Ephraem's 'On Repentance' and the translation of the Greek text into other languages

Abstract

• EPHRAEM the Syrian, who died on 9 June 373 in Edessa, was a writer of prodigious output if it is true, as the church historian Sozomen tells us, that he wrote three million verses. Certainly, the Catalogues of Syriac Manuscripts in the British Library list ninety or so manuscripts which contain works by or attributed to Ephraem. These include twenty-five dated manuscripts, for Syriac scribes were in the habit of adding a colophon giving their name, the date and place of writing. They may have inherited this habit from cuneiform scribes, for similar dated colophons have been found on cuneiform tablets of two millennia earlier. The manuscripts are fairly evenly distributed by century (counting manuscripts dated in the Catalogues to the 'fifth/sixth century' as belonging to the earlier date) from the fifth to the thirteenth centuries: six in the fifth, fourteen in the sixth, four in the seventh, eleven in the eighth, nineteen in the ninth, seven in the tenth, twelve in the eleventh, eight in the twelfth, and eleven in the thirteenth century.