Medieval Armenian Culture by Thomas J. Samuelian; Michael E. Stone; The ArmenianInscriptions from the Sinai by Michael E. StoneReview by: John A. C. GreppinJournal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 105, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec., 1985), pp. 738-739Published by: American Oriental SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/602741 .

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738 Journal of the Anmerican Oriental Societi' 105.4 (1985)

Medieval Armenian Culture. Edited by THOMAS J. SAMUELIAN

and MICHAEL E. STONE. Pp. 468. [University of Pennsyl- vania Armenian Texts and Studies 6.] Chico, California: Scholars Press. 1984. $23.50, cloth; $15.75, paper.

The Armenian Inscriptions from the Sinai. Edited by MICHAEL E. STONE. Pp. 250. Numerous plates. [Harvard Armenian Texts and Studies 6.] Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civiliza- tions, Harvard University. Distributed by Harvard Univer- sity Press. 1982 (1983). $28.50.

Samuelian and Stone have published a volume of papers first read at the Third Dr. H. Markarian Conference on

Armenian Culture. This conference, which emphasized the

Medieval period of Armenian culture, follows by three years the preceding conference which dealt with the Classical period. And whereas the Classical period was covered by a slim publication of fourteen papers, this current publication is

satisfyingly plump, rendering to the reader a full thirty-one articles on Middle Armenian themes.

These conferences were the results of the golden age of Armenian studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Michael Stone, a philologist, was on the staff, later to be

joined by Tom Samuelian, a linguist, and Robert Hewsen from Glassboro, who taught Caucasian history. Over these three hovered the academic god-father of the program, Vartan Gregorian, the man whose administrative skills had brought together the faculty and who administered the monies from the generous Sarkes Tarzian Fund, which paid the salaries and overhead. These days are gone now, and it is the New York Public Library that is the beneficiary; Penn has been left somewhat stained, a school that did not respond to its better instincts.

The Middle Armenian period covers the time between the ninth or tenth century up to the beginning of the fifteenth. It was the time of the rising of the Cilician Kingdom; it saw the glory of Ani-the city of a thousand and one churches. It was also a time of increased scholarship: Armenian physicians began to develop independent theories; grammarians analyzed the Armenian language in new ways, and native historians investigated with fresh vision the earlier periods of Armenian culture. There were also significant changes in the literary language, a prosodic form that hitherto had clung to the patterns of the remarkable fifth century but now reformed itself and, with the adsorption of much new vocabulary from Persian and Arabic, became a new form independent of the past.

The remarkable part of this cultural rejuvenation was that it took place in such unsettled times, during the successive invasions of Arabs, Turks and Mongols; it was the time of the first dislocation of the Armenians, the beginning of the diaspora that was to culminate in the twentieth century at the

fall of the Ottoman Empire and bring the total destruction of Armenian culture in eastern Anatolia. The Middle Armenian period was clearly a period of vigor, imagination and intellectual intensity, and an era which affirms that culture can survive and grow during a blizzard of adversity.

This book's essays are by scholars who are predominantly European based and are overwhelmingly non-Armenian. The papers they have prepared are almost wholly micro- Armenistic, reflecting an interest in narrow topics which are treated with precision and depth. This is perhaps a failing of the book, for there is no introductory matter giving an overview of Middle Armenian life, attesting to the scholarship on this period in the broadest ways. And there are few chapters providing subsections on macro-Armenian topics that testify to the function of any large segment of Middle Armenian culture: to its history, to its art, to its medicine, to any topic that would give the reader a succinct view through a wider window into the world of the medieval Armenian. Instead we read papers on the Galenic influence on Armenian medicine, the literary motif of birds, a criticism of the historiography of Thomas Artsruni, and a very large number of lucubrations that are based on manuscript sources rather than textual editions. There is some significance to be found in these frequent references to manuscripts since, over- whelmingly, the literature of Middle Armenian has been little published and remains accessible yet only to those who can go to Venice or Vienna, Jerusalem or Yerevan to read the documents. This shows how undeveloped the study of this age is, and it is this depressing situation that discourages macro- Armenistic production. There is, relatively, now an awful lot that is known and easily available.

Some efforts were made to provide a wider vision. Lucy der Manuelian discusses Armenian sculpture from the seventh to the fourteenth century and in the process hooks Middle Armenian plastic arts to the Classical period which preceded; Michael van Esbroeck considers the Cult of St. Bartholomew for the whole of the Middle Armenian period, and Joseph Alexanian deals with Armenian Gospel texts from earliest times to the close of the Armenian middle ages. But these wider ranging papers are exceptions, and we are left with essentially a book of snapshots; static images of the Armenian middle ages. It was surely a pleasant conference to participate in; how useful its proceedings will be to the non-specialist remains to be seen.

The book by Michael Stone on the Armenian inscriptions from the Sinai is a quite similar matter. Here Stone has presented us with all known Sinaitic Armenian inscriptions, and includes two appendices which detail ten Georgian and two Latin inscriptions. Overwhelmingly these inscriptions are the graffiti of travelers, usually religious pilgrims on their way to holy sites; they are brief-frequently only a person's name, scratched on a rock.

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Reviews of Books 739

Stone is not the first to take an interest in these rock scratchings; that crown goes probably to Julius Euting who by chance included some Armenian graffiti in his Sinaitisehe Inschriften (1891), though he confessed he didn't have the vaguest idea what the language was. Later, a certain N. Bogharian published a single Armenian inscription from Mt. Sinai in the Armenian journal Sion (1966). But it is Stone who is the dauntless one, mounting expeditions with jeep and Arab driver to take him to the depths of Wadi Maghara, Wadi Mukatab, Wadi Leja, and the steps themselves which lead up Mount Sinai.

Stone, a specialist in, among other things, Armenian palaeography, is able to date a large number of the inscriptions quite precisely; overall the bulk of the scratchings seem to be just a simple name (T'oros, Petros, Step'anos) and sometimes a request, such as: "Lord God remember (me)," or "Lord have mercy on the camel and the guide." A longer and more elaborate inscription reads "Remember the sinful Yakov. 1, Pawios, wrote this inscription. He who reads it, let you remember me."

Some of Stone's reconstructions (numerous inscriptions are in a poor state of preservation) are remarkable and reveal a most clever mind. Abbreviations abound, some common but some not, and they are fleshed out in a competent manner, as are many lacuna. This can be seen in the following recon- struction:

wa]tch thi[s ]A-which here

the year of] the A(rmenians) 301 (= 852 C.E.)

This is interpreted with the assistance of 0. Yeganian, as "This period, when I was here, is the year 301 of the Armenians."

Other reconstructions are less successful. The inscription

Smawon Titos AM

is composed of two names, Simeon and Titus. Stone repeats a suggestion by Tom Samuelian that AM is a dialect form of em "I am." But it seems unlikely that an Armenian of the first millennium, lucky enough to be literate, would squander his knowledge writing an inscription in dialect while on a pilgrimage. It could be, instead, a third name, such as Amovs (Amos), started but not finished.

All in all this book, though meticulously and intelligently, even creatively, done, is of limited value. It tells us little about Armenian or Sinaitic history. And though it gives us abundant material on Armenian palaeography, little of it is unique, and it provides us with no information of philological value. The study of the Armenian inscriptions of the Sinai is largely an end in itself, entertaining for our brief glimpses into the minds

of Armenian pilgrims of a millennium ago, but with little value beyond to either Armenist or Sinaiologist.

JOHN A. C. GREPPIN

CLEVELAND STATE UNIVERSITY

A ristotelian Aporetic Ontology in Islamic and Christian Thinkers. By EDWARD BOOTH, O.P. Pp. xxvi + 314. (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, Third Series, Vol. 20.) Cambridge: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS.

1983. $69.50.

Booth breaks new ground in his analysis of a crucial problem in Aristotle's Metaphysics and its interpretation in medieval times. The problem is the Aristotelian "aporia" of the relationship between individuals as individuals and individuals as instances of a universal. In his analysis Booth follows the ontological interpretations of an impressive succession of Greek, Syrian, Islamic, Jewish and Christian thinkers. After critically examining the textual basis of the "aporia" in Aristotle's works, the author notes the systemati- zation of Aristotelian thought by Alexander of Aphrodisia and moves rapidly through the neoplatonist interpretations of Plotinus, Porphyry and Proclus. He examines the contri- bution of John Philoponos and the Syrian peripatetics (Sergius of RTsh'aina in particular), highlights the vacillations in Boethius's ontology, and stresses the contributions of Pseudo-Dionysius and his Latin translator John Scotus Eriugena towards a "cryptoproclean" ontology in the Christian tradition.

Booth's examination of the neoplatonic tradition in Islam (reflected in the "Theology of Aristotle" and the "Liber de causis") and the renewed appreciation of Aristotle in the Islamic environment (exemplified by al-KindT) set the stage for a core chapter of the book: the emergence of an authentic Aristotelian ontology with three rather "unaporetic" thinkers of Islam-al-FarabT, Ibn STna and Ibn Rushd-plus an appendix on Jewish peripatetics. (One may question the author's choice of words in labeling "Arab" peripatetics the Turk al-FarabT and the Iranian Ibn STna although they wrote in Arabic. As to substance, al-GhazzalT's place in Islamic religious philosophy appears to be underrated by Booth.) Epitomizing the well-documented Christian tradition since Augustine and summarizing the significance of the medieval translation movements, the author devotes the last third of the book to Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, both of whom endeavored to bring a newly discovered Aristotle into an ecclesiastically sanctioned tradition. The former is understood as having created the "logico-emana- tionist figure" of his light-metaphysics as a means of accepting

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