Bibbia e storiografia nel Medioevo siriaco

In the last 25 years Western literary critics have investigated the influence of the Bible (Northrop Frye’s “Great Code”) on different genres, styles and expressive patterns of the major literatures since Late Antiquity. Following the inspiration of previous research on the Middle Latin and Byzantine literatures, I analize here the literary impact of the Old Testament on the development of historiography in Syriac literature, one of the major Eastern Christian traditions. A selection of passages from the Western Syriac late 8th cent. Chronicle of Zuqnin, which incorporates several previous chronographic works, has been translated and discussed, in order to highlight the varied typology of Biblical reminiscences, where at least 5 kinds of functional use can be discerned, as well as some differences with respect to the comparable Middle Latin and Byzantine instances, most particularly the lack in the Syriac tradition of an opposition between an ecclesiastical and a lay historiography, which entails the almost complete absence of a coherent imperial ideology.