The Geography of Ananias of Sirak (ASXARHA COYC), The Long and the Short Recensions: Introduction, Translation and Commentary.

• Author: Cowe, S. Peter

This imposing volume makes available in English for the first time an important geographical source plausibly dated to the early seventh century C.E., which forms a link in the chain from Ptolemy and his Greek successors to later Arab cultivation of the genre. Apart from an independent, more succinct work attributed to Vardan Areweli in the thirteenth century, this text was the only one of its kind in Armenia until the introduction of modern cartography in the seventeenth century. Subsequently, it inspired generations of politicians and freedom fighters with a depiction of the Armenian homeland at its largest extent.

Following the classical model of describing the known world from Europe to China, the work seems to rely most heavily on the lost [Hebrew Text Omitted] of the fourth-century Pappus of Alexandria for its coverage of Europe and Africa, which is rather sketchy and uneven. Moreover, Hewsen reasonably argues that most of the references by the Armenian translator/redactor to other Greek authorities such as Ptolemy, Marinus of Tyre, and Hipparchus derive from Pappus' work. Surely more controversial is his suggestion, following Soukry, that under the designation Constantine of Antioch, the text may preserve the real identity of Ps. Cosmas Indicopleustes as author of much of the Christian topography the work evinces.

In contrast, the main contribution of the Armenian redaction is to supplement the brief classical section regarding the Sasanian Empire with an original survey of the region according to the same methodology and approach, beginning at Asiatic Sarmatia. This more detailed treatment is especially valuable for the Caucasian portion, providing the only comprehensive documentation of the area's subdivision into districts for the early period. It is not clear what sort of evidence this section is based on and the translator's postulation of the author's access to Persian archives is perhaps rather sanguine.

The Asxarhac oyc has undergone a rather complex transmission history. Like many a treatise, it seems it was subject to abridgment in order to satisfy the requirements of the school curriculum. Consequently, alongside the longer recension adduced by a single manuscript, which generally appears to afford the more original form of the work, we find a shorter edition witnessed by some fifty codices, the earliest of which was copied in 1178. However, affinities between the two textual forms in their present condition are both...