#6 Syriac 1

This item started a week of looking at the ‘most’ items in the collection - biggest, tallest, heaviest, everything at the extreme of what we have.

The first also happens to be one of the most unusual.

1. Syriac 1 is a Gezza of the church of the East, containing the services for all the festivals through the year

2. It was written in 1721

3. It measures 475 by 412 by 188mm and weighs 17.5kg (about the same as a small pit bull!)

4. It is a paper manuscript, bound in tanned ‘leather’. According to college tradition, this is actually elephant skin.

5. The text says it is ‘according to the user of the Monastery of Mar Goriel or Mar Oraham of Mosul’

6. This means it is according to the use of the Nestorian Church. This is a doctrine ascribed to Nestorius concerning the nature of Jesus Christ, and caused a split from the rest of the church in AD 431.

7. Contemporary followers of this doctrine are represented by the Church of the East or Persian church, usually referred to in the West as the Assyrian or Nestorian Church.

8. The Syriac manuscript collection at Pembroke was given to us by Athelstan Riley in 1946.

9. Riley had studied at Pembroke, and spent a lot of time visiting Eastern Orthodox churches in Syria and beyond, as well as a hymn writer and Seigneur of La Manoir de Trinite in Jersey.

10. According to the notes in the book, he bought Syriac 1 for £8 from the Revd. R Wahl when he was returning from Kurdistan in 1885.