 2005, foresaw the full documentation of the country’s floor mosaics and annual education programs for Syrian postgraduate students to help them keep abreast of technological developments. Click here to read more. And don't forget to sign up for our newsletter. 

KU Leuven announces a new conference on literary culture in early Chrisitanity: The intellectual landscape of the Classical world was radically altered by the rise and spread of Christianity, which brought about a transformation of moral and cultural values, beliefs and attitudes. Profound changes also occurred in the practical and theoretical approaches to languages as cognitive, ethnic and cultural phenomena. The linguistic horizon of Western scholars was considerably widened through direct acquaintance with the Old Testament languages (Hebrew and Aramaic); at the same time Early Christian authors became increasingly aware of the startling linguistic diversity within the Roman world and outside of it. Read more

A conference at the University of Cyprus, 16-18 October 2014. Tales of miracle and wonder decorate both ancient and Byzantine literature and seem to have had a great impact upon ancient and Byzantine thought. A strong interest in the wondrous is already apparent in the works of Homer and Hesiod. However, a more organized recording of marvels is detected much later, in Herodotus’s time, when marvelous stories and travel accounts of exotic places and peoples are increasingly produced. From the era of Alexander and onwards such stories are recruited by historians and rhetors in an attempt to apotheose the ideal ruler. Between the third century BC and the third century AD, the genre of paradoxography, collections of stories relating strange events and phenomena, achieves great popularity, and influences another new genre, the Hellenistic novel. At about the same time, a number of stories circulate that relate the miraculous healings of suffering people who practice incubation in Asclepi...