The intertwined world of the oral and written transmission of sacred traditions in the Middle East

这个项目的目的是汇集与神圣文本传播的各个方面有关的研究线索，以更深入地了解中东三大宗教在伊斯兰世纪早期形成发展时期相互交织的世界。伊斯兰教、东方基督教和犹太教的神圣文本阿拉伯古兰经、叙利亚语圣经和希伯来语圣经分别以口头和书面形式传播。在中世纪的中东，这些传统的传播方式在很大程度上汇聚在一起，反映了不同宗教团体之间的密切联系。两个特别引人注目的趋同现象包括(I)记法系统的发展，主要是由代表早期伊斯兰时期口头阅读传统的手稿的辅音骨架上添加的圆点组成，以及(Ii)10世纪和11世纪希伯来圣经的传播方式与阿拉伯古兰经的传播方式的同化。这种记数法系统的萌芽发展在早期古兰经手稿(8世纪)和当代叙利亚文圣经手稿中同时得到证明。希伯来语圣经和古兰经的传播方式的融合在10世纪和11世纪由犹太卡拉伊人社区用阿拉伯语抄写的希伯来语圣经手稿语料库中达到了极致。除了对理解个人神圣传统做出重要贡献外，该项目还将提供机会识别这些传统之间的相似之处。在阿拉伯语和叙利亚语中发现的符号系统发展的相似之处很可能反映出当代的直接接触。(二)和(一)之间的相似之处将在很大程度上是类型学性质的，并将作为(一)内联系假设的重要启发式和加强。

The purpose of this project is to bring together strands of research related to various aspects of the transmission of sacred texts in order reach a deeper understanding of the intertwined world of the three major religions of the Middle East at their formative periods of development during the early Islamic centuries.The Arabic Qur’an, the Syriac Bible and the Hebrew Bible, the sacred texts of Islam, Eastern Christianity and Judaism respectively, were all transmitted in oral and written form. The modes of transmission of these traditions converged to a remarkable degree in the medieval Middle East, reflecting close contact between the various religious communities. Two particularly striking phenomena of convergence include (i) the development of notation systems consisting mainly of dots added to the consonantal skeleton of the script representing the oral reading traditions in the early Islamic period and (ii) the assimilation of the mode of transmission of the Hebrew Bible in the 10th and 11th centuries to that of the Arabic Qur’an. The embryonic development of such notation systems is attested simultaneously in the early Qur’an manuscripts (8th century) and contemporary Syriac Bible manuscripts. The convergence of the transmission modes of the Hebrew Bible with the Qur’an reached its extreme point in a corpus of Hebrew Bible manuscripts written in Arabic transcription by the Jewish Karaite community in the 10th and 11th centuries.In addition to making important contributions to the comprehension of the individual sacred traditions, the project will provide the opportunity to identify parallels across these traditions. Parallels identified across Arabic and Syriac in the development of their notation system would be likely to reflect direct contemporary contact. Parallels across (ii) and (i) would be largely of a typological nature and would serve as an important heuristic and strengthening of hypotheses of contact within (i).