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

该项目的目的是汇集与圣书传播的各个方面有关的研究成果。这是为了加深对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的了解。伊斯兰教、东方基督教和犹太教的神圣文本阿拉伯古兰经、叙利亚圣经和希伯来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)记数法的发展，主要是在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圆点；(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。早期古兰经手稿(8世纪)和当代叙利亚文圣经手稿同时证明了这种记数法系统的萌芽发展。希伯来语《圣经》和《古兰经》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来识别这些传统的相似之处。在阿拉伯和叙利亚语记法系统的发展中发现的相似之处很可能反映出当代的直接接触。(Ii)和(I)之间的相似之处将在很大程度上是非地理学性质的，并将作为(I)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 ofthe transmission of sacred texts. This aims at reaching a deeper understanding of the intertwinedworld of the three major religions of the Middle East at their formative periods of developmentduring the early Islamic centuries.The Arabic Qur'an, the Syriac Bible and the Hebrew Bible, the sacred texts of Islam, EasternChristianity and Judaism respectively, were all transmitted in oral and written form. The modes oftransmission of these traditions converged to a remarkable degree in the medieval Middle East,reflecting close contact between the various religious communities. Two particularly strikingphenomena of convergence include (i) the development of notation systems consisting mainly ofdots added to the consonantal skeleton of the script representing the oral reading traditions in theearly Islamic period and (ii) the assimilation of the mode of transmission of the Hebrew Bible inthe 10th and 11th centuries to that of the Arabic Qur'an. The embryonic development of suchnotation systems is attested simultaneously in the early Qur'an manuscripts (8th century) andcontemporary Syriac Bible manuscripts. The convergence of the transmission modes of theHebrew Bible with the Qur'an reached its extreme point in a corpus of Hebrew Bible manuscriptswritten 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 sacredtraditions, 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 wouldbe likely to reflect direct contemporary contact. Parallels across (ii) and (i) would be largely of atypological nature and would serve as an important heuristic and strengthening of hypotheses ofcontact within (i).