INVENTION AND HISTORY OF WRITING

The first writing

Writing has its origins in the strip of fertile land stretching from the Nile up into the area often referred
to as the Fertile Crescent. This name was given, in the early 20th century, to the inverted U-shape of
territory that stretches up the east Mediterranean coast and then curves east through northern Syria
and down the Euphrates and the Tigris to the Persian Gulf.

The first known writing derives from the lower reaches of the two greatest rivers in this extended
region, the Nile and the Tigris. So the two civilizations separately responsible for this totally
transforming human development are the Egyptian and the Sumerian (in what is now Iraq). It has been
conventional to give priority, by a short margin, to Sumer – dating the Sumerian script to about 3100 BC
and the Egyptian version a century or so later.

However, in 1988 a German archaeologist, Günter Dreyer, unearths at Abydos, on the Nile in central
Egypt, small bone and ivory tablets recording in early hieroglyphic form the items delivered to a temple
– mainly linen and oil.

These fragments have been carbon-dated to between 3300 and 3200 BC. Meanwhile the dating of the
earliest cuneiform tablets from Sumeria has been pushed further back, also to around 3200 BC. So any
claim to priority by either side is at present too speculative to carry conviction.

Evolution of a script

Most early writing systems begin with small images used as words, literally depicting the thing in
question. But pictograms of this kind are limited. Some physical objects are too difficult to depict. And
many words are concepts rather than objects.

There are several ways in which early writing evolves beyond the pictorial stage. One is by combining
pictures to suggest a concept. Another is by a form of pun, in which a pictorial version of one object is
modified to suggest another quite different object which sounds the same when spoken.

An example of both developments could begin with a simple symbol representing a roof - a shallow
inverted V. This would be a valid character to mean 'house'. If one places under this roof a similar
symbol for a woman, the resulting character could well stand for some such idea as 'home' or 'family'.
(In fact, in Chinese, a woman under a roof is one of the characters which can be used to mean 'peace').

This is a conceptual character. The punning kind might put under the same roof a sloping symbol
representing the bank of a river. The combined character, roof and bank, would then stand for a
financial institution - the type of 'house' which is a 'bank'.
Cuneiform in Mesopotamia: from 3100 BC

In about 3200 BC temple officials in Sumerdevelop a reliable and lasting method of keeping track of the
animals and other goods which are the temple's wealth. On lumps of wet clay the scribes draw a
simpified picture of the item in question. They then make a similar mark in the clay for the number
counted and recorded. When allowed to bake hard in the sun, the clay tablet becomes a permanent
document. .

Significantly the chief official of many Sumerian temples is known by a word, sangu, which seems to
mean 'accountant'. But however non-literary the purpose, these practical jottings in Sumer are the first
steps in writing.

As writing develops, a standardized method of doing it begins to emerge. This is essential to the very
purpose of writing, making it capable of carrying a message over unlimited distances of space or time.
Doing so depends on the second scribe, in a faraway place or the distant future, being able to read what
the first scribe has written

In Mesopotamia clay remains the most common writing surface, and the standard writing implement
becomes the end of a sharply cut reed. These two ingredients define this early human script. Characters
are formed from the wedge-shaped marks which the reed makes when pressed into the damp clay, so
the style of writing becomes known as cuneiform (from the Latin cuneus, meaning wedge).

Hieroglyphs and papyrus in Egypt: from 3000 BC

The second civilization to develop writing, shortly after the Sumerians, is Egypt. The Egyptian characters
are much more directly pictorial in kind than the Sumerian, but the system of suggesting objects and
concepts is similar. The Egyptian characters are called hieroglyphs by the Greeks in about 500 BC,
because by that time this form of writing is reserved for holy texts; hieros and glypho mean 'sacred' and
'engrave' in Greek.

Because of the importance of hieroglyphic inscriptions in temples and tombs, much of the creation of
these beautiful characters is by painters, sculptors in relief and craftsmen modelling in plaster. But with
the introduction of papyrus, the Egyptian script is also the business of scribes.

The Egyptian scribe uses a fine reed pen to write on the smooth surface of the papyrusscroll. Inevitably
the act of writing causes the hieroglyphs to become more fluid than the strictly formal versions carved
and painted in tombs.

Even so, the professional dignity of the scribes ensures that standards do not slip. There gradually
emerge three official versions of the script (known technically as hieratic) which is used by the scribes.
There is one, the most formal, for religious documents; one for literature and official documents; and
one for private letters.

In about 700 BC the pressure of business causes the Egyptian scribes to develop a more abbreviated
version of the hieratic script. Its constituent parts are still the same Egyptian hieroglyphs, established
more than 2000 years previously, but they are now so elided that the result looks like an entirely new
script. Known as demotic ('for the people'), it is harder to read than the earlier written versions of
Egyptian.

Both hieroglyphs and demotic continue to be used until about 400 AD. Thereafter their secret is
forgotten, until the chance discovery of the Rosetta stone makes it possible for the hieroglyphic code to
be cracked in the 19th century.

The seals of the Indus valley: from 2500 BC

As in the other great early civilizations, the bureaucrats of the Indus valley have the benefit of writing to
help them in their administration. The Indus script, which has not yet been deciphered, is known from
thousands of seals, carved in steatite or soapstone.

Usually the centre of each seal is occupied by a realistic depiction of an animal, with above it a short line
of formal symbols. The lack of longer inscriptions or texts suggests that this script is probably limited to
trading and accountancy purposes, with the signs establishing quantities and ownership of a
commodity.

Chinese characters: from 1600 BC

The last of the early civilizations to develop writing is China, in about 1600 BC. But China outdoes the
others in devising a system which has evolved, as a working script, from that day to this. Chinese
characters are profoundly ill-suited to such labour-saving innovations as printing, typewriting or word-
processing. Yet they have survived. They have even provided the script for an entirely different
language, Japanese.

The Non-phonetic Chinese script has been a crucial binding agent in China's vast empire. Officials from
far-flung places, often unable to speak each other's language, have been able to communicate fluently
in writing.

Phonetics and the alphabet: from the 15th century BC

The most significant development in the history of writing, since the first development of a script in
about 3200 BC, is the move from a pictographic or syllabic system (characteristic of Sumerian, ancient
Egyptian and Chinese) to a phonetic one, based on recording the spoken sound of a word. This change
has one enormous potential. It can liberate writing from the status of an arcane skill, requiring years of
study to learn large numbers of characters. It makes possible the ideal of a literate community.

The first tentative steps in this direction are taken in the second millennium BC in the trading
communities of Phoenicia.

Phoenician is a Semitic language and the new approach to writing is adopted by the
various Semitic groups in Phoenicia and Palestine. Versions of it are used, for example, for Aramaic and
Hebrew. Only the consonants are written, leaving the vowels to be understood by the reader (as is still
the case today with a widespread Semitic language, Arabic).

The contribution of the Greeks, adapting the Phoenician system of writing in the 8th century BC, is to
add vowels. For some they use the names of existing Phoenician letters (alpha for example). For others
entirely new signs are added. The result is a Greek alphabet of twenty-four letters.

The alphabet takes its name from the first two letters in the Phoenician system, alpha and beta,
borrowed and adapted by the Greeks.

The Romans in their turn deveolop the Greek alphabet to form letters suitable for the writing of Latin. It
is in the Roman form - and through the Roman empire - that the alphabet spreads through Europe, and
eventually through much of the world, as a standard system of writing. With a system as simple as this,
and with portable writing materials such as papyrus, wooden tabletsor leaves written correspondence
becomes a familiar part of everyday life.

The Arabic script: from the 5th century BC

A stele, or inscribed column, is set up at Tema in northwest Arabia. Dating from the 5th
century BC, its inscription is the earliest known example of the writing which evolves a millennium later
into the Arabic script.

The script is developed from the 1st century BC by the Nabataeans, a people speaking a Semitic
language whose stronghold at Petra, on a main caravan route, brings them prosperity and the need for
records. Writing is not much needed by the nomads of Arabia, but when it becomes urgently required
for the Qur'an (to record accurately the words of God in the 7th century AD), the Nabataean example is
to hand. Through Islam and the spread of Arabic, it becomes one of the world's standard scripts.

The first American script: 2nd c. BC - 3rd c. AD

Of the various early civilizations of central America, the Maya make the greatest use of writing. In their
ceremonial centres they set up numerous columns, or stelae, engraved with hieroglyphs. But they are
not the inventors of writing in America.

Credit for this should possibly go back as far as the Olmecs. Certainly there is some evidence that they
are the first in the region to devise a calendar, in which writing of some sort is almost essential.
The Zapotecs, preceding the Maya, have left the earliest surviving inscriptions, dating from about the
2nd century BC. The first Mayan stele to be securely dated is erected at Tikal in the equivalent of the
year AD 292.

The Mayan script is hieroglyphic with some phonetic elements. Its interpretation has been a long
struggle, going back to the 16th century, and even today only about 80% of the hieroglyphs are
understood. They reveal that the script is used almost exclusively for two purposes: the recording of
calculations connected with the calendar and astronomy; and the listing of rulers, their dynasties and
their conquests.

Thus the priests and the palace officials of early America succeed in preserving writing for their own
privileged purposes. In doing so they deny their societies the liberating magic of literacy.

Ulfilas and his alphabet: AD c.360

Ulfilas is the first man known to have undertaken an extraordinarily difficult intellectual task - writing
down, from scratch, a language which is as yet purely oral. He even devises a new alphabet to capture
accurately the sounds of spoken Gothic, using a total of twenty-seven letters adapted from examples in
the Greek and Roman alphabets.

God's work is Ulfilas' purpose. He needs the alphabet for his translation of the Bible from Greek into the
language of the Goths. It is not known how much he completes, but large sections of the Gospels and
the Epistles survive in his version - dating from several years before Jerome begins work on his Latin
text.

The achievement of Ulfilas is repeated in the 9th century by two missionaries, Cyril and Methodius, who
adapt their own Greek alphabet for the purposes of writing down a previously oral Slavonic language.

An even more extraordinary feat of the same kind is achieved by Cherokee Indians in the 19th century.
Their analysis of their own previously unwritten language leads them to the conclusion that it consists of
eighty-six different syllables. They turn it into a written languge by adopting a symbol for each syllable.
Cyril and Methodius: 9th century AD

Cyril and his elder brother Methodius already have a distinguished reputation as theologians and
linguists when the Byzantine emperor sends them as missionaries, in 863, to the Slavs of Moravia. The
brothers are Greek but they know the Slavonic language spoken in their native region of Salonika. In
Moravia they conduct church services in Slavonic. Naturally they wish to write down this liturgy,
together with their own Slavonic translation of parts of the Bible. But there is no Slavonic script.

Like Ulfilasbefore them with Gothic, the brothers need to devise a new alphabet for their purpose.

Cyril and Methodius base their new letters loosely on Greek examples. The Slavonic alphabet is known
today as cyrillic after the more forceful of the brothers - though in its surviving form it is probably
devised by Cyril's followers in Bulgaria rather than the saint himself (whose original invention is more
likely to be the now extinct glagolitic alphabet).

Nevertheless the remarkable fact is that cyrillic remains the script of all the Slav regions which adopt the
Greek Orthodox faith - including Serbia, Bulgaria and above all Russia.

From handwriting to print: 7th - 15th century

It is a striking fact that the letters which we take for granted today, in printed books, derive for the most
part from handwriting in the last centuries of the Roman empire. Indeed the script in fragments of Latin
messages, written by members of the Roman garrison at Hadrian's Wallin about100, is visibly related to
the letters taught in western European languages in the 20th century.

When Christian monks in western Europe write out their holy texts, they do so in Latin on parchment -
in the relatively new form of the codex. The script they use is that of the Roman empire, but there are
many regional variations.

Manuscripts written in Italy in the 7th to 8th centuryare entirely in capital letters, giving a neat and
intensely formal look. But Celtic monks in Ireland, who are among the most prolific of scribes at this
time, prefer a more workaday script (the everyday hand of the Roman legionaries at Hadrian's
Wall must have survived in many outlying regions as the normal style of handwriting).

A very early surviving example is the so-called Cathach of St Columba(cathach meaning 'battler',
because this book of psalms is believed to have been carried into battle as a sacred talisman).

The Cathach of St Columba, dating perhaps from the early 7th century and possibly written by the saint
himself, also exemplifies one profoundly influential innovation of the Irish monks. To emphasize the
beginning of an important passage, the scribes write its first letter much larger than the rest of the text
and in a grander style. Slightly embarrassed by the difference in scale, they tend to reduce each
succeeding letter by a little until reaching the small scale of the ordinary text.

Here, already, is the distinction between capitals and lower case (or in manuscript terms, majuscule and
minuscule) which is later a standard feature of the western European script.

The early Christian manuscripts influence the later standards of calligraphy and of print in two widely
separated stages.

At the court of Charlemagne, in the 8th century, the existing manuscript traditions are deliberately
tidied up into one official style of exquisite clarity. This becomes cluttered again during the later Middle
Ages, until calligraphers of the Renaissance, in the 15th century, rediscover the earlier style. From them,
still within the spirit of the Renaissance, it is adopted by the early printers - and thus enshrined for
succeeding centuries.

The Carolingian script: 8th century

In780 the emperor Charlemagnemeets Alcuin, a distinguished scholar from York, and invites him to
direct his palace school at Aachen. Twelve months or more later, in October 781, Charlemagne
commissions from a scribe, by the name of Godesalc, a manuscript of the gospels. Godesalc completes
his magnificent book for the emperor in April 783. The Godesalc Evangelistary, as it is now called, is the
first book in which the script known as Carolingian minuscule appears. The text uses conventional
capitals, but the dedication is in these lower-case letters.

It is probably not too fanciful to see the influence of Alcuin, recently arrived at court, in Godesalc's
experiment with this new script.

Over the next two decades Alcuin rigorously researches and refines a new calligraphy for Charlemagne's
new empire. Just as Charlemagne sees himself as a Roman emperor, so Alcuin goes back to Rome for his
inspiration. With a passion and a thoroughness which prefigures the scholars of the Renaissance, he
copies the letters carved on Roman monuments or written in surviving manuscripts and selects from
them to establish a pure classical style - with the addition of the minuscule letters of monastic
tradition.

The results are superb. Carolingian manuscripts (produced in large numbers in a monastery at Tours, of
which Alcuin becomes abbot in 796) are among the most clear and legible documents in the history of
writing.

Black-letter style: 11th - 15th century

In the later Middle Ages, the clarity of the Carolingianscript becomes lost. A much darker and denser
style evolves in northern Europe from the 11th century. It is known as 'black letter', because of the
almost oppressive weight of dark ink on each densely packed page.

This medieval style derives partly from an aesthetic impulse (there is drama in dark pen strokes and in
the angular ends left by a broad nib), but it is above all a matter of economy. Parchment is expensive.
Books are much in demand, particularly with the growth of universities. If the letters in a word and the
words in a sentence are squashed more closely together, less pages are used and the book is cheaper.

The black-letter style is the convention in German manuscripts when printing is developed there in the
1450s. It therefore becomes the type face used for the earliest European printed books, such
as Gutenberg's Bible. Angular letters of this kind remain the normal convention in German books until
the early 20th century.

But within the first century of printing there is a reaction in Italy against this heavy style.
Italian humanists of the Renaissance associate it with all that they consider dark and barbarous about
the Middle Ages. Like medieval architecture, it is given the dismissive name of Gothic.

Roman and italic: 15th century

Italian scholars of the 14th and 15th century, followers of Petrarch in their reverence for classical
culture, search through libraries for ancient texts. Copying out their discoveries, they aspire also to an
authentic script. They find their models in beautifully written manuscripts which they take to be Roman
but which are in fact Carolingian.

The error is a fortunate one. The script devised for Charlemagne's monastic workshops in the 8th
century is a model of clarity and elegance. It is adapted for practical use, in slightly different ways, by
two Florentine friends - Poggio Bracciolini and Niccolò Niccoli.

Bracciolini, employed as secretary at the papal court in Rome from 1403, uses the ancient script for
important documents. To the rounded lower-case letters of the the Carolingian script he adds straight-
edged capital letters which he copies from Roman monuments.

By contrast his friend Niccoli adapts the Carolingian script to the faster requirements of everyday
writing. To this end he finds it more convenient to slope the letters a little (the result of holding the pen
at a more comfortable angle), and to allow some of them to join up. Joining up is not in itself new. In
several forms of medieval hand-writing the letters flow together to become what is known as a 'cursive'
hand.

Printers in Venice later in the century, attempting to reflect the classical spirit of humanism, turn to the
scripts of Bracciolini and Niccoli. The rounded but upright style of Bracciolini is first used by the French
printer Nicolas Jenson shortly after his arrival in the city in 1470. This type face is given the name roman,
reflecting its ancient origins.
In 1501 another great Venetian printer, Aldus Manutius, needs a contrasting and smaller type for a
'pocket edition' of Virgil. He turns to the script of Niccoli, in everyday use by fashionable Italians, and
calls it accordingly italic. Roman and italic eventually become a standard part of every printer's
repertoire.

Copperplate: from the 16th century

For purposes of handwriting a version of the italic script eventually becomes the norm in most western
societies. The reason is partly accidental. Flowing letters are easily engraved, as can be seen in the
captions of any engraving. The natural movement of the burin through the metal is in elegant curves,
ending in elongated points. A nib, filled with ink, can easily make the same flowing marks on paper.

As writing becomes a necessary accomplishment for the middle classes, a new profession is created -
that of the writing master.

The writing master needs examples for his pupils to copy. The engraverprovides these, as separate
sheets or as plates bound into manuals, and the manuals soon have the effect of standardizing
handwriting. The conventional form becomes known as copper-plate - imitating the letters which the
engraver has cut in his copper plate.

Many such manuals are published, starting with the Essemplare('Examples') of Gianfrancesco Cresci, a
Vatican writer, in 1560. The most successful collection of copper-plate examples is the Universal
Penmanof George Bickham, first published in 1733 and still in use as a teaching aid in Britain in the early
part of the 20th century.

The talking leaves of the Cherokee: 1821 - 1828

The magic of writing is encapsulated in an achievement of the Cherokee Indians of north America. In the
early 19th century, recognizing the advantage that writing brings to the white Americans, they resolve
to acquire the same benefit for their own people.

They analyze the spoken sounds of the Cherokee language and decide that it consists of eighty-six
identifiable syllables. A symbol is selected for each syllable - by adapting letters in the English alphabet,
and perhaps also by borrowing from fragments of Greek and Hebrew in the books distributed by
missionaries.

Traditionally this exacting task has been said to be the work of Sequoyah (the illiterate son of a British
trader and a Cherokee woman), helped only by his daughter. More recently it has been suggested that
others invented the system and that Sequoyah's main contribution was in popularizing it. Whatever the
precise detail, the achievement is an even more striking example of what Ulfilasdid for the Goths in the
4th century.
Written Cherokee, described as 'talking leaves', becomes accepted with a rapidity which testifies both to
the magic of writing and to the persuasive powers of Sequoyah. The system is completed in 1821. The
first issue of the Cherokee Phoenix, written in the syllables, is dated 21 February 1828.

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Roman Tragedy and Later Roman Drama

I. Republican Roman Tragedy

Tragedy entered Rome soon after 240 BCE, at much the same moment as comedy. However, because
the only Roman tragedies to survive whole belong to Seneca, an author living in the days of the early
Empire (the first century CE), it seems today as if Latin tragedy appeared fairly late. The all-but-complete
devastation of tragedies written in Rome prior to Seneca underscores not only the decimations of later
antiquity and the Middle Ages but also the difficulties facing theatre historians in trying to assemble a
full picture of ancient drama in general.

Historical reality is very different. Some of the most famous and respected names in ancient drama have
nothing but shreds of text and anecdotal data to speak for them—Naevius, Ennius, Pacuvius, Accius—all
of them artistic pioneers whose work, we are told, grounded the later triumphs of Vergil, Horace and
Ovid. But without even one complete work by any of these men to go on, we have little choice but to
take that statement on credit. Comparable to the loss of Sappho, these are some of the most tragic
lapses in literary history.

Quintus Ennius, for instance, was a contemporary of Plautus and, like him, stood near the dawn of
Roman drama. His tragedies were still read and produced to some acclaim in the first century BCE, and
copies of his works were available in libraries until late antiquity. From the remnants of his work, we
gather that Ennius preferred Euripides as a model, at least to judge from the titles of his works and the
tone of the fragments preserved. And like Plautus, Ennius adapted his Greek models freely, inserting
many Romanisms. In particular, it appears he amplified the musical element in his drama, sensible
during those brief seconds when history allows direct comparison between his play and the Greek
original he was adapting. For instance, in his Medea Ennius converted into song what Euripides had cast
as a spoken passage.

Though Ennius also wrote comedies, none are preserved, nor do they seem to have been well
respected—comparison to his coeval Plautus cannot have helped his reputation—thus as a dramatist he
was best remembered for his tragedies, though his oeuvre was hardly restricted to stage works. Ennius
wrote all sorts of literature: satires, histories in prose and verse, and theological treatises. He is also
responsible for codifying the equations of Greek and Roman gods: Zeus/Jupiter, Hera/Juno,
Aphrodite/Venus, and so on. (click here for more about the Roman Pantheon) Thus, a formative figure in
not only Roman drama but literature too, Ennius' reduction to mere quotes and scraps opens up a
serious gap in our understanding of Western history and literature alike.
 Ennius' somewhat older peer, Gnaeus Naevius whom we noted
earlier as a comic playwright was another early Roman tragedian.
He, too, appears to have added Roman melodies when Latinizing
Greek speeches, though the evidence for his tragedy is much
scantier than that of Ennius. Nevertheless, he is associated with a
remarkable breakthrough, the invention of a new form of tragic
performance called fabulae praetextae, meaning "toga-wearing
plays," that is, tragedies in Roman dress. (note)

A few play titles recorded under Naevius' name belong to dramas of

this sort (Clastidium, Romulus/Lupus), but unfortunately not much else. The fabulae praetextae were,
evidently, not a resounding success and may even have played some role in landing Naevius in jail after
he incurred the wrath of powerful men in Rome (see Chapter 14). Propaganda and social commentary in
such a public arena as the theatre is dangerous turf to tread, nor one, it seems, Naevius trod carefully.

We hear of few fabulae praetextae after his day, a situation that echoes eerily both the disappearance
of historical tragedies from the Greek stage after Aeschylus' The Persians and the demise of Old Comedy
in the early fourth century BCE. Conversely, fabulae praetextae do, in fact, resurface in Latin literature
later during—of all periods in Roman history!—the days when Nero reigned (54-68 CE). To write
tragedies based on Roman life, not set in some remote locale like Greece or the mythological universe,
and to stage them in front of a despot like Nero seems positively suicidal, but then many
Romans were committing suicide in those days. From this brief revival of interest in the fabulae
praetextae comes the sole surviving example of this genre, Octavia, a play attributed to—but almost
certainly not written by—Seneca. (note) Thus, Naevius' heritage was felt in more ways than one across
Roman history.

The great names associated with Roman tragedy come, in fact, in the centuries-long intermission
between Naevius and Seneca, especially during the second century BCE (200-100 BCE), the same age
when Plautus and Terence were writing. A contemporary of both, Marcus Pacuvius (ca. 220-130 BCE)
was no less than the nephew of Ennius, but a far better and more widely acclaimed tragedian, at least
according to later Romans.

In harmony with his times, Pacuvius was said to have mixed material from different Greek originals, in
particular, spicing up Sophocles with Euripidean sentiment—thus, Terence was apparently not the only
playwright in his day dabbling in contaminatio—and also, unlike his tragic predecessors but in
accordance with his comic coevals, Pacuvius limited his work to one genre of
drama, in his case, tragedy. (note) We are told his use of Latin was grave and
serious, though the examples we have show much playfulness. For instance, the
infamous line Nerei repandirostrum incurvicervicum genus ("Nereus' bent-beaked
convex-necked brood," a reference to dolphins), is reminiscent of Plautus' delight
in wordplay. Pacuvius' plays were produced on the Roman stage well past his long
lifetime and, if not his ostensible delight in alliteration, his general impact on
subsequent Latin literature is patent.

Later in the same century, the Romans produced their last great tragedian of the
Republican period, Lucius Accius (ca. 170-86 BCE), a much younger contemporary
of Pacuvius. His reputation stood high throughout his life and remained that way
until the end of Roman history. Indeed, until very late in antiquity, Roman scholars
had access to and cited his works, a testament to both his endurance and popularity as a playwright.
Even the scant glimpse of his drama provided in the surviving fragments shows that Accius' tragedies
have a dignity reminiscent of Greek tragedy, in the words of one modern classicist, "vigorous, elevated,
solemn and sonorous." Like Pacuvius, Accius also engaged in tragic contaminatio and wrote fabulae
praetextae.

Most important of all, however, the fact that more that a century later Seneca is said to have read
Accius' works ties him to the only Roman tragedian whose work survives intact and makes his influence
all the greater in Latin—and thus Western—literature. From all this and the many extant fragments of
his work, we can see that much was lost when Accius' tragedies failed to survive to our day, though
arguably more lamentable is that fact that no later writer of Roman tragedy rose to match or surpass his
repute.

That last failure speaks volumes about both the skill of early Latin tragedians and also the changing
times in which they lived. But even when the Romans' tastes evolved away from Greek-style drama,
Accius' plays still tasted good enough that Romans long after his heyday eagerly consumed them on
stage and in libraries. If the last of a dying breed, he went out with as much style and dignity as any of
his predecessors and did not cater to the crowd and the more vulgar vogue returning into rule.

II. The Age of Popular Entertainment (100's BCE - 400's CE)

After the waning of literary theatre in Rome, nothing like it rose to meet the challenge—as noted
in Chapter 4, species can die out—and the reasons for the extinction of Roman drama are not hard to
reconstruct. Roman Comedy, for instance, no matter to what degree adapted or seemingly independent
of its Hellenistic models, was still inextricably tied to its forebears, those so-called "Greek originals."
When they began to run out, the Roman love for fabulae palliatae apparently started withering, too.

It is interesting to note, then, that the ancient "biography" of Terence claims he died on a trip back to
Greece to find more Menandrean originals. (note) Probably, a piece of invented history, this factoid
about Terence's death may, however, hint at a greater truth. No one wants a good show to end, but all
authors—even prolific masters like Menander and Shakespeare!—write only so much.

Inherent in this historical tidbit, be it fiction or not, is a wish that Menander, and thus Terence, too, had
never stopped writing, but the sad fact is they did. It must have seemed appropriate to some later
"biographer" for Terence's journey to end with him sailing off into the East in search of more Menander,
like Homer's Odysseus who, according to Greek legend, ends his days not at home but off on yet
another adventure in some distant land. Is one Odyssey ever enough?

But one is all we get here. Roman literary drama passed from the center of public attention, if it had
ever really been there, and replacing it was what theatre historians called "popular entertainment,"
that is, lavish and, to judge from the evidence, mostly vapid spectacles, the ancient counterpart of
television. For the most part, it served Roman society by indulging the indigent masses—the creation of
a super-rich aristocracy had simultaneously spawned an utterly impoverished mob—ambitious
politicians fed this unwashed but voting lower classes a daily dole of "bread and circuses," according to
the writer Pliny who laments the lack of cultural nutrition in their diet. Indeed, aRoman graffito from the
day reads, "Hunting, bathing, gaming: that's living!" So maybe they were washed at least.
But the changing times did not cultivate lengthy attention spans, nor elevated thinking. By the first
century BCE it became increasingly difficult to mount whole plays; the crowds were simply too restless.
At the same time, some drama seems to have done reasonably well. Revivals of Plautus, in particular,
found a sizeable fan base among audiences and performers. Accordingly, Atellan farces made a
comeback—or, to put it evolutionarily, a redient species briefly filled a niche left empty by the demise of
a dominant art form—and then in relatively quick succession, fell back again into oblivion just like its
previous incarnation.

Though literary drama did not die altogether, new works existed only as
antiquarian exercises, toy swords wielded by bored aristocrats brandishing
their schoolbook erudition for the enjoyment of their country clubs. For
example, the great Roman orator Cicero's brother is said to have written four
tragedies in sixteen days. History does not say whether Cicero ever read any
of them. He and the rest of the Roman world were simply too busy looking in
other directions to pay much attention to drama.

By Augustus' day, the dilettante had inherited Euripides' mantle. Though

great artists of the day tried their hands at play-making—the renowned poet
Ovid wrote a much heralded closet-drama, Medea, now lost unfortunately—
other forms of literature and entertainment held sway. Pantomime, in
particular, a form of narrative dance and the precursor of modern ballet, was
very popular (see Chapter 16). But still gladiatorial combat and animal shows
are what the Romans in that day speak most about. At this well-documented "high noon" in Roman
history—one of the greatest ages of literature ever, just not dramatic literature!—historical records
rarely even mention drama. That is, in the Augustan Age theatres went up all over the place, just not
plays.

A. Ars Poetica

The closest thing to drama that survives from this time is a treatise on playwriting composed by the
celebrated Roman poet of the Augustan Age Horace. Called Ars Poetica ("The Art of Playwriting"), a
metrical meditation on Aristotle's The Poetics, Horace's treatise is essentially a set of regulations for
writing drama. Merely because it survived the Middle Ages, it made a great impact on modern
dramatists, especially in and after the Renaissance, the French neo-classical playwrights Racine and
Corneille, in particular.

The nature of the Ars Poetica is largely prescriptive, citing "rules" for constructing sound plots and
characters, with much good advice, at least by ancient standards, like restricting oneself to only three
speaking characters and disposing the action into five acts. The influence of Greek drama is obvious,
putting it in line with the rest of Horace's work which draws heavily from Hellenic forebears. Thus Greek
in just about everything but language, Ars Poetica advertises a sad truth—whether the author meant to
say it or not—drama has become by this day a reflection of the past, a thing more at home in libraries
than theatres.

In form, the Ars Poetica is an epistle addressed to two young poets both named Piso, but it is like no
conventional letter. For one, its form and content are at odds. A curious combination of science and
poetry, it is a sort of academic monograph written in verse. Strange as that may sound to us, versified
scholarship was not uncommon in antiquity. In the 30's BCE, a decade or so earlier, Vergil had published
a very popular, four-book poem on agriculture, The Georgics, a sort of singing almanac with advice to
farmers about crops and herds. Next to that, a poetical epistle on playwriting seems almost sane.

In any case, the organization of the poem definitely defies reason. Instead of following in the footsteps
of its Aristotelian namesake, Horace's Ars Poetica leaps with seeming abandon from subject to subject. If
the poet were cross-examined about this, his excuse would be, no doubt, that he was writing in a
conversational genre—a "satire" (satura) as the Romans called it—a type of literature that avoided
formal clarity and the professional style at which scholars in general aim.

For instance, it seems not to have mattered to Horace at all that in one paragraph he discusses
characterization and how to depict different types naturalistically in drama—for example, how to
engineer old versus young characters on stage effectively—and in the next turns directly to a discussion
of which type of actions are appropriate to put on stage. If there is any reason guiding the sequence of
Horace's topics, no one as yet has demonstrated it convincingly. But then it's not that much easier to
follow the thread of logic weaving Aristotle's prototype together.

So, let us leap then, as Horace himself advises the beginning writer, in medias res ("into the middle of
things") and start at the beginning of Ars Poetica (excerpted):

It's well to bear in mind that for all his advice not one word from antiquity survives to suggest Horace
ever put the Ars Poetica into effect and actually wrote a play, or even produced one. Thus, the critic of
theatre comes of age in Horace, prescriptive and judgmental—and powerful in his regulation of the
medium—without ever having consigned a play of his own to the very scrutiny he details and demands.

It's also well to remember that there is not a single extant drama surviving from Horace's time, few at all
even known to have been written, much less one hint of even a monologue inked by the Piso boys. In
fact, the only thing relating to drama extant from this age is Horace's criticism. It seems clear: dramatic
art is all but dead and, even if they didn't do the murder, critics like Horace stand over the corpse
holding in their hands that razor-sharp instrument called a stylus ("writing instrument"), their ink
dripping like blood from its tip. Indeed, after Horace there will be no more Roman playwrights—except
one!—and so I would like to make an accusation: it was the professor in the library with the pen.

III. Later Roman Tragedy and Seneca

A succession of five members of the Julio-Claudian gens ("family, clan") make up the first dynasty of
emperors to rule Rome. During their reign Roman aristocrats including Seneca, though they felt very
much debased and often lamented the passing of their personal liberties, thrived along with their state
in a way the Romans before them never had. Wealth and luxuries spread across their world unbounded
and became a sort of honeyed muzzle at which many growled but few actually balked.

Among those humiliating splendors were grand-scale entertainments—mainly circuses, chariot races,
and gruesome "sporting events"—and also a little theatre but not of the sort their predecessors thought
of as "drama." The heart of dramatic theatre in that day was the "show-piece," a speech or aria which
gave a virtuoso performer the chance to display his talent—Nero, no less, was famous for performing
these!—such soliloquies, often removed entirely from their dramatic context, were performed
independently with other such bravuras.
A. Senecan Drama

It is remarkable, then, to find a dramatist bucking this trend, as Seneca did, who composed whole
dramas, not just isolated speeches, though his plays have been accused of being merely a string of set
pieces loosely held in place by a weak plot. But that's not the central issue here. The hub of modern
inquiry about Senecan drama centers around whether or not his plays were ever even intended for
performance.

Indeed, there is no record of their ever having been performed in ancient Rome, and the question of
their performability has dominated modern scholarship. Especially the academic community in the first
half of the twentieth century, nursed as it was on Shavian realism, thought these plays could not have
been intended for theatre production because they are simply unfit for the stage—and by Ibsen's
standards they certainly are—but whether that says anything about Seneca's Rome is another matter.
Not every age since Roman times has doubted the performability of these tragedies, for instance, the
Elizabethan public who clearly enjoyed long soliloquies and formal debates of the sort seen in Seneca.
To them these plays were eminently playable.

Both judgments, however, say more about their own era than the text in question. It is vital, then, to
note that, if Seneca's tragedies were composed for full theatrical performance in their day, they
constitute our only surviving instance of drama which was designed to be presented in any of the
theatres preserved from this period, the sole occasion upon which we can imagine in concrete form
Latin script meeting Roman stage. Sadly, of course, much the same can be said of Greek drama, so if for
no other reason than this unique possibility careful examination is warranted as to whether or not
Senecan tragedy was—or was meant to be—performed.

Such an exploration must begin with Seneca himself (4 BCE - 65 CE), the man under whose name the
nine surviving tragedies and one fabula praetexta have come down. With the failure of earlier Roman
tragedy to survive the Middle Ages, Seneca's drama constitutes the entire corpus of intact Roman tragic
drama. But because it seems highly unlikely that Seneca wrote Octavia even though it too is attributed
to him—this sole surviving praetexta alludes to historical events after his life and he himself appears as a
character in the play which raises the unlikely absurdity that he put words into his own mouth via
drama—our suspicions must be raised that these tragedies may have been mistakenly ascribed to him
as well.

Moreover, Seneca the man is well-documented in the Roman historical records. He was a commanding
literary figure in his day, the author of many letters and treatises meant for general consumption, and
he even helped to run Rome in the early years of Nero's reign (54-59 CE). For that reason we know a
great deal about him, yet not one word in all his personal and public records mentions his having
composed or produced tragedies. On top of that, it is hard to find much historical basis for supposing he
had any abiding interest in theatre of any sort.

Nor do these dramas accord well with the tenor of his attested lifestyle and other writings. Seneca
subscribed to Stoicism, a philosophical system embracing a non-violent, rationalistic approach to life.
The popular spectacles and games of the day interested him little, at least to judge from his public and
personal correspondence, and in fact their brutality revolted him as it did most Stoics. The tragedies,
however, which come down under his name entail some of the most violence-ridden and gruesome
drama ever created by any ancient playwright. To align these with stoic principles presents a formidable
challenge, though not insurmountable.
For one, the public façade an author projects in his literary works need not harmonize with the rest of
his life. Seneca's letters, even his "private" ones—indeed his whole life!—were open to general scrutiny,
inasmuch as he was one of the most famous and wealthiest men of his time. It is, of course, always
possible that this minister of moderation espoused and preached dispassionate rationalism by day but
then went home at night and in the solitude of his quiet den vented some very unstoic rage. Such
hypocrisy would hardly be unprecedented in literary history. (note)

If there is any real objection to his authorship of these tragedies, it stems not from his personal
convictions or philosophy, but the chronology of his life. Seneca was a very busy man. It's hard to
imagine he found the time, much less the inclination, to write drama.

So if the plays are highly derivative of Greek tragedy, that may go at least some distance toward
countering such objections, but there's enough that's original in them for it to be clear some artistic
effort was expended in their composition. All in all, they certainly don't look like they were dashed off in
the few spare moments a cabinet secretary can find in his daily agenda of appointments and meetings.
Thus, when—and, more important, why—Seneca found the inspiration for writing for plays is a more
daunting and ultimately unanswerable question, the real puzzle that lurks behind these sole-surviving
Roman tragedies.

Moreover, there are other important clues about the authorship of these plays. For example, they are
replete with sententiae ("opinions"), pithy sayings conveying wisdoms pertinent beyond the dramatic
action itself. Seneca's drama seems to float on a sea of such notable quotables—"No good deed goes
unpunished" is a modern example—leaving the impression that these, and not the characters or action,
are the author's real reason for writing the play.

In that regard, at least, the tragedies conform with the rest of the Senecan corpus which swims in such
aphorisms. But this stylistic device alone cannot stand as proof of his authorship since a plethora
of sententiae is hardly a defining characteristic of any author in this day. The entire age, in fact, reveled
in them—it is hard to find any early Imperial Roman author who does not render them in plenty—
therefore, to confirm that Seneca wrote these tragedies, one must produce better evidence.

It's notable also that the tone of these tragedies is generally consistent, which suggests at least that a
single author wrote them, but that person does not have to be Seneca. They're uniform also in having
been drawn from Greek myth and drama, all in direct imitation of classical tragedies, often particular
ones. Because of this, they can be seen as unoriginal, but clearly they are not. Resembling their Greek
models in plot alone, the style of these Senecan reproductions is Hellenistic, almost baroque, insofar as
they tend to focus on seemingly unnecessary detail, often at the expense of the general coherence and
force of the drama.

Moreover, their pacing is slow, even more so than that of Aeschylean tragedy, and thus they have—
intentionally it seems—neither the emotional drive nor the compassion for humanity that defines the
classical works of the Greek stage. This is not to say that Seneca's plays don't have intensity—they
have too much intensity, one might argue—but their obsession with extreme characters and perverse
motivations is so far beyond normal everyday experience that they come off as "hypertragic," that is to
say, exceeding the average person's ability to connect with and project into the drama.
For instance, Atreus, the protagonist of Seneca's Thyestes, is a character
who, according to classical myth, murdered and cooked his brother's sons
and then fed him their flesh. Granted, Greek tradition handed Seneca a
fairly perverted character—the story calls for a figure whose lust for power
leads him to extremes that make it all but impossible to sympathize with
him—the Atreus seen in the Roman play is so caught up with turning his
nephews into chowder he seems not to care in the slightest about winning
the audience's favor and doesn't even bother to rationalize most of his
actions. For all her explosive fury, Euripides' Medea at least tries not to
sound totally insane.

At one point, for instance, as he's watching his brother Thyestes unwittingly
consume the boys, he notes icily that his brother has belched, a sign to
Romans that the meal was over, but in this context a grizzly reminder of
what is it that's being regurgitated. The moment is so tragic, so horrific, so over-the-top it's hard not to
laugh. It's also not impossible Seneca designed this and many other such scenes to create exactly that
effect.

If so, his plays become strange theatrical experiments, "comitragedies" of a sort—the dark and twisted
counterparts of tragicomedies—and when presented that way, can make highly effective, though quite
unusual theatre fare. Perhaps, however, they only seem unusual to us because we expect tragedy not to
embrace this sort of viewpoint and we don't live in Seneca's time. It's important to remember that the
world surely looked very different from under the shadow of the Julio-Claudian emperors, especially
Nero.

The Pax Romana is, in fact, one of the most troubled periods of "peace and universal harmony" ever
known. As one critic notes:

The themes of Seneca's tragedies—vengeance, madness, power-lust, passion, irrational hatred, self-
contempt, murder, incest, hideous death, fortune's vicissitudes and savagery—were the stuff of his life.
Those who think them merely rhetorical commonplaces have never stared into the face of a Caligula.
(note)

With that, it seems fairer to say these plays might have looked quite reasonable in early imperial times,
perfectly apt extensions of their own reality. In the end, the theatre historian's role is not to judge but to
assess a dramatic corpus as a vehicle of artistic expression suitable to its day. Amidst sadistic "games"
and court intrigue which more than once ended in gruesome public executions, the cultural climate that
dominated Nero's Rome produced a form of tragedy commensurate and compatible with its moment in
the sun. If the product it created seems wasteful and extreme and far too tragic to bear, so was the age.

B. Senecan Theatre

Indeed, Senecan drama confronts the audience with terrifying scenes and characters who seem to fill
the air with outrage, a type of persona that also fits well inside the enormous arenas where Roman
drama played. A subtle piece of quiet character-driven comedy like Menander could all too easily drown
in the din and fray of a restless mob packed into a busy urban theatre.
Furthermore, the grandiose monstrosity of Seneca's creations behooves not only the times but the
majestic entrances such a showcase provides. The sprawling, flat stage also well befits the two-
dimensional presentation typical of Senecan characters—we'll see just that when we
read Phaedra (Reading 8)—which still leaves open the question if they actually were performed in this
context, but they certainly couldhave been, and to good purpose indeed. In the end, our objections are
just that, ours.

The ease with which other ages closer to our own, such as Shakespeare's, have adopted Senecan
tragedy as a model of performable drama should warn us not to slam closed the theatre doors too
quickly. If these plays don't conform easily to our standards of good or even stageable pieces, perhaps
they are not trying to. The writer may not even be aiming at producing tragedy, in our conventional
sense of "serious drama." To the contrary, it's entirely possible that Senecan drama reflects the less
limited meaning of tragoidia in its classical City-Dionysia sense, a genre which included plays written in
all sorts of modes, not just Aristotle's restrictive sense of what makes a drama tragic. A man as well-read
and insightful as Seneca—and many of his peers as well—could certainly have constructed tragedies of
this sort, in full awareness that he was playing on the breadth of what constituted tragic drama in the
ancient world, not some limited and limiting vision like ours of what suited the classical stage.

And this brings us back to the question of Seneca's authorship of these plays. All in all, it's impossible to
confirm or deny that Seneca wrote these plays—only Octavia can be absolutely ruled out—nor does the
question matter in the long run as much as what the survival of these dramas says about the
macroscopic picture of ancient Italian drama and theatre. A playground of extreme behaviors, as all
Rome was in Seneca's day, there can be no doubt such plays were written in and for the age of Caligula
and Nero.

But their impact was much greater. As the only Latin tragedies to survive antiquity, they assumed a
central position in the reformulation of tragic drama during the Renaissance. The extent to which they
influenced Shakespeare and his Jacobean successors is enormous, giving shape to their taste for gore
and the shock tactics they loved to witness on stage. To watch Titus Andronicus or 'Tis Pity She's a
Whoreis to see where Senecan theatre leads, or can lead.

In the end, however, what we are left with is the same set of questions we had at the start: did Seneca
write these plays? were they performed? do they constitute practicable theatre in their or any day?
Little is clear except this: Senecan drama stands, as it has often stood, at the heart of important debates
and discussions, and it's easy to see why. For all its antiquity, it's remarkably modern. Angry, absurdist,
counter-traditional, gender-bending, genre-breaking, it seems intentionally problematical in tone and
temper—and, of course, content. It clearly means to raise serious, troubling questions, issues that have
no clear or easy answers.

Roman And Byzantine Egypt (30 BCE– 642 CE)

Egypt as a province of Rome

“I added Egypt to the empire of the Roman people.” With these words the emperor Augustus (as
Octavian was known from 27 BCE) summarized the subjection of Cleopatra’s kingdom in the great
inscription that records his achievements. The province was to be governed by a viceroy, a prefect with
the status of a Roman knight (eques) who was directly responsible to the emperor. The first viceroy was
the Roman poet and soldier Gaius Cornelius Gallus, who boasted too vaingloriously of his military
achievements in the province and paid for it first with his position and then with his life. Roman senators
were not allowed to enter Egypt without the emperor’s permission, because this wealthiest of provinces
could be held militarily by a very small force, and the threat implicit in an embargo on the export of
grain supplies, vital to the provisioning of the city of Rome and its populace, was obvious. Internal
security was guaranteed by the presence of three Roman legions (later reduced to two), each about
6,000 strong, and several cohorts of auxiliaries.

In the first decade of Roman rule the spirit of Augustan imperialism looked farther afield, attempting
expansion to the east and to the south. An expedition to Arabia by the prefect Aelius Gallus about 26–
25 BCE was undermined by the treachery of the Nabataean Syllaeus, who led the Roman fleet astray in
uncharted waters. Arabia was to remain an independent though friendly client of Rome until 106 CE,
when the emperor Trajan (ruled 98–117 CE) annexed it, making it possible to reopen Ptolemy II’s canal
from the Nile to the head of the Gulf of Suez. To the south the Meroitic people beyond the First Cataract
had taken advantage of Gallus’s preoccupation with Arabia and mounted an attack on the Thebaid. The
next Roman prefect, Petronius, led two expeditions into the Meroitic kingdom (c. 24–22 BCE), captured
several towns, forced the submission of the formidable queen, who was characterized by Roman writers
as “the one-eyed Queen Candace,” and left a Roman garrison at Primis (Qaṣr Ibrīm). But thoughts of
maintaining a permanent presence in Lower Nubia were soon abandoned, and within a year or two the
limits of Roman occupation had been set at Hiera Sykaminos, some 50 miles (80 km) south of the First
Cataract. The mixed character of the region is indicated, however, by the continuing popularity of the
goddess Isis among the people of Meroe and by the Roman emperor Augustus’s foundation of a temple
at Kalabsha dedicated to the local god Mandulis.

Egypt achieved its greatest prosperity under the shadow of the Roman peace, which, in effect,
depoliticized it. Roman emperors or members of their families visited Egypt—Tiberius’s nephew and
adopted son, Germanicus; Vespasian and his elder son, Titus; Hadrian; Septimius Severus; Diocletian—to
see the famous sights, receive the acclamations of the Alexandrian populace, attempt to ensure the
loyalty of their volatile subjects, or initiate administrative reform. Occasionally its potential as a power
base was realized. Vespasian, the most successful of the imperial aspirants in the “Year of the Four
Emperors,” was first proclaimed emperor at Alexandria on July 1, 69 CE, in a maneuver contrived by the
prefect of Egypt, Tiberius Julius Alexander. Others were less successful. Gaius Avidius Cassius, the son of
a former prefect of Egypt, revolted against Marcus Aurelius in 175 CE, stimulated by false rumours of
Marcus’s death, but his attempted usurpation lasted only three months. For several months in
297/298 CE Egypt was under the dominion of a mysterious usurper named Lucius Domitius Domitianus.
The emperor Diocletian was present at the final capitulation of Alexandria after an eight-month siege
and swore to take revenge by slaughtering the populace until the river of blood reached his horse’s
knees; the threat was mitigated when his mount stumbled as he rode into the city. In gratitude, the
citizens of Alexandria erected a statue of the horse.
The only extended period during the turbulent 3rd century CE in which Egypt was lost to the central
imperial authority was 270–272, when it fell into the hands of the ruling dynasty of the Syrian city
of Palmyra. Fortunately for Rome, the military strength of Palmyra proved to be the major obstacle to
the overrunning of the Eastern Empire by the powerful Sāsānian monarchy of Persia.
Internal threats to security were not uncommon but normally were dissipated without major damage to
imperial control. These included rioting between Jews and Greeks in Alexandria in the reign
of Caligula (Gaius Caesar Germanicus; ruled 37–41 CE), a serious Jewish revolt under Trajan (ruled 98–
117 CE), a revolt in the Nile delta in 172 CE that was quelled by Avidius Cassius, and a revolt centred on
the town of Coptos (Qifṭ) in 293/294 CE that was put down by Galerius, Diocletian’s imperial colleague.

Administration and economy under Rome

The Romans introduced important changes in the administrative system, aimed at achieving a high level
of efficiency and maximizing revenue. The duties of the prefect of Egypt combined responsibility for
military security through command of the legions and cohorts, for the organization of finance and
taxation, and for the administration of justice. This involved a vast mass of detailed paperwork; one
document from 211 CE notes that in a period of three days 1,804 petitions were handed into the
prefect’s office. But the prefect was assisted by a hierarchy of subordinate equestrian officials with
expertise in particular areas. There were three or four epistratēgoi in charge of regional subdivisions;
special officers were in charge of the emperors’ private account, the administration of justice, religious
institutions, and so on. Subordinate to them were the local officials in the nomes (stratēgoi and royal
scribes) and finally the authorities in the towns and villages.

It was in these growing towns that the Romans made the most far-reaching changes in administration.
They introduced colleges of magistrates and officials who were to be responsible for running the
internal affairs of their own communities on a theoretically autonomous basis and, at the same time,
were to guarantee the collection and payment of tax quotas to the central government. This was backed
up by the development of a range of “liturgies,” compulsory public services that were imposed on
individuals according to rank and property to ensure the financing and upkeep of local facilities. These
institutions were the Egyptian counterpart of the councils and magistrates that oversaw the Greek cities
in the eastern Roman provinces. They had been ubiquitous in other Hellenistic kingdoms, but in
Ptolemaic Egypt they had existed only in the so-called Greek cities (Alexandria, Ptolemais in Upper
Egypt, Naukratis, and later Antinoöpolis, founded by Hadrian in 130 CE). Alexandria lost the right to have
a council, probably in the Ptolemaic period. When it recovered its right in 200 CE, the privilege was
diluted by being extended to the nome capitals (mētropoleis) as well. This extension of privilege
represented an attempt to shift more of the burden and expense of administration onto the local
propertied classes, but it was eventually to prove too heavy. The consequences were the
impoverishment of many of the councillors and their families and serious problems in administration
that led to an increasing degree of central government interference and, eventually, more direct
control.

The economic resources that this administration existed to exploit had not changed since the Ptolemaic
period, but the development of a much more complex and sophisticated taxation system was a hallmark
of Roman rule. Taxes in both cash and kind were assessed on land, and a bewildering variety of small
taxes in cash, as well as customs dues and the like, was collected by appointed officials. A massive
amount of Egypt’s grain was shipped downriver both to feed the population of Alexandria and for export
to Rome. Despite frequent complaints of oppression and extortion from the taxpayers, it is not obvious
that official tax rates were all that high. In fact the Roman government had actively encouraged the
privatization of land and the increase of private enterprise in manufacture, commerce, and trade, and
low tax rates favoured private owners and entrepreneurs. The poorer people gained their livelihood as
tenants of state-owned land or of property belonging to the emperor or to wealthy private landlords,
and they were relatively much more heavily burdened by rentals, which tended to remain at a fairly high
level.
Overall, the degree of monetarization and complexity in the economy, even at the village level, was
intense. Goods were moved around and exchanged through the medium of coin on a large scale and, in
the towns and the larger villages, a high level of industrial and commercial activity developed in close
conjunction with the exploitation of the predominant agricultural base. The volume of trade, both
internal and external, reached its peak in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE. However, by the end of the 3rd
century CE, major problems were evident. A series of debasements of the imperial currency had
undermined confidence in the coinage, and even the government itself was contributing to this by
demanding increasing amounts of irregular tax payments in kind, which it channeled directly to the main
consumers—army personnel. Local administration by the councils was careless, recalcitrant, and
inefficient. The evident need for firm and purposeful reform had to be squarely faced in the reigns of
Diocletian and Constantine.

Society, religion, and culture

One of the more noticeable effects of Roman rule was the clearer tendency toward classification and
social control of the populace. Thus, despite many years of intermarriage between Greeks and
Egyptians, lists drawn up in 4/5 CEestablished the right of certain families to class themselves as Greek
by descent and to claim privileges attaching to their status as members of an urban aristocracy, known
as the gymnasial class. Members of this group were entitled to lower rates of poll tax, subsidized or free
distributions of food, and maintenance at the public expense when they grew old. If they or their
descendants were upwardly mobile, they might gain Alexandrian citizenship, Roman citizenship, or even
equestrian status, with correspondingly greater prestige and privileges. The preservation of such
distinctions was implicit in the spread of Roman law and was reinforced by elaborate codes of social and
fiscal regulations such as the Rule-Book of the Emperors’ Special Account. The Rule-Book prescribed
conditions under which people of different status might marry, for instance, or bequeath property, and
it fixed fines, confiscations, and other penalties for transgression. When an edict of the
emperor Caracallaconferred Roman citizenship on practically all of the subjects of the empire in 212 CE,
the distinction between citizens and noncitizens became meaningless; however, it was gradually
replaced by an equally important distinction between honestiores and humiliores (meaning, roughly,
“upper classes” and “lower classes,” respectively), groups that, among other distinctions, were
subjected to different penalties in law.
Naturally, it was the Greek-speaking elite that continued to dictate the visibly dominant cultural pattern,
though Egyptian culture was not moribund or insignificant. One proof of its continued survival can be
seen in its reemergent importance in the context of Coptic Christianity in the Byzantine period. An
important reminder of the mixing of the traditions comes from a family of Panopolis in the 4th century,
whose members included both teachers of Greek oratory and priests in Egyptian cult tradition. The
towns and villages of the Nile valley have preserved thousands of papyri that show what the literate
Greeks were reading (e.g., the poems of Homer and the lyric poets, works of the Classical Greek
tragedians, and comedies of Menander). The pervasiveness of the Greek literary tradition is strikingly
demonstrated by evidence left by an obscure and anonymous clerk at Al-Fayyūm village of Karanis in the
2nd century CE. In copying out a long list of taxpayers, the clerk translated an Egyptian name in the list
by an extremely rare Greek word that he could only have known from having read the Alexandrian
Hellenistic poet Callimachus; he must have understood the etymology of the Egyptian name as well.
Alexandria continued to develop as a spectacularly beautiful city and to foster Greek culture
and intellectual pursuits, though the great days of Ptolemaic court patronage of literary figures had
passed. But the flourishing interest in philosophy, particularly Platonic philosophy, had important
effects. The great Jewish philosopher and theologian of the 1st century, Philo of Alexandria (Philo
Judaeus), brought a training in Greek philosophy to bear on his commentaries on the Bible. This
anticipated by a hundred years the period after the virtual annihilation of the great Jewish community of
Alexandria in the revolt of 115–117 CE, when the city was the intellectual crucible in which Christianity
developed a theology that took it away from the influence of the Jewish exegetical tradition and toward
that of Greek philosophical ideas. There the foundations were laid for teaching the heads of the
Christian catechetical school, such as Clement of Alexandria. And in the 3rd century there was the vital
textual and theological work of Origen, the greatest of the Christian Neoplatonists, without which there
would hardly have been a coherent New Testament tradition at all.

Outside the Greek ambience of Alexandria, traditional Egyptian religious institutions continued to
flourish in the towns and villages, but the temples were reduced to financial dependence on a state
subvention (syntaxis), and they became subject to stringent control by secular bureaucrats.
Nevertheless, like the Ptolemies before them, Roman emperors appear in the traditional form as
Egyptian kings on temple reliefs until the mid-3rd century, and five professional hieroglyph cutters were
still employed at the town of Oxyrhynchusin the 2nd century. The animal cults continued to flourish,
despite Augustus’s famous sneer that he was accustomed to worship gods, not cattle. As late as the
reign of Diocletian (285–305), religious stelae preserved the fiction that in the cults of sacred bulls (best
known at Memphis and at Hermonthis [Armant]) the successor of a dead bull was “installed” by the
monarch. Differences between cults of the Greek type and the native Egyptian cults were still highly
marked, in the temple architecture and in the status of the priests. Priests of Egyptian cults formed, in
effect, a caste distinguished by their special clothing, whereas priestly offices in Greek cults were much
more like magistracies and tended to be held by local magnates. Cults of Roman emperors, living and
dead, became universal after 30 BCE, but their impact is most clearly to be seen in the foundations of
Caesarea (Temples of Caesar) and in religious institutions of Greek type, where divine emperors were
associated with the resident deities.
One development that did have an important effect on this religious amalgam, though it was not
decisive until the 4th century, was the arrival of Christianity. The tradition of the foundation of
the church of Alexandria by St. Mark cannot be substantiated, but a fragment of a text of the Gospel
According to Johnprovides concrete evidence of Christianity in the Nile valley in the second quarter of
the 2nd century CE. Inasmuch as Christianity remained illegal and subject to persecution until the early
4th century, Christians were reluctant to advertise themselves as such, and it is therefore difficult to
know how numerous they were, especially because later pro-Christian sources may often be suspected
of exaggerating the zeal and the numbers of the early Christian martyrs. But several papyri survive of
the libelli—certificates in which people swore that they had performed sacrifices to Greek, Egyptian, or
Roman divinities in order to prove that they were not Christians—submitted in the first official state-
sponsored persecution of Christians, under the emperor Decius(ruled 249–251). By the 290s, a decade
or so before the great persecution under Diocletian, a list of buildings in the sizeable town of
Oxyrhynchus, some 125 miles (200 km) south of the apex of the delta, included two Christian churches,
probably of the house-chapel type.

Egypt’s role in the Byzantine Empire

Diocletian was the last reigning Roman emperor to visit Egypt, in 302 CE. Within about 10 years of his
visit, the persecution of Christians ceased. The end of persecution had such far-reaching effects that
from this point on it is necessary to think of the history of Egypt in a very different framework. No single
point can be identified as the watershed between the Roman and Byzantine period, as the divide
between a brighter era of peace, culture, and prosperity and a darker age, supposedly characterized by
more-oppressive state machinery in the throes of decline and fall. The crucial changes occurred in the
last decade of the 3rd century and the first three decades of the 4th. With the end of persecution of
Christians came the restoration of the property of the church. In 313 a new system of calculating and
collecting taxes was introduced, with 15-year tax cycles, called indictions, inaugurated retrospectively
from the year 312. Many other important administrative changes had already taken place. In 296 the
separation of the Egyptian coinage from that of the rest of the empire had come to an end when the
Alexandrian mint stopped producing its tetradrachms, which had been the basis of the closed-currency
system.

Byzantine Empire, 6th century

One other event that had an enormous effect on the political history of Egypt was the founding of
Constantinople (now Istanbul) on May 11, 330. First, Constantinople was established as an imperial
capital and an eastern counterpart to Rome itself, thus undermining Alexandria’s traditional position as
the first city of the Greek-speaking East. Second, it diverted the resources of Egypt away from Rome and
the West. Henceforth, part of the surplus of the Egyptian grain supply, which was put at 8
million artabs (about 300 million litres) of wheat (one artab was roughly equivalent to one bushel) in an
edict of the emperor Justinian of about 537 or 538, went to feed the growing population of
Constantinople, and this created an important political and economic link. The cumulative effect of
these changes was to knit Egypt more uniformly into the structure of the empire and to give it, once
again, a central role in the political history of the Mediterranean world.

The key to understanding the importance of Egypt in that period lies in seeing how the Christian church
came rapidly to dominate secular as well as religious institutions and to acquire a powerful interest and
role in every political issue. The corollary of this was that the head of the Egyptian church, the patriarch
of Alexandria, became the most influential figure within Egypt, as well as the person who could give the
Egyptian clergy a powerful voice in the councils of the Eastern church. During the course of the 4th
century, Egypt was divided for administrative purposes into a number of smaller units but
the patriarchy was not, and its power thus far outweighed that of any local administrative official. Only
the governors of groups of provinces (vicarii of dioceses) were equivalent, and the praetorian prefects
and emperors were superior. When a patriarch of Alexandria was given civil authority as well, as
happened in the case of Cyrus, the last patriarch under Byzantine rule, the combination was very
powerful indeed.
The turbulent history of Egypt in the Byzantine period can largely be understood in terms of the
struggles of the successive (or, after 570, coexisting) patriarchs of Alexandria to maintain their position
both within their patriarchy and outside it in relation to Constantinople. What linked Egypt and the rest
of the Eastern Empire was the way in which the imperial authorities, when strong (as, for instance, in
the reign of Justinian), tried to control the Egyptian church from Constantinople, while at the same time
assuring the capital’s food supply and, as often as not, waging wars to keep their empire intact.
Conversely, when weak they failed to control the church. For the patriarchs of Alexandria, it proved
impossible to secure the approval of the imperial authorities in Constantinople and at the same time
maintain the support of their power base in Egypt. The two made quite different demands, and the
ultimate result was a social, political, and cultural gulf between Alexandria and the rest of Egypt and
between Hellenism and native Egyptian culture, which found a powerful new means of expression in
Coptic Christianity. The gulf was made more emphatic after the Council of Chalcedon in 451 established
the official doctrine that Christ was to be seen as existing in two natures, inseparably united. The
council’s decision in effect sent the Egyptian Coptic (now Coptic Orthodox) church off on its own path of
monophysitism, which centred around a firm insistence on the singularity of the nature of Christ.
Despite the debilitating effect of internal quarrels between rival churchmen, and despite the threats
posed by the hostile tribes of Blemmyes and Nubade in the south (until their conversion to Christianity
in the mid-6th century), emperors of Byzantium still could be threatened by the strength of Egypt if it
were properly harnessed. The last striking example is the case of the emperor Phocas, a tyrant who was
brought down in 609 or 610. Nicetas, the general of the future emperor Heraclius, made for Alexandria
from Cyrene, intending to use Egypt as his power base and cut off Constantinople’s grain supply. By the
spring of 610 Nicetas’s struggle with Bonosus, the general of Phocas, was won, and the fall of the tyrant
duly followed.

The difficulty of defending Egypt from a power base in Constantinople was forcefully illustrated during
the last three decades of Byzantine rule. First, the old enemy, the Persians, advanced to the Nile delta
and captured Alexandria. Their occupation was completed early in 619 and continued until 628, when
Persia and Byzantium agreed to a peace treaty and the Persians withdrew. This had been a decade of
violent hostility to the Egyptian Coptic Christians; among other oppressive measures, the Persians are
said to have refused to allow the normal ordination of bishops and to have massacred hundreds of
monks in their cave monasteries. The Persian withdrawal hardly heralded the return of peace to Egypt.

In Arabia events were taking place that would soon bring momentous changes for Egypt. These were
triggered by the flight of the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina and by his declaration in
632 CE of a holy war against Byzantium. A decade later, by September 29, 642, the Arab general ʿAmr
ibn al-ʿĀṣ was able to march into Alexandria, and the Arab conquest of Egypt, which had begun with an
invasion three years earlier, ended in peaceful capitulation. The invasion itself had been preceded by
several years of vicious persecution of Coptic Christians by Cyrus, the Chalcedonian patriarch of
Alexandria, and it was he who is said to have betrayed Egypt to the forces of Islam.

The Islamic conquest was not bloodless. There was desultory fighting at first in the eastern delta, then
Al-Fayyūm was lost in battle in 640, and a great battle took place at Heliopolis (now a suburb of Cairo) in
July 640 in which 15,000 Arabs engaged 20,000 Egyptian defenders. The storming and capture of
Trajan’s old fortress at Babylon (on the site of the present-day quarter called Old Cairo) on April 6, 641,
was crucial. By September 14 Cyrus, who had been recalled from Egypt 10 months earlier by the
emperor Heraclius, was back with authority to conclude a peace. Byzantium signed Egypt away on
November 8, 641, with provision for an 11-month armistice to allow ratification of the treaty of
surrender by the emperor and the caliph. In December 641 heavily laden ships were dispatched to carry
Egypt’s wealth to its new masters. Nine months later the last remnants of Byzantine forces left Egypt in
ships bound for Cyprus, Rhodes, and Constantinople, and ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ took Alexandria in the name of
the caliph. The new domination by the theocratic Islamic caliphate was strikingly different from anything
that had happened in Egypt since the arrival of Alexander the Great almost a thousand years earlier.

Byzantine government of Egypt

The reforms of the early 4th century had established the basis for another 250 years of comparative
prosperity in Egypt, at a cost of perhaps greater rigidity and more-oppressive state control. Egypt was
subdivided for administrative purposes into a number of smaller provinces, and separate civil and
military officials were established (the praeses and the dux, respectively). By the middle of the 6th
century the emperor Justinian was eventually forced to recognize the failure of this policy and to
combine civil and military power in the hands of the dux with a civil deputy (the praeses) as a
counterweight to the power of the church authorities. All pretense of local autonomy had by then
vanished. The presence of the soldiery was more noticeable, its power and influence more pervasive in
the routine of town and village life. Taxes were perhaps not heavier than they had been earlier, but they
were collected ruthlessly, and strong measures were sanctioned against those who tried to escape from
their fiscal or legal obligations. The wealthier landowners probably enjoyed increased prosperity,
especially as a result of the opportunity to buy now state-owned land that had once been sold into
private ownership in the early 4th century. The great landlords were powerful enough to offer their
peasant tenants a significant degree of collective fiscal protection against the agents of the state,
the rapacious tax collector, the officious bureaucrat, or the brutal soldier. But, if the life of the average
peasant did not change much, nevertheless the rich probably became richer, and the poor became
poorer and more numerous as the moderate landholders were increasingly squeezed out of the picture.

The advance of Christianity

The advance of Christianity had just as profound an effect on the social and cultural fabric of Byzantine
Egypt as on the political power structure. It brought to the surface the identity of the native Egyptians in
the Coptic church, which found a medium of expression in the development of the Coptic language—
basically Egyptian written in Greek letters with the addition of a few characters. Coptic Christianity also
developed its own distinctive art, much of it pervaded by the long-familiar motifs of Greek mythology.
These motifs coexisted with representations of the Virgin and Child and with Christian parables and
were expressed in decorative styles that owed a great deal to both Greek and Egyptian precedents.
Although Christianity had made great inroads into the populace by 391 (the year in which the practice of
the local polytheistic religions was officially made illegal), it is hardly possible to quantify it or to trace a
neat and uniform progression. It engulfed its predecessors slowly and untidily. In the first half of the 5th
century a polytheistic literary revival occurred, centred on the town of Panopolis, and there is evidence
that fanatical monks in the area attacked non-Christian temples and stole statues and magical texts.
Outside the rarefied circles in which doctrinal disputes were discussed in philosophical terms, there was
a great heterogeneous mass of commitment and belief. For example, both the gnostics, who believed in
redemption through knowledge, and the Manichaeans, followers of the Persian prophet Mani, clearly
thought of themselves as Christians. In the 4th century a Christian community, the library of which was
discovered at Najʾ Ḥammādī in 1945, was reading both canonical and apocryphal gospels as well as
mystical revelatory tracts. At the lower levels of society, magical practices remained ubiquitous and
were simply transferred to a Christian context.

By the mid-5th century Egypt’s landscape was dominated by the great churches, such as the magnificent
church of St. Menas (Abū Mīna), south of Alexandria, and by the monasteries. The latter were Egypt’s
distinctive contribution to the development of Christianity and were particularly important as
strongholds of native loyalty to the monophysite church. The origins of Antonian communities, named
for the founding father of monasticism, St. Anthony of Egypt (c. 251–356), lay in the desire of individuals
to congregate about the person of a celebrated ascetic in a desert location, building their own cells,
adding a church and a refectory, and raising towers and walls to enclose the unit. Other monasteries,
called Pachomian—for Pachomius, the founder of cenobitic monasticism—were planned from the start
as walled complexes with communal facilities. The provision of water cisterns, kitchens, bakeries, oil
presses, workshops, stables, and cemeteries and the ownership and cultivation of land in the vicinity
made these communities self-sufficient to a high degree, offering their residents peace and protection
against the oppression of the tax collector and the brutality of the soldier. But it does not follow that
they were divorced from contact with nearby towns and villages. Indeed, many monastics were
important local figures, and many monastery churches were probably open to the local public for
worship.

The economic and social power of the Christian church in the Nile River valley and delta is the
outstanding development of the 5th and 6th centuries. By the time of the Arab invasion, in the mid-7th
century, the uncomplicated message of Islam might have seemed attractive and drawn attention to the
political and religious rifts that successive and rival patriarchs of the Christian church had so violently
created and exploited. But the advent of Arab rule did not suppress Christianity in Egypt. Some areas
remained heavily Christian for several more centuries.

OLD TESTAMENT CANON, TEXTS, AND VERSIONS

THE CANON

The term canon, from a Hebrew-Greek word meaning “cane” or “measuring rod,” passed into Christian
usage to mean “norm” or “rule of faith.” The Church Fathers of the 4th century CE first employed it in
reference to the definitive, authoritative nature of the body of sacred Scripture.
The Hebrew canon

The Hebrew Bible is often known among Jews as TaNaKh, an acronym derived from the names of its
three divisions: Torah (Instruction, or Law, also called the Pentateuch), Neviʾim (Prophets),
and Ketuvim (Writings).
The Torah contains five books: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. The
Neviʾim comprise eight books divided into the Former Prophets, containing the four historical
works Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings, and the Latter Prophets, the oracular discourses
of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve (Minor—i.e., smaller) Prophets—
Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah,
and Malachi. The Twelve were all formerly written on a single scroll and thus reckoned as one book. The
Ketuvim consist of religious poetry and wisdom literature—Psalms, Proverbs, and Job, a collection
known as the Five Megillot (Five Scrolls; i.e., Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, and Esther,
which have been grouped together according to the annual cycle of their public reading in
the synagogue)—and the books of Daniel, Ezra and Nehemiah, and Chronicles.

The number of books

The number of books in the Hebrew canon is thus 24, referring to the sum of the separate scrolls on
which these works were traditionally written in ancient times. This figure is first cited in II Esdras in a
passage usually dated about 100 CE and is frequently mentioned in rabbinic (postbiblical) literature, but
no authentic tradition exists to explain it. Josephus, a 1st-century-CE Jewish historian, and some of the
Church Fathers, such as Origen (the great 3rd-century Alexandrian theologian), appear to have had a 22-
book canon.
English Bibles list 39 books for the Old Testament because of the practice of bisecting Samuel, Kings, and
Chronicles and of counting Ezra, Nehemiah, and the 12 Minor Prophets as separate books.

The tripartite canon

The threefold nature of the Hebrew Bible (the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings) is reflected in the
literature of the period of the Second Temple (6th–1st century BCE) and soon after it. The earliest
reference is that of the Jewish wisdom writer Ben Sira (flourished 180–175 BCE), who speaks of “the law
of the Most High…the wisdom of all the ancients and…prophecies.” His grandson (c.132 BCE), in the
prologue to Ben Sira’s work, mentions “the law and the prophets and the others that followed them,”
the latter also called “the other books of our fathers.” The same tripartite division finds expression in II
Maccabees, the writings of Philo, a Hellenistic Jewish philosopher, and Josephus, a Hellenistic Jewish
historian, as well as in the Gospel According to Luke. The tripartite canon represents the three historic
stages in the growth of the canon.

The history of canonization

Because no explicit or reliable traditions concerning the criteria of canonicity, the canonizing authorities,
the periods in which they lived, or the procedure adopted have been preserved, no more than a
plausible reconstruction of the successive stages involved can be provided. First, it must be observed
that sanctity and canonization are not synonymous terms. The first condition must have existed before
the second could have been formally conferred. Next, the collection and organization of a number of
sacred texts into a canonized corpus (body of writings) is quite a different problem from that of the
growth and formation of the individual books themselves.

No longer are there compelling reasons to assume that the history of the canon must have commenced
very late in Israel’s history, as was once accepted. The emergence in Mesopotamia, already in the
second half of the 2nd millennium BCE, of a standardized body of literature arranged in a more or less
fixed order and with some kind of official text, expresses the notion of a canon in its secular sense.
Because Babylonian and Assyrian patterns frequently served as the models for imitation throughout
the Middle East, sacred documents in Israel may well have been carefully stored in temples and palaces,
particularly if they were used in connection with the cult or studied in the priestly or wisdom schools.
The injunction to deposit the two tables of the Decalogue (Ten Commandments) inside the Ark of the
Covenant and the book of the Torah beside it and the chance find of a book of the Torah in the Temple
in 622 BCE tend to confirm the existence of such a practice in Israel.

The divisions of the TaNaKh

The Torah

The history of the canonization of the Torah as a book must be distinguished from the process by which
the heterogeneous components of the literature as such developed and were accepted as sacred.
The Book of the Chronicles, composed circa 400 BCE, frequently refers to the “Torah of Moses” and
exhibits a familiarity with all five books of the Pentateuch. The earliest record of the reading of a “Torah
book” is provided by the narrative describing the reformation instituted by King Josiah of Judah in
622 BCEfollowing the fortuitous discovery of a “book of the Torah” during the renovation of the Temple.
The reading of the book (probably Deuteronomy), followed by a national covenant ceremony, is
generally interpreted as having constituted a formal act of canonization.
Between this date and 400 BCE the only other ceremony of Torah reading is that described
in Nehemiah as having taken place at the autumnal New Year festival. The “book of the Torah of Moses”
is mentioned and the emphasis is on its instruction and exposition. The Samaritans, the descendants of
Israelites intermarried with foreigners in the old northern kingdom that fell in 722 BCE, became hostile
to the Judaeans in the time of Ezra and Nehemiah (6th–5th century BCE). They would not likely have
accepted the Torah—which they did, along with the tradition of its Mosaic origin—if it had only recently
been canonized under the authority of their archenemies. The final redaction and canonization of the
Torah book, therefore, most likely took place during the Babylonian Exile (6th–5th century BCE).

The Neviʾim

The model of the Pentateuch probably encouraged the assemblage and ordering of the literature of the
prophets. The Exile of the Jews to Babylonia in 587/586 and the restoration half a century
later enhanced the prestige of the prophets as national figures and aroused interest in the written
records of their teachings. The canonization of the Neviʾim could not have taken place before the
Samaritan schism that occurred during the time of Ezra and Nehemiah, since nothing of the prophetical
literature was known to the Samaritans. On the other hand, the prophetic canon must have been closed
by the time the Greeks had displaced the Persians as the rulers of Palestine in the late 4th century BCE.
The exclusion of Daniel would otherwise be inexplicable, as would be the omission of Chronicles and
Ezra-Nehemiah, even though they supplement and continue the narrative of the Former Prophets.
Furthermore, the books of the Latter Prophets contain no hint of the downfall of the Persian empire and
the rise of the Greeks, even though the succession of great powers in the East plays a major role in their
theological interpretation of history. Their language, too, is entirely free of Grecisms.
These phenomena accord with the traditions of Josephus and rabbinic sources limiting the activities of
the literary prophets to the Persian era.

The Ketuvim

That the formation of the Ketuvim as a corpus was not completed until a very late date is evidenced by
the absence of a fixed name, or indeed any real name, for the third division of Scripture. Ben Sira refers
to “the other books of our fathers,” “the rest of the books”; Philo speaks simply of “other writings” and
Josephus of “the remaining books.” A widespread practice of entitling the entire Scriptures “the Torah
and the Prophets” indicates a considerable hiatusbetween the canonization of the Prophets and the
Ketuvim. Greek words are to be found in the Song of Songs and in Daniel, which also refers to the
disintegration of the Greek empire of Alexander the Great. Ben Sira omits mention of Daniel and Esther.
No fragments of Esther have turned up among the biblical scrolls (e.g., the Dead Sea Scrolls) from the
Judaean desert. Rabbinic sources betray some hesitation about Esther and a decided ambivalence about
the book of Ben Sira. A third-generation Babylonian amora(rabbinic interpretive scholar;
plural amoraim) actually cites it as “Ketuvim,” as opposed to Torah and Prophets, and in the mid-2nd
century CE the need to deny its canonicity and prohibit its reading was still felt. Differences of opinion
also are recorded among the tannaim (rabbinic scholars of tradition who compiled the Mishna, or Oral
Law) and amoraim (who created the Talmud, or Gemara) about the canonical status of Proverbs, Song
of Songs, Ecclesiastes, and Esther.
All this indicates a prolonged state of fluidity with respect to the canonization of the Ketuvim. A synod
at Jabneh (c. 100 CE) seems to have ruled on the matter, but it took a generation or two before their
decisions came to be unanimously accepted and the Ketuvim regarded as being definitively closed. The
destruction of the Jewish state in 70 CE, the breakdown of central authority, and the ever-
widening Diaspora (collectively, Jews dispersed to foreign lands) all contributed to the urgent necessity
of providing a closed and authoritative corpus of sacred Scripture.

The Samaritan canon

As has been mentioned, the Samaritans accepted the Pentateuch from the Jews. They knew of no other
section of the Bible, however, and did not expand their Pentateuchal canon even by the inclusion of any
strictly Samaritan compositions.

The Alexandrian canon

The Old Testament as it has come down in Greek translation from the Jews of Alexandria via the
Christian church differs in many respects from the Hebrew Scriptures. The books of the second and third
divisions have been redistributed and arranged according to categories of literature—history, poetry,
wisdom, and prophecy. Esther and Daniel contain supplementary materials, and many noncanonical
books, whether of Hebrew or Greek origin, have been interspersed with the canonical works. These
extracanonical writings are I Esdras, the Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus (Ben Sira), additions to
Esther, Judith, Tobit, Baruch, the Epistle of Jeremiah, and additions to Daniel, as listed in the manuscript
known as Codex Vaticanus (c. 350 CE). The sequence of the books varies, however, in the manuscripts
and in the patristic and synodic lists of the Eastern and Western churches, some of which include other
books as well, such as I and II Maccabees.
It should be noted that the contents and form of the inferred original Alexandrian Jewish canon cannot
be ascertained with certainty, because all extant Greek Bibles are of Christian origin. The Jews of
Alexandria may themselves have extended the canon they received from Palestine, or they may have
inherited their traditions from Palestinian circles in which the additional books had already been
regarded as canonical. It is equally possible that the additions to the Hebrew Scriptures in the Greek
Bible are of Christian origin.

The canon at Qumrān

In the collection of manuscripts from the Judaean desert—discovered from the 1940s on—there are no
lists of canonical works and no codices (manuscript volumes), only individual scrolls. For these reasons,
nothing can be known with certainty about the contents and sequence of the canon of
the Qumrānsectarians. Since fragments of all the books of the Hebrew Bible (except Esther) have been
found, it may be assumed that this reflects the minimum extent of its canon. The situation is
complicated by the presence in Qumrān of extracanonical works—some already known from
the Apocrypha (so-called hidden books not accepted as canonical by Judaism or the church)
and pseudepigrapha (books falsely ascribed to biblical authors) or from the Cairo Geniza (synagogue
storeroom) and others entirely new. Some or all of these additional works may have been considered
canonical by the members of the sect. It is significant, however, that, so far, pesharim (interpretations)
have been found only on books of the traditional Hebrew canon. Still, the great Psalmsscroll departs
from the received Hebrew text in both sequence and contents. If the Psalms scroll were a canonical
Psalter and not a liturgy, then evidence would indeed be forthcoming for the existence of a rival canon
at Qumrān.

The Christian canon

The Christian church received its Bible from Greek-speaking Jews and found the majority of its early
converts in the Hellenistic world. The Greek Bible of Alexandria thus became the official Bible of the
Christian community, and the overwhelming number of quotations from the Hebrew Scriptures in
the New Testament are derived from it. Whatever the origin of the apocryphal books in the canon of
Alexandria, these became part of the Christian Scriptures, but there seems to have been no unanimity as
to their exact canonical status. The New Testament itself does not cite the Apocryphal books directly,
but occasional traces of a knowledge of them are to be found. The Apostolic Fathers (late 1st–early 2nd
century) show extensive familiarity with this literature, but a list of the Old Testament books by Melito,
bishop of Sardis in Asia Minor (2nd century), does not include the additional writings of the Greek Bible,
and Origen (c. 185–c. 254) explicitly describes the Old Testament canon as comprising only 22 books.
From the time of Origen on, the Church Fathers who were familiar with Hebrew differentiated,
theoretically at least, the apocryphal books from those of the Old Testament, though they used them
freely. In the Syrian East, until the 7th century the church had only the books of the Hebrew canon with
the addition of Ecclesiasticus, or the Wisdom of Jesus the son of Sira (but without Chronicles, Ezra, and
Nehemiah). It also incorporated the Wisdom of Solomon, Baruch, the Letter of Jeremiah, and the
additions to Daniel. The 6th-century manuscript of the Peshitta (Syriac version) known as Codex
Ambrosianus also has III and IV Maccabees, II (sometimes IV) Esdras, and Josephus’s Wars VII.
Early councils of the African church held at Hippo (393) and Carthage (397, 419) affirmed the use of the
apocryphal books as Scripture. In the 4th century also, St. Athanasius, chief theologian of Christian
orthodoxy, differentiated “canonical books” from both “those that are read” by Christians only and the
“apocryphal books” rejected alike by Jews and Christians. In the preparation of a standard Latin version,
the biblical scholar St. Jerome (c. 347–419/420) separated “canonical books” from “ecclesiastical books”
(i.e., the apocryphal writings), which he regarded as good for spiritual edification but
not authoritative Scripture. A contrary view of St. Augustine (354–430), one of the greatest Western
theologians, prevailed, however, and the works remained in the Latin Vulgate version. The Decretum
Gelasianum, a Latin document of uncertain authorship but recognized as reflecting the views of
the Roman church at the beginning of the 6th century, includes Tobit, Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon,
Ecclesiasticus, and I and II Maccabees as biblical.
Throughout the Middle Ages, the apocryphal books were generally regarded as Holy Scripture in the
Roman and Greek churches, although theoretical doubts were raised from time to time. Thus, in
1333 Nicholas of Lyra, a French Franciscan theologian, discussed the differences between the Latin
Vulgate and the “Hebrew truth.” Christian-Jewish polemics, the increasing attention to Hebrew studies,
and, finally, the Reformation kept the issue of the Christian canon alive. Protestants denied Old
Testament canonical status to all books not in the Hebrew Bible. The first modern vernacular Bible to
segregate the disputed writings was a Dutch version by Jacob van Liesveldt (Antwerp, 1526). Martin
Luther’s German edition of 1534 did the same thing and entitled them “Apocrypha” for the first time,
noting that, while they were not in equal esteem with sacred Scriptures, they were edifying.
In response to Protestant views, the Roman Catholic Church made its position clear at the Council of
Trent (1546) when it dogmatically affirmed that the entire Latin Vulgate enjoyed equal canonical status.
This doctrine was confirmed by the Vatican Council of 1870. In the Greek church the Synod of
Jerusalem (1672) had expressly designated as canonical several apocryphal works. In the 19th century,
however, Russian Orthodox theologians agreed to exclude these works from the Holy Scriptures.
The history of the Old Testament canon in the English church has generally reflected a more restrictive
viewpoint. Even though the Wycliffite Bible (14th century) included the Apocrypha, its preface made it
clear that it accepted Jerome’s judgment. The translation made by the English bishop Miles
Coverdale (1535) was the first English version to segregate these books, but it did place Baruch after
Jeremiah. Article VI of the Thirty-nine Articles of religionof the Church of England (1562) explicitly denied
their value for the establishment of doctrine, although it admitted that they should be read for
their didactic worth. The first Bible in English to exclude the Apocrypha was the Geneva Bible of 1599.
The King James Version of 1611 placed it between the Old and New Testaments. In 1615
Archbishop George Abbot forbade the issuance of Bibles without the Apocrypha, but editions of the King
James Version from 1630 on often omitted it from the bound copies. The Geneva Bible edition of 1640
was probably the first to be intentionally printed in England without the Apocrypha, followed in 1642 by
the King James Version. In 1644 the Long Parliament actually forbade the public reading of these books,
and three years later the Westminster Confession of the Presbyterians decreed them to be no part of
the canon. The British and Foreign Bible Society in 1827 resolved never to print or circulate copies
containing the Apocrypha. Most English Protestant Bibles in the 20th century omitted the disputed
books or had them as a separate volume, except in library editions, in which they were included with the
Old and New Testaments.

Texts and versions

Textual criticism: manuscript problems

The text of the Hebrew printed Bible consists of consonants, vowel signs, and cantillation (musical or
tonal) marks. The two latter components are the product of the school of Masoretes (Traditionalists)
that flourished in Tiberias (in Palestine) between the 7th and 9th centuries CE. The history of the bare
consonantal text stretches back into hoary antiquity and can be only partially traced.
The earliest printed editions of the Hebrew Bible derive from the last quarter of the 15th century and
the first quarter of the 16th century. The oldest Masoretic codices stem from the end of the 9th century
and the beginning of the 10th. A comparison of the two shows that no textual developments took place
during the intervening 600 years. A single standardized recension enjoyed an absolute monopoly and
was transmitted by the scribes with amazing fidelity. Not one of the medieval Hebrew manuscripts and
none of the thousands of fragments preserved in the Cairo Geniza (synagogue storeroom) contains
departures of any real significance from the received text.
This situation, however, was a relatively late development; there is much evidence for the existence of a
period when more than one Hebrew text-form of a given book was current. In fact, both the variety of
witnesses and the degree of textual divergence between them increase in proportion to their antiquity.

No single explanation can satisfactorily account for this phenomenon. In the case of some biblical
literature, there exists the real possibility, though it cannot be proven, that it must have endured a long
period of oral transmission before its committal to writing. In the interval, the material might well have
undergone abridgement, amplification, and alteration at the hands of transmitters, so that not only
would the original have been transformed but the process of transmission would have engendered
more than one recension from the very beginning of its written, literary career.

The problem is complicated further by the great difference in time between the autograph (original
writing) of a biblical work, even when it assumed written form from its inception, and its
oldest extant exemplars. In some instances, this may amount to well over a thousand years of scribal
activity. Whatever the interval, the possibility of inadvertent or deliberate change, something that
affects all manuscript copying, was always present.
The evidence that such, indeed, took place is rich and varied. First there are numerous divergences
between the many passages duplicated within the Hebrew Bible itself—e.g., the parallels between
Samuel-Kings and Chronicles. Then there are the citations of the Old Testament to be found in the books
of the Apocrypha and apocalyptic literature (works describing the intervention of God in history in
cryptic terms), in the works of Philo and Josephus, in the New Testament, and in rabbinic and patristic
(early Church Fathers) literature. There are also rabbinic traditions about the text-critical activities of the
scribes (soferim) in Second Temple times. These tell of divergent readings in Temple scrolls of the
Pentateuch, of official “book correctors” in Jerusalem, of textual emendations on the part of scribes, and
of the utilization of sigla (signs or abbreviations) for marking suspect readings and disarranged verses.
The Samaritan Pentateuch and the pre-Masoretic versions of the Old Testament made directly from
Hebrew originals are all replete with divergences from current Masoretic Bibles. Finally, the scrolls from
the Judaean desert, especially those from the caves of Qumrān, have provided, at least, illustrations of
many of the scribal processes by which deviant texts came into being. The variants and their respective
causes may be classified as follows: aurally conditioned, visual in origin, exegetical, and deliberate.

Problems resulting from aural conditioning

Aural conditioning would have resulted from a mishearing of similar-sounding consonants when a text
was dictated to the copyist. A negative particle loʾ, for example, could have been confused with the
prepositional lo (“to him”) or a guttural ḥet with spirant kaf, so that aḥ (“brother”) might have been
written for akh (“surely”).

Problems visual in origin

The confusion of graphically similar letters, whether in the paleo-Hebrew or Aramaic script, is another
cause for variations. Thus, the prepositions bet (“in”) and kaf (“like”) are interchanged in the Masoretic
and Dead Sea Scroll texts of Isaiah.
The order of letters also might be inverted. Such metathesis, as it is called, appears in Psalms, in
which qirbam (“their inward thoughts”) stands for qibram (“their grave”).
Dittography, the inadvertent duplication of one or more letters or words, also occurs, as in the Dead Sea
Scroll text of Isaiah and in the Masoretic text of Ezekiel, for example.
Haplography, the accidental omission of a letter or word that occurs twice in close proximity, can be
found, for example, in the Dead Sea Scroll text of Isaiah.
Homoeoteleuton occurs when two separate phrases or lines have identical endings and the copyist’s eye
slips from one to the other and omits the intervening words. A comparison of the Masoretic text I
Samuel 14:41 with the Septuagint and Vulgate versions clearly identifies such an aberration.

Exegetical problems
This third category does not involve any consonantal alteration but results solely from the different
possibilities inherent in the consonantal spelling. Thus, the lack of vowel signs may permit the
word DBR to be read as the verb DiBeR(“he spoke,” as in the Masoretic text of Hosea) or as the
noun DeBaR (“the word of,” as in the Septuagint). The absence of word dividers could lead to different
divisions of the consonants. Thus, BBQRYM in Amos could be understood as either BaBeQaRYM (“with
oxen,” as in the Masoretic text) or BaBaQaR YaM(“the sea with an ox”). The incorrect solution by later
copyists of abbreviations is another source of error. That such occurred is proved by a comparison of the
Hebrew text with the Septuagint version in, for example, II Samuel 1:12, Ezekiel12:23, and Amos 3:9.

Deliberate changes

Apart from mechanical alterations of a text, many variants must have been consciously introduced by
scribes, some by way of glossing—i.e., the insertion of a more common word to explain a rare one—and
others by explanatory comments incorporated into the text. Furthermore, a scribe who had before him
two manuscripts of a single work containing variant readings and was unable to decide between them
might incorporate both readings into his scroll and thus create a conflate text.

Textual criticism: scholarly problems

The situation so far described poses two major scholarly problems. The first involves the history of the
Hebrew text, and the second deals with attempts to reconstruct its “original” form.

As to when and how a single text type gained hegemony and then displaced all others, it is clear that the
early and widespread public reading of the Scriptures in the synagogues of Palestine, Alexandria,
and Babylon was bound to lead to a heightened sensitivity of the idea of a “correct” text and to
give prestige to the particular text form selected for reading. Also, the natural conservatism of ritual
would tend to perpetuate the form of such a text. The Letter of Aristeas, a document derived from the
middle of the 2nd century BCEthat describes the origin of the Septuagint, recognizes the distinction
between carelessly copied scrolls of the Pentateuch and an authoritative Temple scroll in the hands of
the high priest in Jerusalem. The rabbinic traditions (see above) about the textual criticism of Temple-
based scribes actually reflect a movement toward the final stabilization of the text in the Second Temple
period. Josephus, writing not long after 70 CE, boasts of the existence of a long-standing fixed text of the
Jewish Scriptures. The loss of national independence and the destruction of the spiritual centre of Jewry
in 70, accompanied by an ever-widening Diaspora and the Christian schism within Judaism, made
the exclusive dissemination of a single authoritative text a vitally needed cohesiveforce. The text type
later known as Masoretic is already well represented at pre-Christian Qumrān. Scrolls from Wadi Al-
Murabbaʿat, Naḥal Ẓeʾelim, and Masada from the 2nd century CE are practically identical with the
received text that by then had gained victory over all its rivals.
In regard to an attempt to recover the original text of a biblical passage—especially an unintelligible
one—in the light of variants among different versions and manuscripts and known causes of corruption,
it should be understood that all reconstruction must be conjectural and perforce tentative because of
the irretrievable loss of the original edition. But not all textual difficulties need presuppose underlying
mutilation. The Hebrew Biblerepresents but a small portion of the literature of ancient Israel and, hence,
a limited segment of the language. A textual problem may be the product of present limited knowledge
of ancient Hebrew, because scholars might be dealing with dialectic phenomena or foreign loanwords.
Comparative Semitic linguistic studies have yielded hitherto unrecognized features of grammar, syntax,
and lexicography that have often eliminated the need for emendation. Furthermore, each version—
indeed, each biblical book within it—has its own history, and the translation techniques and stylistic
characteristics must be examined and taken into account. Finally, the number of manuscripts that attest
to a certain reading is of less importance than the weight given to a specific manuscript.
None of this means that a Hebrew manuscript, an ancient version, or a conjectural emendation cannot
yield a reading superior to that in the received Hebrew text. It does mean, however, that these tools
have to be employed with great caution and proper methodology.

Texts and manuscripts

Sources of the Septuagint

A Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible—known as the Septuagint and designated LXX because there
allegedly were 70 or 72 translators, six from each of the 12 tribes of Israel—is a composite of the work
of many translators labouring for well over a hundred years. It was made directly from Hebrew originals
that frequently differed considerably from the present Masoretic text. Apart from other limitations
attendant upon the use of a translation for such purposes, the identification of the parent text used by
the Greek translators is still an unsettled question. The Pentateuch of the Septuagint manifests a basic
coincidence with the Masoretic text. The Qumrān scrolls have now proven that the Septuagint book of
Samuel-Kings goes back to an old Palestinian text tradition that must be earlier than the 4th
century BCE, and from the same source comes a short Hebrew recension of Jeremiah that probably
underlies the Greek.

The Samaritan Pentateuch

The importance of the recension known as the Samaritan Pentateuch lies in the fact that
it constitutes an independent Hebrew witness to the text written in a late and developed form of the
paleo-Hebrew script. Some of the Exodusfragments from Qumrān demonstrate that it has
close affinities with a pre-Christian Palestinian text type and testify to the faithfulness with which it has
been preserved. It contains about 6,000 variants from the Masoretic text, of which nearly a third agree
with the Septuagint. Only a minority, however, are genuine variants, most being dogmatic, exegetical,
grammatical, or merely orthographic in character.
The Samaritan Pentateuch first became known in the West through a manuscript secured
in Damascus in 1616 by Pietro della Valle, an Italian traveler. It was published in the Paris (1628–45) and
London (1654–57) Polyglots, written in several languages in comparative columns. Many manuscripts of
the Samaritan Pentateuch are now available. The Avishaʿ Scroll, the sacred copy of the Samaritans, has
recently been photographed and critically examined. Only Numbers 35 to Deuteronomy 34 appears to
be very old, the rest stemming from the 14th century. A definitive edition, with photographs, of the
Samaritan Pentateuch was prepared in Madrid by F. Pérez Castro in 1959.

The Qumrān texts and other scrolls

Until the discovery of the Judaean desert scrolls, the only premedieval fragment of the Hebrew Bible
known to scholars was the Nash Papyrus (c. 150 BCE) from Egypt containing the Decalogue and
Deuteronomy. Now, however, fragments of about 180 different manuscripts of biblical books are
available. Their dates vary between the 3rd century BCE and the 2nd century CE, and all but 10 stem
from the caves of Qumrān. All are written on either leather or papyrus in columns and on one side only.
The most important manuscripts from what is now identified as Cave 1 of Qumrān are a practically
complete Isaiah scroll (1QIsaa), dated about 100–75 BCE, and another very fragmentary manuscript
(1QIsab) of the same book. The first contains many variants from the Masoretic text in both orthography
and text, and the second is very close to the Masoretic type and contains few genuine variants. The
richest hoard, from Cave 4, includes fragments of 5 copies of Genesis, 8 of Exodus, 1 of Leviticus, 14
of Deuteronomy, 2 of Joshua, 3 of Samuel, 12 of Isaiah, 4 of Jeremiah, 8 of the Minor Prophets, 1
of Proverbs, and 3 of Daniel. Cave 11 yielded a Psalter containing the last third of the book in a form
different from that of the Masoretic text, as well as a manuscript of Leviticus.
The importance of the Qumrān scrolls cannot be exaggerated. Their great antiquity brings them close to
the Hebrew Bible period itself—from as early as 250–200 BCE. For the first time, Hebrew variant texts
are extant and all known major text types are present. Some are close to the Septuagint, others to the
Samaritan. On the other hand, many of the scrolls are practically identical with the Masoretic text, which
thus takes this recension back in history to pre-Christian times. Several texts in the paleo-Hebrew script
show that this script continued to be used side by side with the Aramaic script for a long time.
Of quite a different order are scrolls from other areas of the Judaean desert. All of these are practically
identical with the received text. This applies to fragments of Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Ezekiel, and Psalms
discovered at Masada (the Jewish fortress destroyed by the Romans in 73 CE) as well as to the finds at
Wadi Al-Murabbaʿat, the latest date of which is 135 CE. Here were found fragments of Genesis, Exodus,
Leviticus, and Isaiah in addition to a substantially preserved Minor Prophets scroll. Variants from the
Masoretic text are negligible. The same phenomenon characterizes the fragments of Numbers found at
Naḥal Ḥever.

Masoretic texts

No biblical manuscripts have survived from the six centuries that separate the latest of the Judaean
desert scrolls from the earliest of the Masoretic period. A “Codex Mugah,” frequently referred to as an
authority in the early 10th century, and the “Codex Hilleli,” said to have been written circa 600 by
Rabbi Hillel ben Moses ben Hillel, have both vanished.
The earliest extant Hebrew Bible codex is the Cairo Prophets written and punctuated by Moses ben
Asher in Tiberias (in Palestine) in 895. Next in age is the Leningrad Codex of the Latter Prophets dated to
916, which was not originally the work of Ben Asher, but its Babylonian pointing—i.e., vowel signs used
for pronunciation purposes—was brought into line with the Tiberian Masoretic system.
The outstanding event in the history of that system was the production of the model so-called Aleppo
Codex, now in Jerusalem. Written by Solomon ben Buya’a, it was corrected, punctuated, and furnished
with a Masoretic apparatus by Aaron ben Moses ben Asher about 930. Originally containing the entire
Hebrew Bible in about 380 folios, of which 294 are extant, the Aleppo Codex remains the only known
true representative of Aaron ben Asher’s text and the most important witness to that particular
Masoretic tradition that achieved hegemony throughout Jewry.
Two other notable manuscripts based on Aaron’s system are the manuscript designated as BM or. 4445,
which contains most of the Pentateuch and utilized a Masora (text tradition) circa 950, and the
Leningrad complete Hebrew Bible designated MSB 19a of 1008. Codex Reuchliana of the Prophets,
written in 1105 and now in Karlsruhe, Germany, represents the system of Moses ben David ben
Naphtali, which was more faithful to that of Moses ben Asher.
Collations of the Masoretic materials

The earliest extant attempt at collating the differences between the Ben Asher and Ben Naphtali
Masoretic traditions was made by Mishael ben Uzziel in his Kitāb al-Ḥulaf (before 1050). A vast amount
of Masoretic information, drawn chiefly from Spanish manuscripts, is to be found in the text-critical
commentary known as Minhath Shai, by Solomon Jedidiah Norzi, completed in 1626 and printed in
the Mantua Bible of 1742. Benjamin Kennicott collected the variants of 615 manuscripts and 52 printed
editions (2 vol., 1776–80, Oxford). Giovanni Bernado De Rossi published his additional collections of 731
manuscripts and 300 prints (4 vol., 1784–88, Parma), and C.D. Ginsburg did the same for 70 manuscripts,
largely from the British Museum, and 17 early printed editions (3 vol. in 4, 1908–26, London).

Printed editions

Until 1488, only separate parts of the Hebrew Bible had been printed, all with rabbinic commentaries.
The earliest was the Psalms (1477), followed by the Pentateuch (1482), the Prophets (1485/86), and
the Hagiographa (1486/87), all printed in Italy.
The first edition of the entire Hebrew Bible was printed at Soncino (in Italy) in 1488 with punctuation
and accents but without any commentary. The second complete Bible was printed in Naples in 1491/93
and the third in Brescia in 1494. All these editions were the work of Jews. The first Christian production
was a magnificent Complutensian Polyglot (under the direction of Francisco Cardinal Jiménez of Spain) in
six volumes, four of which contained the Hebrew Bible and Greek and Latin translations together with
the Aramaic rendering (Targum) of the Pentateuch that has been ascribed to Onkelos. Printed at Alcalá
de Henares (1514–17) and circulated about 1522, this Bible proved to be a turning point in the study of
the Hebrew text in western Europe.
The first rabbinic Bible—i.e., the Hebrew text furnished with full vowel points and accents, accompanied
by the Aramaic Targums and the major medieval Jewish commentaries—was edited by Felix Pratensis
and published by Daniel Bomberg (Venice, 1516/17). The second edition, edited by Jacob ben Hayyim
ibn Adonijah and issued by Bomberg in four volumes (Venice, 1524/25), became the prototype of future
Hebrew Bibles down to the 20th century. It contained a vast text-critical apparatus of Masoretic notes
never since equalled in any edition. Unfortunately, Ben Hayyim had made use of late manuscripts, and
the text and notes are eclectic.
In London, Christian David Ginsburg, an immigrant Polish Jew and Christian convert, produced a critical
edition of the complete Hebrew Bible (1894, 1908, 1926) revised according to the Masora and early
prints with variant readings from manuscripts and ancient versions. It was soon displaced by the Biblica
Hebraica (1906, 1912) by Rudolf Kittel and Paul Kahle, two German biblical scholars. The third edition of
this work, completed by Albrecht Alt and Otto Eissfeldt (Stuttgart, 1937), finally abandoned Ben
Hayyim’s text, substituting that of the Leningrad Codex (B 19a). It has a dual critical apparatus, with
textual emendations separated from the manuscript and versional variants. Since 1957, variants from
the so-called Judaean desert scrolls have been included. In progress at the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem in the early 1970s was the preparation of a new text of the entire Hebrew Bible based on the
Aleppo Codex, which was to include all its own Masoretic notes together with textual differences found
in all pertinent sources. A sample edition of the Book of Isaiah appeared in 1965.

Early versions
The Aramaic Targums

In the course of the 5th and 6th centuries BCE, Aramaic became the official language of the Persian
empire. In the succeeding centuries it was used as the vernacular over a wide area and was increasingly
spoken by the post-Exilic Jewish communities of Palestine and elsewhere in the Diaspora. In response to
liturgical needs, the institution of a turgeman (or meturgeman, “translator”) arose in the synagogues.
These men translated the Torah and prophetic lectionaries into Aramaic. The rendering remained for
long solely an oral, impromptu exercise, but gradually, by dint of repetition, certain verbal forms and
phrases became fixed and eventually committed to writing.
There are several Targums (translations) of the Pentateuch. The Babylonian Targum is known as
“Onkelos,” named after its reputed author. The Targum is Palestinian in origin, but it was early
transferred to Babylon, where it was revised and achieved great authority. At a later date, probably not
before the 9th century CE, it was re-exported to Palestine, where it displaced other, local Targums. On
the whole, Onkelos is quite literal, but it shows a tendency to obscure expressions attributing human
form and feelings to God. It also usually faithfully reflects rabbinic exegesis.
The most famous of the Palestinian Targums is that popularly known as “Jonathan,” a name derived
from a 14th-century scribal mistake that solved a manuscript abbreviation “TJ” as “Targum Jonathan”
instead of “Targum Jerusalem.” In contrast to two other Targums, Jerusalem II and III, which are highly
fragmentary, Pseudo-Jonathan (Jerusalem I) is virtually complete. It is a composite of the Old Palestinian
Targum and an early version of Onkelos with an admixture of material from diverse periods. It contains
much rabbinic material as well as homiletic and didactic amplifications. There is evidence of great
antiquity but also much late material, indicating that Pseudo-Jonathan could not have received its
present form before the Islamic period.
Another extant Aramaic version is the Targum to the Samaritan Pentateuch. It is less literal than the
Jewish Targums, and its text was never officially fixed.
The Targum to the Prophets also originated in Palestine and received its final editing in Babylonia. It is
ascribed to Jonathan ben Uzziel, a pupil of Hillel, the famous rabbinic sage of the 1st century BCE–1st
century CE, though it is in fact a composite work of varying ages. In its present form, it discloses a
dependence on Onkelos, though it is less literal.
The Aramaic renderings of the Hagiographa are relatively late productions, none of them antedating the
5th century CE.

The Septuagint (LXX)

The story of the Greek translation of the Pentateuch is told in the Letter of Aristeas, which purports to
be a contemporary document written by Aristeas, a Greek official at the Egyptian court of Ptolemy II
Philadelphus (285–246 BCE). It recounts how the law of the Jews was translated into Greek by Jewish
scholars sent from Jerusalem at the request of the king.
This narrative, repeated in one form or another by Philo and rabbinic sources, is full of inaccuracies that
prove that the author was an Alexandrian Jew writing well after the events he described had taken
place. The Septuagint Pentateuch, which is all that is discussed, does, however, constitute an
independent corpus within the Greek Bible, and it was probably first translated as a unit by a company
of scholars in Alexandria about the middle of the 3rd century BCE.
The Septuagint, as the entire Greek Bible came to be called, has a long and complex history and took
well over a century to be completed. It is for this reason not a unified or consistent translation. The
Septuagint became the instrument whereby the basic teachings of Judaism were mediated to the pagan
world, and it became an indispensable factor in the spread of Christianity.
The adoption of the Septuagint as the Bible of the Christians naturally engendered suspicion on the part
of Jews. In addition, the emergence of a single authoritative text type after the destruction of the
Temple made the great differences between it and the Septuagint increasingly intolerable, and the need
was felt for a Greek translation based upon the current Hebrew text in circulation.

The version of Aquila

About 130 CE Aquila, a convert to Judaism from Pontus in Asia Minor, translated the Hebrew Bible into
Greek under the supervision of Rabbi Akiba. Executed with slavish literalness, it attempted to reproduce
the original to the most minute detail, even to the extent of coining derivations from Greek roots to
correspond to Hebrew usage. Little of it has survived except in quotations, fragments of the Hexapla,
and palimpsests (parchments erased and used again) from the Cairo Geniza.

The revision of Theodotion

A second revision of the Greek text was made by Theodotion (of unknown origins) late in the 2nd
century, though it is not entirely clear whether the Septuagint or some other Greek version underlay his
revision. The new rendering was characterized by a tendency toward verbal consistency and much
transliteration of Hebrew words.

The translation of Symmachus

Still another Greek translation was made toward the end of the same century by St. Symmachus, an
otherwise unknown scholar, who made use of his predecessors. His influence was small despite the
superior elegance of his work. Jerome did utilize Symmachus for his Vulgate, but, other than that, his
translation is known largely through fragments of the Hexapla.

Origen’s Hexapla

The multiplication of versions doubtless proved to be a source of increasing confusion in the 3rd
century. This situation the Alexandrian theologian Origen, working at Caesarea between 230 and 240 CE,
sought to remedy. In his Hexapla(“Sixfold”), he presented in parallel vertical columns the Hebrew text,
the same in Greek letters, and the versions of Aquila, Symmachus, the Septuagint, and Theodotion, in
that order. In the case of some books, Psalms for instance, three more columns were added. The
Hexapla serves as an important guide to Palestinian pre-Masoretic pronunciation of the language. The
main interest of Origen lay in the fifth column, the Septuagint, which he edited on the basis of the
Hebrew. He used the obels (− or ÷) and asterisk (*) to mark, respectively, words found in the Greek text
but not in the Hebrew and vice versa.
The Hexapla was a work of such magnitude that it is unlikely to have been copied as a whole. Origen
himself produced an abbreviated edition, the Tetrapla, containing only the last four columns. The
original manuscript of the Hexapla is known to have been extant as late as about 600 CE. Today it
survives only in fragments.

Manuscripts and printed editions of the Septuagint

The manuscripts are conveniently classified by papyrus uncials (capital letters) and minuscules (cursive
script). The papyrus fragments run into the hundreds, of varying sizes and importance, ranging from the
formative period of the Septuagint through the middle of the 7th century. Two pre-Christian fragments
of Deuteronomy from Egypt are of outstanding significance. Although written not on papyrus but on
parchment or leather, the fragments from Qumrān of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers, and the leather
scroll of the Minor Prophets from Naḥal Ḥever from the last centuries BCE and first centuries CE,
deserve special mention among the earliest extant. The most important papyri are those of the Chester
Beatty collection, which contains parts of 11 codices preserving fragments of nine Old Testament books.
Their dates vary between the 2nd and 4th centuries. During the next 300 years papyrus texts multiplied
rapidly, and remnants of about 200 are known.
The uncials are all codices written on vellum between the 4th and 10th centuries. The most outstanding
are Vaticanus, which is an almost complete 4th-century Old Testament; Sinaiticus, of the same period
but less complete; and the practically complete 5th-century Alexandrinus. These three originally
contained both Testaments. Many others were partial manuscripts from the beginning. One of the most
valuable of these is the Codex Marchalianus of the Prophets, written in the 6th century.
The minuscule codices begin to appear in the 9th century. From the 11th to the 16th century they are
the only ones found, and nearly 1,500 have been recorded.

The first printed Septuagint was that of the Complutensian Polyglot (1514–17). Since it was not released
until 1522, however, the 1518 Aldine Venice edition actually was available first. The standard edition
until modern times was that of Pope Sixtus V, 1587. In the 19th and 20th centuries several critical
editions were printed.

Coptic versions

The spread of Christianity among the non-Greek-speaking peasant communities of Egypt necessitated
the translation of the Scriptures into the native tongue (Coptic). These versions may be considered to be
wholly Christian in origin and largely based on the Greek Bible. They also display certain affinities with
the Old Latin. Nothing certain is known about the Coptic translations except that they probably antedate
the earliest known manuscripts from the end of the 3rd and the beginning of the 4th centuries CE.

The Armenian version

The Armenian version is an expression of a nationalist movement that brought about a separation from
the rest of the church (mid-5th century), the discontinuance of Syriac in Greek worship, and the
invention of a national alphabet by St. Mesrob, also called Mashtots (c. 361–439/440). According to
tradition, St. Mesrob first translated Proverbs from the Syriac. Existing manuscripts of the official
Armenian recension, however, are based on the Hexaplaric Septuagint, though they show
some Peshitta (Syriac version) influence. The Armenian Bible is noted for its beauty and accuracy.

The Georgian version

According to Armenian tradition, the Georgian version was also the work of Mesrob, but the Psalter, the
oldest part of the Georgian Old Testament, is probably not earlier than the 5th century. Some
manuscripts were based upon Greek versions, others upon the Armenian.
The Ethiopic version
The Ethiopic version poses special problems. The earliest Bible probably was based on Greek versions,
after Ethiopia had been converted to Christianity during the 4th and 5th centuries. The earliest existing
manuscripts, however, belong to the 13th century. Most manuscripts from the 14th century on seem to
reflect Arabic or Coptic influence, and it is not certain whether these represent the original translation
or later ones. Many readings agree with the Hebrew against the Septuagint, which may have been
caused by a Hexaplaric influence.

The Gothic version

The Gothic version was produced in the mid-4th century by Ulfilas, a Christian missionary who also
invented the Gothic alphabet. It constitutes practically all that is left of Gothic literature. The translation
of the Old Testament has entirely disappeared except for fragments of Ezra and Nehemiah. Though a
Greek base is certain, some scholars deny the attribution of these remnants to Ulfilas.

The Old Latin version

The existence of a Latin translation can be attested in North Africa and southern Gaul as early as the
second half of the 2nd century CE and in Rome at the beginning of the following century. Its origins may
possibly be attributed to a Christian adoption of biblical versions made by Jews in the Roman province of
Africa, where the vernacular was exclusively Latin. Only portions or quotations from it have been
preserved, and from these it can be assumed that the translation was made not from Hebrew but from
Greek. For this reason, the Old Latin version is especially valuable because it reflects the state of the
Septuagint before Origen’s revision. By the 3rd century, several Latin versions were circulating, and
African and European recensions can be differentiated. Whether they all diverged from an original single
translation or existed from the beginning independently cannot be determined. The textual confusion
and the vulgar and colloquial nature of the Old Latin recension had become intolerable to the church
authorities by the last decade of the 4th century, and about 382 Pope Damasus decided to remedy the
situation.

Versions after the 4th century

The Vulgate
The task of revision fell to Eusebius Hieronymus, generally known as St. Jerome(died 419/420), whose
knowledge of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew made him the outstanding Christian biblical scholar of his time.
Jerome produced three revisions of the Psalms, all extant. The first was based on the Septuagint and is
known as the Roman Psalter because it was incorporated into the liturgy at Rome. The second,
produced in Palestine from the Hexaplaric Septuagint, tended to bring the Latin closer to the Hebrew. Its
popularity in Gaul was such that it came to be known as the Gallican Psalter. This version was later
adopted into the Vulgate. The third revision, actually a fresh translation, was made directly from the
Hebrew, but it never enjoyed wide circulation. In the course of preparing the latter, Jerome realized the
futility of revising the Old Latin solely on the basis of the Greek and apparently left that task unfinished.
By the end of 405 he had executed his own Latin translation of the entire Old Testament based on the
“Hebrew truth” (Hebraica veritas).
Because of the canonical status of the Greek version within the church, Jerome’s version was received at
first with much suspicion, for it seemed to cast doubt on the authenticity of the Septuagint and
exhibited divergences from the Old Latin that sounded discordant to those familiar with the traditional
renderings. St. Augustine feared a consequent split between the Greek and Latin churches. The innate
superiority of Jerome’s version, however, assured its ultimate victory, and by the 8th century it had
become the Latin Vulgate (“the common version”) throughout the churches of Western Christendom,
where it remained the chief Bible until the Reformation.
In the course of centuries of rival coexistence, the Old Latin and Jerome’s Vulgate tended to react upon
each other so that the Vulgate text became a composite. Other corruptions—noted in over 8,000
surviving manuscripts—crept in as a result of scribal transmission. Several medieval attempts were
made to purify the Vulgate, but with little success. In 1546 the reforming Council of Trent accorded this
version “authentic” status, and the need for a corrected text became immediate, especially because
printing (introduced in the mid-15th century) could ensure, at last, a stabilized text. Because the Sixtine
edition of Pope Sixtus V (1590) did not receive widespread support, Pope Clement VIII produced a fresh
revision in 1592. This Clementine text remained the official edition of the Roman Catholic Church. In
1907 the Benedictine order, on the initiative of Pope Pius X, began preparing a comprehensive edition.
By 1969 only the Prophets were still awaiting publication to complete the Old Testament. A year later a
papal commission under Augustinus Cardinal Bea of Germany was charged with the task of preparing a
new “revision of the Vulgate,” taking the Benedictine edition as its working base.

Syriac versions
The Bible of the Syriac churches is known as the Peshitta (“Simple” translation). Though neither the
reason for the title nor the origins of the versions are known, the earliest translations most likely served
the needs of the Jewish communities in the region of Adiabene (in Mesopotamia), which are known to
have existed as early as the 1st century CE. This probably explains the archaicstratum unquestionably
present in the Pentateuch, Prophets, and Psalms of the Peshitta as well as the undoubtedly Jewish
influences generally, though Jewish Christians also may have been involved in the rendering.
The Peshitta displays great variety in its style and in the translation techniques adopted. The Pentateuch
is closest to the Masoretic text, but elsewhere there is much affinity with the Septuagint. This latter
phenomenon might have resulted from later Christian revision.
Following the split in the Syriac church in the 5th century into Nestorian (East Syrian) and Jacobite (West
Syrian) traditions, the textual history of the Peshitta became bifurcated. Because the Nestorian church
was relatively isolated, its manuscripts are considered to be superior.
A revision of the Syriac translation was made in the early 6th century by Philoxenos, bishop of Mabbug,
based on the Lucianic recension of the Septuagint. Another (the Syro-Hexaplaric version) was made by
Bishop Paul of Tella in 617 from the Hexaplaric text of the Septuagint. A Palestinian Syriac version,
extant in fragments, is known to go back to at least 700, and a fresh recension was made by Jacob of
Edessa (died 708).
There are many manuscripts of the Peshitta, of which the oldest bears the date 442. Only four complete
codices are extant from between the 5th and 12th centuries. No critical edition yet exists, but one is
being prepared by the Peshitta Commission of the International Organization for the Study of the Old
Testament.
Arabic versions

There is no reliable evidence of any pre-Islamic Arabic translation. Only when large Jewish and Christian
communities found themselves under Muslim rule after the Arab conquests of the 7th century did the
need for an Arabic vernacular Scripture arise. The first and most important was that of Saʿadia ben
Joseph (892–942), made directly from Hebrew and written in Hebrew script, which became the standard
version for all Jews in Muslim countries. The version also exercised its influence upon Egyptian
Christians, and its rendering of the Pentateuch was adapted by Abū al-Ḥasan to the Samaritan Torah in
the 11th–12th centuries. Another Samaritan Arabic version of the Pentateuch was made by Abū Saʿīd
(Abū al-Barakāt) in the 13th century. Among other translations from the Hebrew, that of the 10th-
century Karaite Yāphith ibn ʿAlī is the most noteworthy.
In 946 a Spanish Christian of Córdoba, Isaac son of Velásquez, made a version of the Gospels from Latin.
Manuscripts of 16th-century Arabic translations of both Testaments exist in St. Petersburg, and both the
Paris and London Polyglots of the 17th century included Arabic versions. In general, the Arabic
manuscripts reveal a bewildering variety of renderings, dependent on Hebrew, Greek,
Samaritan, Syriac, Coptic, and Latin translations. As such, they have no value for critical studies. Several
modern Arabic translations by both Protestants and Catholics were made in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Later and modern versions: English

Knowledge of the pre-Wycliffite English renditions stems from the many actual manuscripts that have
survived and from secondary literature, such as book lists, wills, citations by later authors, and
references in polemical works that have preserved the memory of many a translation effort.

Old English versions

For about seven centuries after the conversion of England to Christianity(beginning in the 3rd century),
the common people had no direct access to the text of the Scriptures. Ignorant of Latin, their biblical
knowledge was derived principally from sermons and metrical prose paraphrases and summaries. The
earliest poetic rendering of any part of the Bible is credited to Caedmon(flourished 658–680), but only
the opening lines of his poem on the Creation, in the Northumbrian dialect of Old English, have been
preserved.
An actual translation of the Psalter into Old English is ascribed to Aldhelm, bishop of Sherborne (died
709), but nothing has survived by which its true character, if it actually existed, might be determined.
Linguistic considerations alone rule out the possibility that the prose translation of Psalms 1–50 extant in
the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris is a 7th-century production. In the next century, St. Bede the
Venerable (died 735) is said to have translated parts of the Gospels, but, though he knew Greek and
possibly even some Hebrew, he does not appear to have applied himself to the Old Testament.
The outstanding name of the 9th century is that of King Alfred the Great. He appended to his laws a free
translation of the Ten Commandments and an abridgment of the enactments of Exodus 21–23. These
actually constitute the earliest surviving examples of a portion of the Old Testament in Old English
prose.
An important step toward the emergence of a true English translation was the development of the
interlinear gloss, a valuable pedagogic device for the introduction of youthful members of monastic
schools to the study of the Bible. The Vespasian Psalter is the outstanding surviving example of that
technique from the 9th century. In the next century the Lindisfarne Gospels, written in Latin circa 700,
were glossed in Old English circa 950.
The last significant figure associated with the vernacular Bible before the Norman Conquest was the so-
called Aelfric the Grammarian (c. 955–1020). Though he claimed to have rendered several books into
English, his work is more a paraphrase and abridgment than a continuous translation.

Middle English versions

The displacement of the English upper class, with the consequent decline of the Old English tradition,
attendant upon the Norman invasion, arrested for a while the movement toward the production of the
English Bible. Within about 50 years (c. 1120) of the Conquest, Eadwine’s Psalterium triplex, which
contained the Latin version accompanied by Middle English and Old English renderings, appeared. The
contemporary Oxford Psalter achieved such influence that it became the basis of all subsequent Middle
English versions. By 1361 a prose translation of most of Scripture into Middle English had been
executed.

The Wycliffite versions

By the middle of the 13th century, the Anglo component in the Anglo-Norman amalgam had begun to
reassert itself, and the close of the century witnessed a Northumbrian version of the Psalter made
directly from Latin, which, because it survived in several manuscripts, must have achieved relatively
wide circulation. By the next century, English had gradually superseded French among the upper classes.
When the first complete translation of the Bible into English emerged, it became the object of violent
controversy because it was inspired by the heretical teachings of John Wycliffe. Intended for the
common people, it became the instrument of opposition to ecclesiastical authority.
The exact degree of Wycliffe’s personal involvement in the Scriptures that came to bear his name is not
clear. Because a note containing the words “Here ends the translation of Nicholas of Hereford” is found
in a manuscript copy of the original (and incomplete) translation, it may be presumed that, though there
must have been other assistants, Hereford can be credited with overall responsibility for most of the
translation and that his summons before a synod in London and his subsequent departure for Rome in
1382 terminated his participation in the work. Who completed it is uncertain.
The Wycliffite translations encountered increasing ecclesiastical opposition. In 1408 a synod
of clergy summoned to Oxford by Archbishop Arundel forbade the translation and use of Scripture in the
vernacular. The proscription was rigorously enforced but remained ineffectual. In the course of the next
century, the Wycliffite Bible, the only existing English version, achieved wide popularity, as is evidenced
by the nearly 200 manuscripts extant, most of them copied between 1420 and 1450.

ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS AFTER THE REFORMATION

The translation of William Tyndale

Because of the influence of printing and a demand for Scriptures in the vernacular, William
Tyndale began working on a New Testament translation directly from the Greek in 1523. Because of
political and ecclesiastical pressures, the work could not be continued in England, so the printing of his
translation began in Cologne (in Germany) in 1525. Again under pressure, this time from the city
authorities, Tyndale had to flee to Worms, where two complete editions were published in 1525. Copies
were smuggled into England, where they were at once proscribed. Of 18,000 copies printed (1525–28),
two complete volumes and a fragment are all that remain.
When the New Testament was finished, Tyndale began work on the Old Testament. The Pentateuch was
issued in Marburg in 1530, each of the five books being separately published and circulated. Tyndale’s
greatest achievement was the ability to strike a felicitous balance between the needs of scholarship,
simplicity of expression, and literary gracefulness, all in a uniform dialect. The effect was the creation of
an English style of Bible translation, tinged with Hebraisms, that was to serve as the model for all future
English versions for nearly 400 years.

The translation of Miles Coverdale

A change in atmosphere in England found expression in a translation that, for all its great significance,
turned out to be a retrograde step in the manner of its execution, although it proved to be
a vindication of Tyndale’s work. On October 4, 1535, the first complete English Bible, the work of Miles
Coverdale, came off the press either in Zürich or in Cologne. The edition was soon exhausted. A second
impression appeared in the same year and a third in 1536. A new edition, “overseen and corrected,”
was published in England by James Nycholson in Southwark in 1537. Another edition of the same year
bore the announcement “set forth with the king’s most gracious license.” In 1538 a revised edition of
Coverdale’s New Testament printed in England, with the English and the Latin Vulgate in parallel
columns, was found to be so full of errors that Coverdale promptly arranged for a rival, corrected
version to appear in Paris.

The Thomas Matthew version

In the same year that Coverdale’s authorized version appeared, another English Bible was issued under
royal license and with the encouragement of ecclesiastical and political power. It appeared (in
Antwerp?) under the name of Thomas Matthew, but it is certainly the work of John Rogers, a close
friend of Tyndale. Although the version claimed to be “truly and purely translated into English,” it was in
reality a combination of the labours of Tyndale and Coverdale. Rogers used the former’s Pentateuch and
1535 revision of the New Testament and the latter’s translation from Ezra to Malachi and his Apocrypha.
Rogers’s own contribution was primarily editorial.

The Great Bible

In an injunction of 1538, Henry VIII commanded the clergy to install in a convenient place in every parish
church “one book of the whole Bible of the largest volume in English.” The order seems to refer to an
anticipated revision of the Matthew Bible. The first edition was printed in Paris and appeared in London
in April 1539 in 2,500 copies. The huge page size earned it the sobriquet“the Great Bible.” It was
received with immediate and wholehearted enthusiasm.
The first printing was exhausted within a short while, and it went through six subsequent editions
between 1540 and 1541. “Editions” is preferred to “impressions” here since the six successive issues
were not identical.

The Geneva Bible

The brief efflorescence of the Protestant movement during the short reign of Edward VI (1547–53) saw
the reissue of the Scriptures but no fresh attempts at revision. The repressive rule of Edward’s
successor, Mary, a Roman Catholic, put an end to the printing of Bibles in England for several years.
Their public reading was proscribed and their presence in the churches discontinued.
The persecution of Protestants caused the focus of English biblical scholarship to be shifted abroad,
where it flourished in greater freedom. A colony of Protestant exiles, led by Coverdale and John
Knox (the Scottish reformer) and under the influence of John Calvin, published the New Testament in
1557.
The editors of the Geneva Bible (or “Breeches Bible,” so named because of its rendering of the first
garments made for Adam and Eve in Genesis 3:7; published in 1560) may almost certainly be identified
as William Whittingham, the brother-in-law of Calvin’s wife, and his assistants Anthony Gilby and
Thomas Sampson. The Geneva Bible was not printed in England until 1576, but it was allowed to be
imported without hindrance. The accession of Elizabeth in 1558 put an end to the persecution of
Protestants, and the Great Bible was soon reinstated in the churches. The Geneva Bible, however,
gained instantaneous and lasting popularity over against its rival, the Great Bible. Its
technical innovations contributed not a little to its becoming for a long time the family Bible of England,
which, next to Tyndale, exercised the greatest influence upon the King James Version.

The Bishops’ Bible

The failure of the Great Bible to win popular acceptance against the obvious superiority of its Geneva
rival, and the objectionable partisan flavour of the latter’s marginal annotations, made a new revision a
necessity. By about 1563–64 Archbishop Matthew Parker of Canterbury had determined upon its
execution, and the work was apportioned among many scholars, most of them bishops, from which the
popular name was derived.
The Bishops’ Bible came off the press in 1568 as a handsome folio volume, the most impressive of all
16th-century English Bibles with respect to the quality of paper, typography, and illustrations. A portrait
of the queen adorned the engraved title page, but it contained no dedication. For some reason, Queen
Elizabeth never officially authorized the work, but sanction for its public use came from
the Convocation (church synod or assembly) of 1571, and it thereby became in effect the second
authorized version.
The Douai-Reims Bible
The Roman Catholics addressed themselves affirmatively to the same problem faced by the Anglican
church: a Bible in the vernacular. The initiator of the first such attempt was Cardinal Allen of Reims,
France, although the burden of the work fell to Gregory Martin, professor of Hebrew at Douai. The New
Testament appeared in 1582, but the Old Testament, delayed by lack of funds, did not appear until
1609, when it was finally published at Douai under the editorship of Thomas Worthington. In the
intervening period, the Douai-Reims Bible had been brought into line with the new text of the Vulgate
authorized by Clement VIII in 1592.
The King James and subsequent versions
The King James (Authorized) Version

Because of changing conditions, another official revision of the Protestant Bible in English was needed.
The reign of Queen Elizabeth had succeeded in imposing a high degree of uniformity upon the church.
However, the failure of the Bishops’ Bible to supplant its Geneva rival made for a discordant note in the
quest for unity.
A conference of churchmen in 1604 became noteworthy for its request that the English Bible be revised
because existing translations “were corrupt and not answerable to the truth of the original.” King James
I was quick to appreciate the broader value of the proposal and at once made the project his own.
By June 30, 1604, King James had approved a list of 54 revisers, although extantrecords show that 47
scholars actually participated. They were organized into six companies, two each working separately
at Westminster, Oxford, and Cambridge on sections of the Bible assigned to them. The Bible was finally
published in 1611.
Not since the Septuagint had a translation of the Bible been undertaken under royal sponsorship as a
cooperative venture on so grandiose a scale. An elaborate set of rules was contrived to curb
individual proclivities and to ensure its scholarly and nonpartisan character. In contrast to earlier
practice, the new version was to preserve vulgarly used forms of proper names, in keeping with its aim
to make the Scriptures popular and familiar.
The impact of Jewish sources upon the King James Version is one of its noteworthy features. The wealth
of scholarly tools available to the translators made their final choice of rendering an exercise in
originality and independent judgment. For this reason, the new version was more faithful to the original
languages of the Bible and more scholarly than any of its predecessors. The impact of the Hebrew upon
the revisers was so pronounced that they seem to have made a conscious effort to imitate its rhythm
and style in the Old Testament. The English of the New Testament actually turned out to be superior to
its Greek original.
Two editions were actually printed in 1611, later distinguished as the “He” and “She” Bibles because of
the variant readings “he” and “she” in the final clause of Ruth 3:15—“and he went into the city.” Both
printings contained errors. Some errors in subsequent editions have become famous: the so-
called Wicked Bible (1631) derives its name from the omission of “not” in Exodus 20:14—“Thou shalt
commit adultery”—for which the printers were fined £300, and the “Vinegar Bible” (1717) stems from a
misprinting of “vineyard” in the heading of Luke 20.
By the 18th century the King James Version had supplanted the Great Bible and the Geneva Bible in
popularity and use. Even before the 20th century it was regarded as a masterpiece of English-language
literature. By the late 20th century it had become the favoured translation of English-speaking Christian
fundamentalists, some of whom regarded it as divinely inspired.

The English Revised Version

The remarkable and total victory of the King James Version could not entirely obscure
those inherent weaknesses that were independent of its typographical errors. The manner of its
execution had resulted in a certain unevenness and lack of consistency. Because the translators’
understanding of the Hebrew tense system was often limited, their version contains inaccurate and
infelicitous renderings. In particular, the Greek text of the New Testament that they used as their base
was a poor one. The great early Greek codices were not then known or available, and the Hellenistic
papyri which were to shed light on the common Greek dialect had not yet been discovered.
A committee established by the Convocation of Canterbury in February 1870 reported favourably three
months later on the idea of revising the King James Version; two companies were formed, one each for
the Old and New Testaments. A novel development was the inclusion of scholars representative of the
major Christian traditions, except Roman Catholics (who declined the invitation to participate).
Another innovation was the formation of parallel companies in the United States, to whom the work of
the British scholars was submitted and who in turn sent back their reactions. The instructions to the
committees made clear that only a revision, not a new translation, was contemplated.
The New Testament was published in Britain on May 17, 1881, and three days later in the United States,
after 11 years of labour. Over 30,000 changes were made, of which more than 5,000 represent
differences between the Greek text used for the Revised Version and that used as the basis of the King
James Version. Most of the other changes were made in the interest of consistency or modernization.
The publication of the Old Testament in 1885 stirred far less excitement, partly because it was less well
known than the New Testament and partly because fewer changes were involved. The poetic and
prophetic books, especially Job, Ecclesiastes, and Isaiah, benefited greatly.
The revision of the Apocrypha, not originally contemplated, came to be included only because
of copyright arrangements made with the university presses of Oxford and Cambridge and was first
published in 1895.

The American Standard Version

According to the original agreement between the British and American scholars who worked on the
Revised Version, the preferred readings and renderings of the American revisers that their British
counterparts had declined to accept were published in an appendix to the Revised Version. In 1900 the
American edition of the New Testament, which incorporated the American scholars’ preferences into
the body of the text, was produced. A year later the Old Testament was added but not the Apocrypha.
The alterations covered a large number of obsolete words and expressions and replaced Anglicisms with
the diction then in vogue in the United States.

The Revised Standard Version

The American Standard Version was an expression of sensitivity to the needs of the American public. At
about the same time that it was produced, several individual and unofficial translations into modern
speech made from 1885 on gained popularity, their appeal reinforced by the discovery that the Greek of
the New Testament used the common nonliterary variety of the language spoken throughout
the Roman Empire when Christianity was in its formative stage. The notion that a nonliterary modern
rendering of the New Testament best expressed the form and spirit of the original was hard to refute.
This plus a new maturity in Classical, Hebraic, and theological scholarship in the United States led to a
desire to produce a native American version of the English Bible.
In 1928 the copyright of the American Standard Version was acquired by the International Council of
Religious Education and thereby passed into the ownership of churches representing 40 major
denominations in the United States and Canada. A two-year study by a special committee
recommended a thorough revision, and in 1937 the council gave its authorization to the proposal. Not
until 1946, however, did the revision of the New Testament appear in print, and another six years
elapsed before the complete Revised Standard Version (RSV) was published. The RSV was the work of 32
scholars, one of them Jewish, drawn from the faculties of 20 universities and theological seminaries. A
decision to translate the Apocrypha was not made until 1952, and the revision appeared in 1957. Insofar
as the RSV was the first version to make use of the Dead Sea Scroll of Isaiah, it was revolutionary.
The RSV was essentially not a new translation into modern speech but a revision. It did engage in a good
deal of modernization—e.g., dispensing with archaic pronouns, except “thou” for the Deity. But its
basic conservatism was displayed in the retention of forms or expressions in passages that had special
devotional or literary associations, even where this practice made for inconsistency. The primary aim
was to produce a version for use in private and public worship.

The New English Bible

The idea of a completely new translation into British English was first broached in 1946. Under a joint
committee representing the major Protestant churches of the British Isles, with Roman
Catholics appointed as observers, the New Testament was published in 1961, and a second edition
appeared in 1970. The Old Testament and Apocrypha were also published in 1970.
The New English Bible proved to be an instant commercial success, selling at a rate of 33,000 copies a
week in 1970. The translation differed from the English mainstream Bible in that it was not a revision
but a completely fresh version from the original tongues. It abandoned the tradition of “biblical English”
and, except for the retention of “thou” and “thy” in addressing God, freed itself of all archaisms. It
endeavoured to render the original into the idiom of contemporary English while
avoiding ephemeral modernisms.

The New International Version

In the 1960s a meeting of Protestant scholars and clergy, largely Evangelicals, formed the Committee for
Bible Translation in order to produce a modern translation of the Bible that, it was hoped, would
balance the power and literary style of the original text with contemporary English. The International
Bible Society (later Biblica) undertook the translation and produced translations first of the New
Testament (1973) and then of the complete Bible (1978). Scholars from various Protestant traditions
participated. The New International Version (NIV) subsequently became the best-selling English-
language translation by the early 21st century and the most popular with Evangelicals. However, some
scholars raised concerns about the rendering of some key passages of Scripture, most notably in St.
Paul’s letters, which they felt had been distorted by an overt evangelical agenda. Further, an attempt at
introducing gender-sensitive language attracted such antipathy that a 1997 revision was abandoned. A
gender-inclusive Today’s New International Version (TNIV) attracted the scorn of traditionalists. In 2011
the NIV was revised again, this time to much broader acceptance by traditionalists. However, some
fundamentalist denominations, such as the Southern Baptist Convention, rejected the new translation.

The New King James Version

In 1975 the Texas-based evangelical scholar Arthur L. Farstad assembled a group of 130 biblical scholars,
theologians, and clergy for the task of producing a modern English version of the King James Version.
The New Testament was published in 1979, the Psalms a year later, and the complete New King James
Version (NKJV) in 1983. The NKJV featured modernized spellings and the replacement of some 17th-
century terminology (e.g., “thou” and “thee”) with more-contemporary words and phrases. Yet, because
the translators and editors strove to preserve the literary style of the original King James Version, which
had been widely regarded as one of the high-water marks of English literature, traditional sentence
structure was preserved. The NKJV gained popularity among Bible societies such as Gideons
International.

The New Revised Standard Version

By the late 20th century, biblical scholarship had so progressed, particularly given both the mid-century
discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the expansion of the study of ancient Semitic languages of the
Middle Eastern context in which the biblical texts emerged and developed, that a new translation of the
Revised Standard Version was proposed. Under the auspicesof the U.S. National Council of Churches,
Protestant, Eastern Orthodox, and Roman Catholic scholars, as well as a contingent of Jewish scholars
who participated in the Old Testament translation, strove to produce a Bible that would preserve “all
the best” of the King James Version and the Revised Standard Version while acknowledging linguistic
and archaeological discoveries since the mid-20th century that had greatly enhanced knowledge of the
social, cultural, and theological context of the biblical world.
The finished product gained acclaim for its scholarship and its accuracy as well as for its accessibility and
literary quality. Published in 1989 in both Anglicized and U.S. versions, the New Revised Standard
Version (NRSV) gained general acceptance among scholars, clergy, and laypersons from the three main
branches of mainstream Christianity. The NRSV also became the standard translation for most university
and seminary biblical studies and religious studies courses. However, some traditionalists objected to
the NRSV’s use of gender-inclusive language (e.g., printing “brothers and sisters” when it is clear in the
base texts that both men and women are being addressed and the use of male-only language
may constitute a distortion). Others bristled at the translators’ use of historical method
and archaeology when suggesting a reinterpretation of a traditional rendering of the text. In 1990 the
Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church in America (OCA) ultimately decided not to permit either liturgical or
study use of the NRSV, because the translators relied on the Hebrew Masoretic text in translating the
Old Testament instead of on the Greek-language Septuagint, which is accepted by Eastern
Orthodox churches.

Mid-20th-century Roman Catholic versions

With the exception of a version by the Irish American archbishop Francis Patrick Kenrick (published in six
volumes, 1849–60), all Roman Catholic versions up to the 20th century were merely versions of
the Douai-Reims Bible. A celebrated translation was that of Ronald Knox (New Testament, 1945; Old
Testament, 1949; complete edition with Old Testament revised, 1955).
The most significant development in modern Catholic translations was initiated by the Confraternity of
Christian Doctrine in 1936. A New Testament version of the Latin Clementine Vulgate (1941), intended
as a revision, was in effect a new translation into clear and simple English. The Old Testament revision
remained unfinished, the work having been interrupted by a decision inspired by the Pontifical Biblical
Commission in 1943 to encourage modern vernacular translations from the original languages instead of
from the Latin Vulgate. Accordingly, both the Old and New Testaments were respectively retranslated
into modern English from the Hebrew and Greek originals. The resultant Confraternity Version (1952–
61) was later issued as the New American Bible (1970). Another, more colloquial modern version is the
Jerusalem Bible (1966), translated from the French Catholic Bible de Jérusalem (one-volume edition,
1961). An updated translation, The New Jerusalem Bible, was published in 1985. Both Anglicized and
American Catholic versions of the New Revised Standard Version were published in 1991. These were
approved by the Vatican for personal but not liturgical use.

Special versions

In the late 19th century the American evangelist and publisher Louis Klopsch devised the idea of
publishing Bibles featuring the words attributed to Jesus Christ in red text. Klopsch published the first
red-letter New Testament in 1899; a complete Bible appeared in 1901. The conceit gained rapid
popularity and quickly became commonplace in various subsequent translations, particularly in “study
bibles” intended for both personal and group reading and discussion. A similar principle was employed
in various special-interest versions of the Bible. For example, 2008 saw the publication of The Green
Bible, a version of the New Revised Standard Version with “ecologically sensitive” passages of Scripture,
particularly those attributed to God in the Old Testament and specifically to Jesus in the New
Testament, indicated in green print.

Jewish versions
Though Jews in English-speaking lands have generally utilized the King James Version and the Revised
Version, such English versions present great difficulties. They contain departures from the traditional
Hebrew text, they sometimes embody Christological interpretations, the headings are often doctrinally
objectionable, and the renderings in the legal portions of the Pentateuch frequently diverge from
traditional Jewish exegesis. In addition, where the meaning of the original is obscure, Jewish readers
prefer to consult the well-known medieval Jewish commentators. Finally, the order of the Hebrew
canon differs from that of the Christian canons, and the liturgical needs of Jews make inconvenient a
version that does not mark the scriptural readings for Sabbaths and festivals.
Until 1917 all Jewish translations were the efforts of individuals. Planned in 1892, the project of
the Jewish Publication Society of America was the first translation for which a group representing Jewish
learning among English-speaking Jews assumed joint responsibility. This version essentially retained the
Elizabethan diction of the King James Version and yet stuck unswervingly to the received Hebrew text,
which it interpreted in accordance with Jewish tradition and the best scholarship of the day. For over
half a century it remained authoritative, even though it laid no claim to any
official ecclesiastical sanction.
In response to an increasingly felt need for modernization, a committee of translators was established,
composed of three professional biblical and Semitic scholars and three rabbis. It began its work in 1955
and the Pentateuch was issued in 1962. The Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther,
and Jonah—all in a single volume for the convenience of synagogue use—followed in 1969,
and Isaiah and Psalms appeared in 1973. A second committee had been set up in 1955 to work
separately on the rest of the Hagiographa (Ketuvim).

MEDIEVAL AND MODERN VERSIONS: DUTCH, FRENCH, AND GERMAN

Dutch versions
Until the Reformation, Dutch Bible translations were largely free adaptations, paraphrases, or rhymed
verse renderings of single books or parts thereof. A popular religious revival at the end of the 12th
century accelerated the demand for vernacular Scriptures, and one of the earliest extant examples is the
Liège manuscript (c. 1270) translation of the Diatessaron (a composite rendering of the four Gospels)
by Tatian, a 2nd-century Syrian Christian heretical scholar; it is believed to derive from a lost Old Latin
original. Best known of all the rhymed versions is the Rijmbijbel of Jacob van Maerlant (1271), based on
Peter Comestar’s Historia scholastica. Despite the poor quality of Johan Schutken’s translation of the
New Testament and Psalms (1384), it became the most widely used of medieval Dutch versions.
With the Reformation came a renewed interest in the study of the Scriptures. Martin Luther’s Bible was
repeatedly rendered into Dutch, the most important version being that of Jacob van Liesveldt (1526). It
was mainly to counter the popularity of this edition that Roman Catholics produced their own Dutch
Bible, executed by Nicolaas van Winghe (Leuven, 1548). A revision printed by Jan Moerentorf (Moretus,
1599) became the standard version until it was superseded by that of the Peter Canisius Association
(1929–39), now in general use. A fresh translation of the New Testament into modern Dutch appeared
in 1961.

French versions

The deep conflicts that characterized the history of Christianity in France made it difficult for one
authoritative version to emerge. The first complete French Bible was produced in the 13th century at
the University of Paris, and toward the end of that century Guyart des Moulins executed his Bible
historiale. Both works served as the basis of future redactions, of which the Bible printed in Paris (date
given variously as 1487, 1496, or 1498) by order of King Charles VIII is a good example.
The real history of the French Bible began in Paris in 1523 with the publication of the New Testament,
almost certainly the work of the reformer Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples (Faber Stapulensis). The Old
Testament appeared in Antwerpin 1528 and the two together in 1530 as the Antwerp Bible. The first
true Protestant version came out in Serrières, near Neuchâtel, five years later, the work of Pierre Robert,
called Olivétan. This version was frequently revised throughout the 16th century, the most-celebrated
editions being Calvin’s of 1546 and that of Robert Estienne (Stephanus) of 1553. Roman Catholics
produced a new version, the Louvain Bible of 1550, based on both Lefèvre and Olivétan. Modernizations
of Olivétan appeared in succeeding centuries. The most important French version of the 20th century is
the Jerusalem Bible, prepared by professors at the Dominican École Biblique de Jérusalem (Paris 1949–
54, complete 1956).

German versions

The early Old Testament in Gothic has already been described. The New Testament remains are far
more extensive and are preserved mainly in the Codex Argenteus (c. 525) and Codex Gissensis. The
translation, essentially based on a Byzantine text, is exceedingly literal and not homogeneous. It is
difficult to determine the degree of contamination that the original Gospels translation of Ulfilas had
undergone by the time it appeared in these codices.
Nothing is known of the vernacular Scriptures in Germany prior to the 8th century, when an idiomatic
translation of Matthew from Latin into the Bavarian dialect was made. From Fulda (in Germany) circa
830 came a more literal East Franconian German translation of the Gospel story. In the same period was
produced the Heliand (“Saviour”), a versified version of the Gospels. Such poetic renderings cannot,
strictly speaking, be regarded as translations. There is evidence, however, for the existence of German
Psalters from the 9th century on. By the 13th century the different sects and movements that
characterized the religious situation in Germany had stimulated a demand for popular Bible reading.
Since all the early printed Bibles derived from a single family of late 14th-century manuscripts, German
translations must have gained wide popularity. Another impetus toward the use of the German
Scriptures in this period can be traced to mystics of the upper Rhine. A complete New Testament,
the Augsburg Bible, can be dated to 1350, and another from Bohemia, Codex Teplensis (c. 1400), has
also survived.
The Wenzel Bible, an Old Testament made between 1389 and 1400, is said to have been ordered by
King Wenceslas, and large numbers of 15th-century manuscripts have been preserved.
The first printed German Bible (the Mentel Bible) appeared at Strassburg no later than 1466 and ran
through 18 editions before 1522. Despite some evidence that ecclesiastical authority did not entirely
look with favour upon this vernacular development, the printed Bible appeared in Germany earlier, in
more editions, and in greater quantity than anywhere else.
A new era opened up with the work of Martin Luther, for whom a translation from the original
languages was a necessary and logical conclusion of his doctrine of justification by faith, to which the
Scriptures provided the only true key. His New Testament (Wittenberg, 1522) was made from the
second edition of Erasmus’s Greek Testament. The Old Testament followed in successive parts, based on
the Brescia Hebrew Bible (1494). Luther’s knowledge of Hebrew and Aramaic was limited, but his
rendering shows much influence of Rashi, the great 11th–12th-century French rabbinic scholar and
commentator, through the use of the notes of Nicholas of Lyra. The complete Lutheran Bible emerged
from the press in 1534. Luther was constantly revising his work with the assistance of other scholars.
Between 1534 and his death in 1546, 10 editions were printed, and another edition was printed
posthumously. Luther’s Bible truly fulfilled his objective of serving the needs of the common people, and
it in turn formed the basis of the first translations in those lands to which Lutheranism spread. It proved
to be a landmark in German prose literature and contributed greatly to the development of the modern
language.
The phenomenal success of Luther’s Bible and the failure of attempts to repress it led to the creation of
Roman Catholic versions in German, largely adaptations of Luther’s. Hieronymus Emser’s edition simply
brought the latter into line with the Vulgate. Johann Dietenberger issued a revision of Emser (Mainz,
1534) and used Luther’s Old Testament in conjunction with an Anabaptist (radical Protestant group)
version and the Zürich version of 1529. It became the standard Catholic version. Of the 20th-century
translations, the Grünewald Bible, which reached a seventh edition in 1956, is one of the most
noteworthy.
German glosses in Hebrew script attached to Hebrew Bibles in the 12th and 13th centuries constitute
the earliest Jewish attempts to render the Scriptures into that German dialect current among the Jews
of middle Europe, the dialect that developed into Judeo-German, or Yiddish. The first translation proper
has been partially preserved in a manuscript from Mantua dated 1421. The earliest printed translation is
that of the scriptural dictionaries prepared by a baptized Jew, Michael Adam (Constance, 1543–44;
Basel, 1583, 1607). The version of Jacob ben Isaac Ashkenazi of Janów, known as the Tzʾenah u-
Reʾna (Lublin, 1616), became one of the most popular and widely diffused works of its kind.
The first Jewish translation into pure High German, though in Hebrew characters (1780–83), made
by Moses Mendelssohn, opened a new epoch in German Jewish life. The first Jewish rendering of the
entire Hebrew Bible in German characters was made by Gotthold Salomon (Altona, 1837). An attempt to
preserve the quality of the Hebrew style in German garb was the joint translation of two Jewish religious
philosophers, Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig (15 vol., Berlin, 1925–37; revised in 4 vol., Cologne,
1954–62).

GREEK, HUNGARIAN, ITALIAN, AND PORTUGUESE TRANSLATIONS

Greek versions
A 13th-century manuscript of Jonah by a Jew is the earliest known post-Hellenistic Greek biblical work. A
rendering of Psalms was published by the Cretan monk Agapiou in 1563. A version in Hebrew characters
(a large part of the Old Testament) appeared in the Constantinople Polyglot Pentateuch in 1547.

The first New Testament was done by Maximus of Gallipoli in 1638 (at Geneva?). The British and Foreign
Bible Society published the Old Testament in 1840 (London) and the New Testament in 1848 (Athens).
Between 1900 and 1924, however, the use of a modern Greek version was prohibited.
Hungarian versions
The spread of Lutheranism in the Reformation period gave rise to several vernacular Hungarian
versions. János Sylvester (Erdősi) produced the first New Testament made from the Greek (Sárvár,
1541). The Turkish occupation of much of Hungary and the measures of the Counter-
Reformation arrested further printing of the vernacular Bible, except in the semi-independent
principality of Transylvania. The first complete Hungarian Bible, issued at Vizsoly in 1590, became
the Protestant church Bible.
In the 20th century a new standard edition for Protestants was published, the New Testament appearing
in 1956 and the Old Testament (Genesis to Job) in 1951 and following. A new, modernized Catholic
edition of the New Testament from the Greek appeared in Rome in 1957.
Italian versions
The vernacular Scriptures made a relatively late appearance in Italy. Existing manuscripts of individual
books derive from the 13th century and mainly consist of the Gospels and the Psalms.

These medieval versions were never made from the original languages. They were influenced by French
and Provençal renderings as well as by the form of the Latin Vulgate current in the 12th and 13th
centuries in southern France. There is evidence for a Jewish translation made directly from the Hebrew
as early as the 13th century.

The first printed Italian Bible appeared in Venice in 1471, translated from the Latin Vulgate by Niccolò
Malermi. In 1559 Pope Paul IV proscribed all printing and reading of the vernacular Scriptures except by
permission of the church. This move, reaffirmed by Pope Pius IV in 1564, effectively stopped further
Catholic translation work for the next 200 years.
The first Protestant Bible (Geneva, 1607, revised 1641) was the work of Giovanni Diodati, a Hebrew and
Greek scholar. Frequently reprinted, it became the standard Protestant version until the 20th century.
Catholic activity was renewed after a modification of the ban by Pope Benedict XIV in 1757. A complete
Bible in translation made directly from the Hebrew and Greek has been in progress under the
sponsorship of the Pontifical Biblical Institute since the 1920s.

Portuguese versions

The first Portuguese New Testament (Amsterdam), the work of João Ferreira d’Almeida, did not appear
until 1681. The first complete Bible (2 vol., 1748–53) was printed in Batavia (in Holland). Not until late in
the 18th century did the first locally published vernacular Scriptures appear in Portugal. A revision of
d’Almeida was issued in Rio de Janeiro (in Brazil), the New Testament in 1910 and the complete Bible in
1914 and 1926. An authorized edition in modernized orthography was published by the Bible Society of
Brazil (New Testament, 1951; Old Testament, 1958). A translation of the New Testament from Greek
by José Falcão came out in Lisbon (1956–65).

SCANDINAVIAN, SLAVIC, SPANISH, AND SWISS TRANSLATIONS

Scandinavian versions

In pre-Reformation times, only partial translations into Scandinavian languageswere made, all on the
basis of the Latin Vulgate and all somewhat free. The earliest and most-celebrated is that
of Genesis through Kings in the so-called Stjórn (“Guidance”) manuscript in the Old Norwegian language,
probably about 1300. Swedish versions of the Pentateuch and of Acts have survived from the 14th
century, as has a manuscript of Joshua and Judges by Nicholaus Ragnvaldi of Vadstena from about 1500.
The oldest Danish version, covering Genesis through Kings, derives from 1470.
Within two years of publication, Luther’s New Testament had already influenced a Danish translation,
made at the request of the exiled king Christian II, by Christiern Vinter and Hans Mikkelsen (Wittenberg,
1524). In 1550 Denmark received a complete Bible commissioned by royal command (the Christian III
Bible, Copenhagen). A revision appeared in 1589 (the Frederick II Bible) and another in 1633
(the Christian IV Bible).
A rendering by Hans Paulsen Resen (1605–07) was distinguished by its accuracy and learning. It was the
first made directly from Hebrew and Greek, but its style was not felicitous, so a revision was undertaken
by Hans Svane (1647). Nearly 200 years later (1819) a combination of the Svane Old Testament and the
Resen-Svane New Testament was published. In 1931 a royal commission produced a new translation of
the Old Testament; the New Testament followed in 1948 and the Apocrypha in 1957.
The separation of Norway from Denmark in 1814 stimulated the revival of literature in Norwegian. The
Old Testament of 1842–87 (revised, 1891) and the New Testament of 1870–1904 were still intelligible to
Danish readers, but the version of E. Blix (New Testament, 1889; complete Bible, 1921) is in New
Norwegian. A revised Bible in this standardized form of the language, executed by R. Indrebö, was
published by the Norwegian Bible Society in 1938.
The first Icelandic New Testament was the work of Oddur Gottskálksson(Roskilde, Denmark, 1540),
based on the Latin Vulgate and Luther. It was not until 1584 that the complete Icelandic Scriptures were
printed (at Hólar), mainly executed by Gudbrandur Thorláksson. It was so successful that it became the
church Bible until displaced by the revision of Thorlákur Skúlason (1627–55), based apparently on
Resen’s Danish translation. The Icelandic Bible Society published a new New Testament in 1827 and a
complete Bible in 1841 (Videyjar; Reykjavík, 1859), revised and reprinted at Oxford in 1866. A
completely new edition (Reykjavík, 1912) became the official church Bible.
Soon after Sweden achieved independence from Denmark in the early 16th century, it acquired its own
version of the New Testament, published by the royal press (Stockholm, 1526). Luther’s New Testament
of 1522 served as its foundation, but the Latin Vulgate and Erasmus’s Greek were also consulted. The
first official complete Bible in the vernacular—the first such in any Scandinavian country—was
the Gustav Vasa Bible (Uppsala, 1541), named for the Swedish king under whose reign it was printed. It
utilized earlier Swedish translations as well as Luther’s. A corrected version (the Gustavus Adolphus
Bible, named for the reigning Swedish king) was issued in 1618 and another, with minor alterations
by Eric Benzelius, in 1703. The altered Bible was called the Charles XII Bible because it was printed
during the reign of Charles XII. In 1917 the diet of the Lutheran church published a completely fresh
translation directly from modern critical editions of the Hebrew and Greek originals, and it received the
authorization of Gustaf V to become the Swedish church Bible.

Slavic versions

The earliest Old Church Slavonic translations, connected with the arrival of the brothers Saints Cyril and
Methodius in Moravia in 863, resulted from the desire to provide vernacular renderings of those parts of
the Bible used liturgically. The oldest manuscripts derive from the 11th and 12th centuries. The earliest
complete Bible manuscript, dated 1499, was used for the first printed edition (Ostrog, 1581). This was
revised in Moscow in 1633 and again in 1712. The standard Slavonic edition is the St. Petersburg revision
of 1751, known as the Bible of Elizabeth.
The printing of parts of the Bulgarian Bible did not begin until the mid-19th century. A fresh vernacular
version of the whole Bible was published at Sofia in 1925, having been commissioned by the Synod of
the Bulgarian Orthodox Church.
The Serbian and Croatian literary languages are identical; they differ only in the alphabet they use. To
further the dissemination of Protestantism among the southern Slavs, Count Jan Ungnad set up a press
in 1560 at Urach that issued a translation of the New Testament in both Glagolitic (1562–63)
and Cyrillic (1563) characters. The efforts of the Serbian leader Vuk Karadžić to establish the Serbo-
Croatian vernacular on a literary basis resulted in a new translation of the New Testament (Vienna,
1847) that went through many revisions.
The spread of the Lutheran Reformation to the Slovene-speaking provinces of Austria stimulated the
need for vernacular translations. The first complete Slovene Bible, translated from the original languages
but with close reference to Luther’s German, was made by Jurij Dalmatin (Wittenberg, 1584). Not until
two centuries later did a Slovene Roman Catholic version, rendered from the Latin Vulgate, appear
(Laibach, 1784–1802).
Between the 9th and 17th centuries the literary and ecclesiastical language of Russia was Old Slavonic.
Vernacular Scriptures were thus late in developing. An incomplete translation into the Belorussian
dialect was prepared by Franciscus Skorina (Prague, 1517–19) from the Latin Vulgate and Slavonic and
Bohemian versions, but not until 1821 did the first New Testament appear in Russian, an official version
printed together with the Slavonic. With the more liberal rule of Alexander II, the Holy Synod sponsored
a fresh version of the Gospels in 1860. The Old Testament was issued at St. Petersburg in 1875. A Jewish
rendering was undertaken by Leon Mandelstamm, who published the Pentateuch in 1862 (2nd ed.,
1871) and the Psalter in 1864. Prohibited in Russia, it was first printed in Berlin. A complete Jewish Bible
was published in Washington, D.C., in 1952.
No manuscript in the Czech vernacular translation is known to predate the 14th century, but at least 50
complete or fragmentary Bibles have survived from the 15th. The first complete Bible was published
in Prague in 1488 in a text based on earlier, unknown translations connected with the
heretical Hussite movement. The most important production of the century, however, was that
associated principally with Jan Blahoslav. Based on the original languages, it appeared at Kralice in six
volumes (1579–93). The Kralice Bible, regarded as the finest extant specimen of classical Czech, became
the standard Protestant version.
Closely allied to the Czech language but not identical to it, Slovakian became a literary language only in
the 18th century. A Roman Catholic Bible made from the Latin Vulgate by Jiři Palkovic̆ was printed in
the Gothic script (2 vol., Gran, 1829, 1832) and another, associated with Richard Osvald, appeared
at Trnava in 1928. A Protestant New Testament version of Josef Rohac̆ek was published at Budapest in
1913 and his complete Bible at Prague in 1936. A new Slovakian version by Stefan Žlatoš and Anton Jan
Surjanský was issued at Trnava in 1946.
A manuscript of a late 14th-century Psalter is the earliest extant example of the Polish vernacular
Scriptures, and several books of the Old Testament have survived from the translation made from the
Czech version for Queen Sofia (Sárospatak Bible, 1455). Otherwise, post-Reformation Poland supplied
the stimulus for biblical scholarship. The New Testament first appeared in a two-volume rendering from
the Greek by the Lutheran Jan Seklucjan (Königsberg, 1553). The “Brest Bible” of 1563, sponsored by
Prince Radziwiłł, was a Protestant production made from the original languages. A version of this edition
for the use of Socinians (Unitarians) was prepared by the Hebraist Szymon Budny (Nieswicz, 1570–82),
and another revision, primarily executed by Daniel Mikołajewski and Jan Turnowski (the “Danzig Bible”)
in 1632, became the official version of all Evangelical churches in Poland. This edition was burned by the
Catholics, and it subsequently had to be printed in Germany. The standard Roman Catholic version
(1593, 1599) was prepared by Jakób Wujek, whose work, revised by the Jesuits, received the approval of
the Synod of Piotrków in 1607. A revised edition was put out in 1935.

Spanish versions

The history of the Spanish Scriptures is unusual in that many of the translations were based not on the
Latin Vulgate but on the Hebrew, a phenomenon that is to be attributed to the unusual role played by
Jews in the vernacular movement.
Nothing is known from earlier than the 13th century, when James I of Aragon in 1233 proscribed the
possession of the Bible in “Romance” (the Spanish vernacular) and ordered such to be burned. Several
partial Old Testament translations by Jews as well as a New Testament from a Visigoth Latin text are
known from this century. In 1417 the whole Bible was translated into Valencian Catalan, but the entire
edition was destroyed by the Inquisition.
Between 1479 and 1504, royal enactments outlawed the vernacular Bible in Castile, Leon, and Aragon,
and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 transferred the centre of Spanish translation activity to
other lands. In 1557 the first printed Index of Forbidden Books of the Spanish Inquisition prohibited the
“Bible in Castilian Romance or any other vulgar tongue,” a ban that was repeated in 1559 and remained
in force until the 18th century. In 1916 the Hispano-Americana New Testament appeared in Madrid as
an attempt to achieve a common translation for the entire Spanish-speaking world. The first Roman
Catholic vernacular Bible from the original languages was made under the direction of the
Pontifical University of Salamanca (Madrid, 1944, 9th ed. 1959).

Swiss versions
Four parts of Luther’s version were reprinted in the Swyzerdeutsch dialect in Zürich in 1524–25. The
Prophets and Apocrypha appeared in 1529. A year later the first Swiss Bible was issued, the Prophets
and Apocrypha having been independently translated. The Swiss Bible underwent frequent revision
between 1660 and 1882. A fresh translation from the original languages was made between 1907 and
1931.

Non-European versions

Translations of parts of the Bible are known to have existed in only seven Asian and four African
languages before the 15th century. In the 17th century Dutch merchants began to interest themselves in
the missionary enterprise among non-Europeans. A pioneer was Albert Cornelius Ruyl, who is credited
with having translated Matthew into High Malay in 1629, Mark following later. Jan van Hasel translated
the two other Gospels in 1646 and added Psalms and Actsin 1652. Other traders began translations into
Minnan, a form of Southern Min spoken by the Hoklo (Fukien Taiwanese), in 1661 and Sinhalese in 1739.
A complete printed Japanese New Testament reputedly existed in Miyako in 1613, the work of Jesuits.
The first known printed New Testament in Asia appeared in 1715 in the Tamil language, produced
by Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg, a Lutheran missionary. A complete Bible followed in 1727. Six years later
the first Bible in High Malay came out.
The distinction of having produced the first New Testament in any indigenouslanguage of the Americas
belongs to John Eliot, a Puritan missionary, who made it accessible to Native Americans in
Massachusetts in 1661. Two years later he brought out the Massachusetts Indian Bible, the first Bible to
be printed on the American continent.
By 1800 the number of non-European versions had not exceeded 13 Asian, 4 African, 3 American, and 1
Oceanian. With the founding of missionary societies after 1800, however, new translations were viewed
as essential to the evangelical effort. First came renderings in those languages that already possessed a
written literature. A group at Serampore, India, headed by William Carey, a Baptist missionary, produced
28 versions in Indian languages. Robert Morrison, the first Protestant missionary to China, produced a
Mandarin New Testament in 1814 and a complete Bible by 1823. Adoniram Judson, an American
missionary, rendered the Bible into Burmese in 1834.
With European exploration of the African continent often came the need to invent an alphabet, and in
many instances the translated Scriptures constituted the first piece of a written literature there. In the
19th century the Bible was translated into Amharic, Malagasy, Tswana, Xosa, and Ga.
In North America James Evans invented a syllabary for the use of Cree people, in whose language the
Bible was available in 1862, the work of Wesleyanmissionary W. Mason. The New Testament appeared
in Ojibwa in 1833, and the whole Bible was translated for the Dakota peoples in 1879. The Labrador
Eskimos had a New Testament in 1826 and a complete Bible in 1871.
In Oceania the New Testament was rendered into Tahitian and Javanese in 1829 and
into Hawaiian and Low Malay in 1835. By 1854 the whole Bible had appeared in all but the last of these
languages as well as in Rarotonga (1851).
In the 20th century the trend toward the development of non-European Bible translations was
characterized by an attempt to produce “union” or “standard” versions in the common language
underlying different dialects. One such is the Swahili translation (1950) that makes the Scriptures
accessible to most of East Africa. Within the realm of non-European translation there has also been a
movement for the updating of versions to bring them into line with the spoken language, especially
through the use of indigenous Christian scholars. The first example of this was the colloquial Japanese
version of 1955.
By 1970 some part, if not all, of the Bible had been translated into more than 100 languages or dialects
spoken in India and into over 300 in Africa.

OLD TESTAMENT HISTORY

History is a central element of the Old Testament. It is the subject of narration in the specifically
historical books and of celebration, commemoration, and remonstration in all of the books. History in
the Old Testament is not history in the modern sense; it is the story of events seen as revealing the
divine presence and power. Nevertheless, it is the account of an actual people in an actual geographical
area at certain specified historical times and in contact with other particular peoples and empires known
from other sources. Hence, far more than with other great religious scriptures, a knowledge of the
historical background is conducive, if not essential, to an adequate understanding of a major portion of
the Old Testament. Recent archaeological discoveries as well as comparative historical research and
philological studies, collated with an analysis and interpretation of the Old Testament text (still the
major source of information), have made possible a fuller and more reliable picture of biblical history
than in previous eras.

Early developments

Background and beginnings

The geographical theatre of the Old Testament is the ancient Near East, particularly the Fertile
Crescent region, running from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers up to Syria and down through Palestine to
the Nile Delta. In this area great civilizations and empires developed and seminomadic ethnic groups,
such as the Hebrews, were involved in the mixture of peoples and cultures. The exact origin of the
Hebrews is not known with certainty, but the biblical tradition of their origin in a clan that migrated
from Mesopotamia to Canaan(Palestine) early in the 2nd millennium BCE has analogues in what is
known of the movements of other groups in that area and period. There are, moreover, obvious
Mesopotamian motifs in biblical cosmogony and primeval history in the early part of the Bible, and
Mesopotamian place-names are the obvious bases of some of the personal names of the clan’s
forebears. Canaanite influences are evident in the Hebrew alphabet, poetry, and certain mythological
themes. Linguistic and other similarities with neighbouring Semitic peoples, such as the Amorites and
Moabites, are also evident.

Exodus and conquest

According to biblical tradition, the clan migrated to Egypt because of a famine in the land of Canaan,
were later enslaved and oppressed, and finally escaped from Egypt to the desert east of the Isthmus of
Suez under a remarkable leader, Moses. The account—a proclamation, celebration, and
commemoration of the event—is replete with legendary elements, but present-day scholars tend to
believe that behind the legends there is a solid core of fact; namely, that Hebrew slaves who built the
fortified cities of Pithom and Rameses somehow fled from Egypt, probably in the 13th century BCE,
under a great leader (see also Moses). A stele (inscribed stone pillar) of the pharaoh Merneptah of that
time in which he claims to have destroyed Israel is the first known nonbiblical reference to the people by
name. Whether the destruction was in the intervening desert or in Canaan (and whether a true or a
false claim) is not clear. The tradition ascribes to Moses the basic features of Israel’s faith: a single God,
called YHWH, who cannot be represented iconically, bound in a covenant relationship with his special
people Israel, to whom he has promised possession of (not, as with their forefathers, mere residence in)
the land of Canaan. There is some dispute among scholars as to when such features as the Mosaic
Covenant actually emerged and as to which of the traditional 12 tribes of Israel entered Canaan at the
end of the period of wandering in the desert.
The biblical account of the conquest of Canaan is again, from the point of view of historical scholarship,
full of legendary elements that express and commemorate the elation and wonder of the Israelites at
these events. The conquest of Canaan—according to tradition, a united national undertaking led by
Moses’ successor, Joshua—was a rather drawn out and complicated matter. Archaeological evidence
tends to refute some of the elements of the biblical account, confirm others, and leave some open.
According to the tradition, after an initial unified assault that broke the main Canaanite resistance, the
tribes engaged in individual mopping-up operations. Scholars believe that Hebrews who had remained
resident in Canaan joined forces with the invading tribes, that the other Canaanite groups continued to
exist, and that many of them later were assimilated by the Israelites.

The tribal league

The invading tribes who became masters of parts of Canaan, although effectively autonomous and
lacking a central authority, considered themselves a league of 12 tribes, although the number 12 seems
to have been more canonical or symbolical than historical. Some scholars, on the analogy of Greek
leagues of six or 12 tribes or cities with a common sanctuary, speak of the Israelite league as an
“amphictyony,” the Greek term for such an association; but others hold that there is no evidence that
the Israelites maintained a common shrine. Certain leaders arose, called judges, who might rule over
several tribes, but this arrangement was usually of a local or regional character. However, the stories
about such “judges” (who were frequently local champions or heroes, such as Gideon, Jephthah, and
Samson), though encrusted with legend, are now thought to be substantially historical. The period from
about 1200 to 1020 is called, after them, the period of the judges. It was during this period
that Israelite assimilation of Canaanite cultural and religious ideas and practices began to be
an acute problem and that other invaders and settlers became a threat to the security of Israel. One of
the chief threats was from the Philistines, an Aegean people who settled (c. 12th century BCE) on the
coast of what later came to be called, after them, Palestine. Organized in a league of five cities, or
principalities, the Philistines, who possessed a monopoly of iron implements and weapons, pushed
eastward into the Canaanite hinterland and subjugated Israelite tribes, such as the Judahites and
Danites, that stood in their way, even capturing the sacred ark from the famous shrine of Shiloh when it
was brought into battle against them. The Philistine threat was probably the decisive factor in the
emergence of a permanent political (but at first primarily military) union of all Israel under a king—what
historians call the united monarchy (or kingdom).
The united monarchy

The monarchy was initiated during the career of Samuel, a prophet of great influence and authority who
was also recognized as a judge and is depicted in varying biblical accounts as either favouring or not
favouring the reign of a human king over Israel. In any case, he anointed Saul, a courageous military
leader of the tribe of Benjamin, as king (c. 1020 BCE). Saul won substantial victories over the
Ammonites, Philistines, and Amalekites, leading the tribes in a “holy war,” and for a time the Philistine
advance was stopped; but Saul and his son Jonathan were killed in a disastrous battle with the
Philistines in central Palestine. His successor, David, a former aide (and also his son-in-law) who had
fallen out of favour with him, at first took over (c. 1010) the rule of Judah in the south and then of all
Israel (c. 1000). Through his military and administrative abilities and his political acumen, David
established a centralized rule in Israel, cleared the territory of foreign invaders, and, in the absence of
any aggressive foreign empire in the area, created his own petty empire over neighbouring city-states
and peoples. He established his capital in Jerusalem, which until then had maintained its independence
as a Canaanite city-state wedged between the territories of Saul’s tribe Benjamin and David’s tribe
Judah, and moved the ark there from the small Israelite town in which it had been stored by the
Philistines, establishing it in a tent shrine. This felicitous combination of holy ark, political reign, and
central city was to be hailed and proclaimed by future ages. Under David’s successor, his
son Solomon (reigned c. 961–922), Israel became a thriving commercial power; numerous impressive
buildings were erected, including the magnificent Temple (a concrete symbol of the religiopolitical unity
of Israel); a large harem of foreign princesses was acquired, sealing relations with other states; the
country was divided into 12 districts for administrative, supply, and taxation purposes. Foreign cults set
up to serve the King’s foreign wives and foreign traders led to charges of idolatry and apostasyby
religious conservatives. In the latter years of his reign, Solomon’s unpopular policies, such as
oppressive forced labour, led to internal discontent and rebellion, while externally the vassal nations of
Damascus (Aram) and Edom staged successful revolts against his rule. The central and northern tribes,
called Israel in the restricted sense, were especially galled by the oppressive policies, and soon after
Solomon’s death Israel split off to become a separate kingdom. The united monarchy thus became the
divided monarchy of Israel (the northern kingdom) and Judah (the southern kingdom).

From the period of the divided monarchy through the restoration

The divided monarchy: from Jeroboam I to the Assyrian conquest

Jeroboam I, the first king of the new state of Israel, made his capital first at Shechem, then at Tirzah.
Recognizing the need for religious independence from Jerusalem, he set up official sanctuaries at Dan
and Bethel, at the two ends of his realm, installing in them golden calves (or bulls), for which he
is castigated in the anti-northern account in the First Book of the Kings. Israel engaged in conflicts with
Judah and, sometimes jointly with Judah, against foreign powers. At first there was great dynastic
instability in the northern kingdom, until the accession of Omri (reigned c. 884–c. 872), one of its
greatest kings, who founded a dynasty that lasted through the reign of his two grandsons (to 842).
Under Omri an impressive building program was initiated at the capital, Moab was subjugated (an event
confirmed in an extrabiblical source, the Moabite Stone), and amicable relations were established with
Judah. The Phoenician kingdom of Tyre was made an ally through the marriage of his son Ahab to the
Tyrian princess Jezebel. Ahab (reigned c. 874–853 BCE)—unless the episode recounted in I Kings,
chapter 20, actually took place four reigns later—fought off an attempt by Damascus, heading a
coalition of kings, to take over Israel. Near the end of his reign, Ahab joined with Damascus and other
neighbouring states to fight off the incursions of the great Assyrian Empire in their area. Peaceful
relations were cemented with Judah through the marriage of Ahab’s daughter (or sister) Athaliah to
Jehoram, the son of the king of Judah (not to be confused with Ahab’s son, Jehoram of Israel). But the
establishment of a pagan Baal temple for Jezebel and her attempt to spread her cult aroused great
opposition on the part of the zealousYahwists among the common people. There was also resentment
at the despotic Oriental manner of rule that Ahab, incited by Jezebel, exercised. She and her cult were
challenged by Elijah, a prophet whose fierce and righteous character and acts, as illumined by legend,
are dramatically depicted in the First Book of the Kings. In the reign of Ahab’s son Jehoram,
Elijah’s discipleElisha inspired the slaughter of Jezebel and the whole royal family, as well as of all the
worshippers of Baal, thus putting a stop to the Baalist threat. Jehu, Jehoram’s general who led this
massacre, became king and established a dynasty that lasted almost a century (c. 842–745), the longest
in the history of Israel.
Meanwhile, in Judah, the Baal cult introduced by Athaliah, the queen mother and effective ruler for a
time, was suppressed after a revolt, led by the chief priests, in which Athaliah was killed and her
grandson Joash (Jehoash) was made king. In the ensuing period, down to the final fall of the northern
kingdom, Judah and Israel had varying relations of conflict and amity and were involved in
the alternative expansion and loss of power in their relations with neighbouring states. Damascus was
the main immediate enemy, which annexed much of Israel’s territory, exercised suzerainty over the rest,
and exacted a heavy tribute from Judah. Under Jeroboam II (783–741) in Israel and Uzziah (Azariah;
783–742) in Judah, both of whom had long reigns at the same time, the two kingdoms cooperated to
achieve a period of prosperity, tranquillity, and imperial sway unequalled since Solomon’s reign. The
threat of the rising Assyrian Empire under Tiglath-Pileser III soon reversed this situation. When a
coalition of anti-Assyrian states, including Israel, marched against Judah to force its participation, the
Judahite king Ahaz (c. 735–720) called on Assyria for protection; the result was the defeat of Israel,
which suffered heavily in captives, money tribute, and lost provinces, while Judah became a vassal state
of Assyria. In about 721, after an abortive revolt under King Hoshea, the rump state of Israel was
annexed outright by Assyria and became an Assyrian province; its elite cadre, amounting to nearly
30,000 according to Assyrian figures, was deported to Mesopotamia and Media, and settlers were
imported from other lands. Thus, the northern kingdom of Israel ceased to exist. Its decline and fall were
a major theme in the prophecies of Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, and Micah.

The final period of the kingdom of Judah

Meanwhile, the southern kingdom of Judah was to have another century and a half of existence before
a similar and even grimmer fate befell it. Hezekiah(reigned c. 715–c. 686), who instituted a religious
reform to return worship to a pure Yahwist form, also displayed political independence, joining a
coalition of Palestinian states against Assyria. But the coalition was soon defeated, and Judah—with
Jerusalem besieged—bought off the Assyrians, led by Sennacherib, with tribute. In the reign
of Manasseh (c. 686–c. 642) there was a revival of pagan rites, including astral cults in the very
forecourts of the temple of YHWH, child sacrifice, and temple prostitution; hence, he is usually
portrayed as the most wicked of the kings of Judah. If he had any tendencies toward independence from
Assyrian domination, they apparently were suppressed by his being taken in chains to Babylon, where
he was molded into proper vassal behaviour, although one edifying and probably unhistorical biblical
account reports his repentance and attempt at religious reform after his return to Judah. The great
religious reform took place in the reign of his grandson Josiah (640–609) during a period when the
Assyrian Empire was in decline and was precipitated by the discovery of the Book of the Law during the
restoration of the Temple. It was proclaimed by the king to be the Law of the realm, and the people
pledged obedience to it. In accordance with its admonitions, the pagan altars and idols in the Temple
were removed, rural sanctuaries (“high places”) all the way into Samaria were destroyed, and the
Jerusalem Temple was made the sole official place of worship. (For an identification of the law book
with the legal portion of Deuteronomy, see below Old Testament literature: Deuteronomy.) Josiah also
made an attempt at political independence and expansion but was defeated and killed in a battle with
the Egyptians, the new allies of the fading Assyrian Empire. During the reigns of his sons Jehoiakim
(c. 609–598) and Zedekiah (597–586), Judah’s independence was gradually extinguished by the might of
the new dominant Babylonian Empire under Nebuchadrezzar. The end came in 586 with the Babylonian
capture of Jerusalem and the destruction of the principal buildings, including the Temple and the
fortifications. The first deportation of Judahites to Babylon, during the brief reign of Josiah’s grandson
Jehoiachin in 597, was followed by the great deportation of 586, which was to be a theme of lament and
remembrance for millennia to come. (Numerous Jews also migrated to Egypt during this troubled time.)
Exhortations and prophecies on the decline and fall of Judah are to be found in Zephaniah, Nahum,
Habakkuk, and Jeremiah (who played a significant role in the events), while the conditions and meaning
of the exile are proclaimed by Ezekiel and Deutero-Isaiah (chapters 40–55 of Isaiah).

The Babylonian Exile and the restoration

The Babylonian Exile (586–538) marks an epochal dividing point in Old Testament history, standing
between what were subsequently to be designated the pre-exilic and post-exilic eras. The
Judahite community in Babylonia was, on the whole, more Yahwist in religion than ever, following the
Mosaic Law, emphasizing and redefining such distinctive elements as circumcision and the sabbath and
stressing personal and congregational prayer—the beginnings of synagogal worship. It is possible that
they also reached an understanding of historical events (like that taught by the great pre-exilic and exilic
prophets)—as the chastening acts of a universal God acting in history through Nebuchadrezzar and
other conquerors. To this period is also ascribed the beginning of the compilation of significant portions
of the Old Testament and of the organizing view behind it. In any event, it was from this community that
the leadership and the cadres for the resurrection of the Judahite nation and faith were to come
when Cyrus the Great (labelled “the Lord’s anointed” in Deutero-Isaiah) conquered Babylon and made it
possible for them to return (538). A contingent of about 50,000 persons, including about 4,000 priests
and 7,000 slaves, returned under Sheshbazzar, a prince of Judah.
The first great aim was the rebuilding of the Temple as the centre of worship and thus also of national
existence; this was completed in 515 under the administration of Zerubbabel and became the place of
uninterrupted sacrificial worship for the next 350 years. The next task was to rebuild the walls of
Jerusalem, which was undertaken by Nehemiah, a Babylonian Jew and court butler who was appointed
governor of Judah and arrived in 444. Nehemiah also began religious reforms, emphasizing tithing,
observance of the sabbath, and the prohibition against intermarriage with “foreign” women. This reform
was carried through systematically and zealously by Ezra, a priest and scribe who came from Babylon
about 400 BCE, called the people together, and read them the “book of the law of Moses” to bring them
back to the strict and proper observance maintained in Babylon: circumcision, sabbath observance,
keeping the feasts, and, to seal it all, avoiding intermarriage. (In this presentation, modern critical
scholarship is being followed, placing Nehemiah before Ezra instead of the traditional sequence, which
reverses the positions.) Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi are the prophets of this restoration period. Ezra
and Nehemiah are its narrators.
It was in this period that enmity between the Jews, or Judaeans, as they came to be called, and
the Samaritans, a term applied to the inhabitants of the former northern kingdom (Israel),
was exacerbated. It has been surmised that this goes back to the old political rivalry between Israel and
Judah or even further back to the conflict between the tribes of Joseph and Judah. Scholars ascribe the
exacerbation of enmity in the restoration period variously to the Samaritans’ being excluded from
participating in the rebuilding of the Temple; to Nehemiah’s rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem
(regarded as a threatening act by the Samaritan authorities); or to the proscriptions of intermarriage by
Ezra. The animus of the Jews against the Samaritans is frequently expressed in the biblical books dealing
with the restoration (expressions perhaps engendered by later events), but the attitude of the
Samaritans and a good deal else about them is not evident. At some time they became a distinct
religious community, with a temple of their own on Mt. Gerizim and a Scripture that was limited solely
to the Pentateuch, excluding the Prophets and Writings.

Old Testament history proper ends with the events described in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. The
books of Chronicles give all the preceding history, from Adam to the Babylonian sack of Jerusalem and
the exile. The last two verses of the Second Book of the Chronicles are repeated in the first two verses of
Ezra: God inspires Cyrus to send the Jews back to Jerusalem to rebuild the Temple. The Persian period of
Jewish history ended with the conquest of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE to begin the Hellenistic era, in
which some of the biblical (including apocryphal or deuterocanonical) writings were created (for
Hellenistic Judaism, see Judaism).

Ancient Philosophy

Ancient philosophy is philosophy in antiquity, or before the end of the Roman Empire. It usually refers
to ancient Greek philosophy. It can also encompass various other intellectual traditions, such as Chinese
philosophy, Indian philosophy, and Iranian philosophy. Ancient philosophies are generally deeply rooted
in religious traditions. Accordingly, ancient philosophies have a comprehensive outlook as opposed
to modern or contemporary philosophies, which tend to have more narrow methodologies and areas of
focus.
In the Western tradition, ancient philosophy was developed primarily by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.
Ancient philosophy, however, also includes the Pre-Socratics, Hellenistic philosophy, and Roman
philosophy. Ancient philosophy in the West is distinguished from Medieval philosophy, which was
largely influenced by Christianity and Islam. Ancient philosophies from non-Western traditions, such as
Chinese or Indian philosophy, often have strong ethical or religious concerns that continue to be major
parts of the traditions today.

General characteristics
The term ancient philosophy encompasses a variety of thoughts that emerged from the early stages of
various intellectual traditions. However, not all ideas are considered philosophies since philosophy
includes, as its primary component, a rational self-refection and conceptualization of thought.
Major philosophies include: ancient Greek and Roman philosophy in the West, which date
approximately from the sixth century B.C.E. through the third century C.E.; Chinese
philosophyincluding Yin-yang philosophy, Taoism, Confucianism; Indian
philosophy including Upanishads and Vedic traditions, Jainism, Buddhist philosophy, and Hindu
philosophy; and ancient Iranian philosophy including Zoroastrianism.
Each philosophy has some distinct characteristics which reflect intellectual climates, problematics,
issues, and approaches; despite these differences, however, these philosophies have some factors in
common.
First, ancient philosophy tends to have a comprehensive perspective which includes a wide range of
components, including myth, religious beliefs, ethics, literature, cosmology, and theories of nature. The
synthetic characteristic of ancient philosophy is different from modern and contemporary philosophies
in that modern and contemporary philosophies tend to focus on specific, often narrower, areas and
their approaches are accompanied with clearer methodological awareness. Because of its synthetic
character, thought processes found in ancient philosophy also differs from those of modern philosophy.
For example, the Pre-Socratics in ancient Greek philosophy presented their metaphysical arguments
in poetic verse and their arguments are inflected with religious-ethical themes such as divine justice and
salvation of the soul. In ancient Chinese philosophy, metaphysics is also fused with natural philosophy,
ethics, and is often extended to political philosophy. Because of their comprehensiveness, the
interpretation of ancient philosophy requires an understanding of an entire framework of thought.
Second, ancient philosophy is often deeply rooted in religious traditions. Modern and contemporary
philosophy tend to develop philosophy as an autonomous discipline independent of religious traditions.
This tendency is most evident in the development of modern and contemporary Western philosophy,
which is the main stream of contemporary philosophy. For example, Indian philosophy is deeply rooted
in Upanishad, Vedas, Hinduism, and others. Even Plato's philosophy is built within the framework that
presupposes such beliefs as immortality of the soul, redemption, and divine justice.

Western philosophy
Ancient philosophy in the West refers to philosophies that date from approximately the sixth
century B.C.E. to about the third century C.E.and includes the philosophies of the Pre-
Socratics, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and those developed in Hellenistic and Roman periods.
The pinnacle of ancient philosophy is the classical Greek philosophy as developed by Plato and Aristotle.
These two philosophers defined the issues, philosophical vocabularies, methodologies, and types of
discourses of philosophy as a discipline and influenced the entire tradition of philosophy. Their
philosophies are far more comprehensive than those of other philosophers in antiquity.

Presocratic philosophers
 Milesian School
Thales (624-546 B.C.E.)

Anaximander (610-546 B.C.E.)

Anaximenes (585-525 B.C.E.)

 Pythagoreans
Pythagoras (582-507 B.C.E.)

Alcmaeon of Croton

Archytas (428-347 B.C.E.)

 Heraclitus (535-475 B.C.E.)

 Pluralist School
 Empedocles (490-430 B.C.E.)

Anaxagoras (500-428 B.C.E.)

Metrodorus of Lampsacus (the elder) (fifth century B.C.E.)

 Eleatics
Parmenides (515-450 B.C.E.)

Zeno of Elea (490-430 B.C.E.)

Diogenes of Apollonia (460-? B.C.E.)

Philolaus (480-405 B.C.E.)

Melissus of Samos (470-? B.C.E.)

Xenophanes (570-480 B.C.E.)

 Atomists
Leucippus (first half of fifth century B.C.E.)

Democritus (460-370 B.C.E.)

Metrodorus of Chios (fourth century B.C.E.)

 Pherecydes of Syros (sixth century B.C.E.)

 Sophists
Gorgias (483-375 B.C.E.)

Protagoras (481-420 B.C.E.)

Antiphon (480-411 B.C.E.)

Prodicus (465/450-after 399 B.C.E.)

Hippias (middle of the fifth century B.C.E.)

Thrasymachus (459-400 B.C.E.)

Callicles

Critias

Lycophron

Classical Greek philosophers

 Socrates (469-399 B.C.E.)
 Euclid of Megara (450-380 B.C.E.)
 Antisthenes (445-360 B.C.E.)
 Aristippus (435-356 B.C.E.)
 Plato (428-347 B.C.E.)
 Speusippus (407-339 B.C.E.)
 Diogenes of Sinope (400-325 B.C.E.)
 Xenocrates (396-314 B.C.E.)
 Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.)
 Stilpo (380-300 B.C.E.)
 Theophrastus (370-288 B.C.E.)

Hellenistic philosophy
 Pyrrho (365-275 B.C.E.)
 Epicurus (341-270 B.C.E.)
 Metrodorus of Lampsacus (the younger) (331–278 B.C.E.)
 Zeno of Citium (333-263 B.C.E.)
 Cleanthes (331-232 B.C.E.)
 Timon (320-230 B.C.E.)
 Arcesilaus (316-232 B.C.E.)
 Menippus (third century B.C.E.)
 Archimedes (c. 287-212 B.C.E.)
 Chrysippus (280-207 B.C.E.)
 Carneades (214-129 B.C.E.)
 Kleitomachos (187-109 B.C.E.)
 Metrodorus of Stratonicea (late second century B.C.E.)
 Philo of Larissa (160-80 B.C.E.)
 Posidonius (135-51 B.C.E.)
 Antiochus of Ascalon (130-68 B.C.E.)
 Aenesidemus (first century B.C.E.)
 Philo of Alexandria (30 B.C.E. - 45 C.E.)
 Agrippa (first century C.E.)

Hellenistic schools of thought

 Cynicism
 Epicureanism
 Hedonism
 Eclecticism
 Neo-Platonism
 Skepticism
 Stoicism
 Sophism

Philosophers during Roman times

 Cicero (106-43 B.C.E.)
 Lucretius (94-55 B.C.E.)
 Seneca (4 B.C.E. - 65 C.E.)
 Musonius Rufus (30 C.E. - 100 C.E.)
 Plutarch (45-120 C.E.)
 Epictetus (55-135 C.E.)
 Marcus Aurelius (121-180 C.E.)
 Clement of Alexandria (150-215 C.E.)
 Alcinous (second century C.E.)
 Sextus Empiricus (third century C.E.)
 Alexander of Aphrodisias (third century C.E.)
 Ammonius Saccas (third century C.E.)
 Plotinus (205-270 C.E.)
 Porphyry (232-304 C.E.)
 Iamblichus (242-327 C.E.)
 Themistius (317-388 C.E.)
 Augustine of Hippo (354-430 C.E.)
 Proclus (411-485 C.E.)
 Philoponus of Alexandria (490-570 C.E.)
 Damascius (462-540 C.E.)
 Boethius (472-524 C.E.)
 Simplicius of Cilicia (490-560 C.E.)

Chinese philosophy

Yin-Yang philosophy is probably the oldest among classic Chinese philosophy. It is a

comprehensive metaphysics built upon the principle of Yin and Yang, which encompasses both natural
phenomena and human affairs. Centuries later, it was applied to various areas and disciplines including
medical science, nutrition theory, art, martial art, and others.
Practical orientation is a distinctive characteristic of Chinese philosophy and it has guided its entire
tradition since antiquity. Unlike western philosophy, there is a continuity of thought from ancient to
contemporary. Ancient philosophy which guided the entire tradition includes Confucianism, Taoism, and
Buddhism. These philosophies are all deeply rooted in or fused into religious and ethical thoughts.
 Chinese philosophy—Confucianism, Taoism, Legalism
 Buddhist philosophy arose in India but contributions to it were also made in China, Japan,
and Korea.
 Eastern philosophy


Indian philosophy

Vedic philosophy
Indian philosophy begins with the Vedas where questions related to laws of nature, the origin of the
universe and the place of man in it are asked. In the famous Rigvedic Hymn of Creation the poet says:

"Whence all creation had its origin, he, whether he fashioned it or whether he did not, he, who surveys
it all from highest heaven, he knows—or maybe even he does not know."

In the Vedic view, creation is ascribed to the self-consciousness of the primeval being (Purusha). This
leads to the inquiry into the one being that underlies the diversity of empirical phenomena and the
origin of all things. Cosmic order is termed rta and causal law by karma. Nature (prakriti) is taken to
have three qualities (sattva, rajas, and tamas).
 Vedas
 Upanishads
 Hindu philosophy

Classical Indian philosophy

In classical times, these inquiries were systematized in six schools of philosophy. Some of the questions
asked were:
 What is the ontological nature of consciousness?
 How is cognition itself experienced?
 Is mind (chit) intentional or not?
 Does cognition have its own structure?
The Six schools of Indian philosophy are:
 Nyaya
 Vaisheshika
 Samkhya
 Yoga
 Mimamsa (Purva Mimamsa)
 Vedanta (Uttara Mimamsa)
Other traditions of Indian philosophy include:
 Hindu philosophy
 Buddhist philosophy
 Jain philosophy
 Sikh philosophy
 Carvaka (atheist) philosophy
Some ancient philosophers:
 Asanga (c. 300), exponent of the Yogacara
 Bhartrihari (c 450–510 C.E.), early figure in Indic linguistic theory
 Bodhidharma (c. 440–528 C.E.), founder of the Zen school of Buddhism
 Chanakya (c.350 - c.275 B.C.E.) , author of Arthashastra, professor (acharya) of political science at
the Takshashila University
 Dignāga (c. 500), one of the founders of Buddhist school of Indian logic.
 Gautama Buddha (563 B.C.E. - 483 B.C.E.), founder of Buddhist school of thought
 Gotama (c. second to third century C.E.), wrote the Nyaya Sutras, considered to be the
foundation of the Nyaya school.
 Kanada (c. 600 B.C.E.), founded the philosophical school of Vaisheshika, gave theory of atomism
 Jaimini, author of Purva Mimamsa Sutras
 Kapila (c. 500 B.C.E.), proponent of the Samkhya system of philosophy
 Nagarjuna (c. 150 - 250 C.E.), the founder of the Madhyamaka (Middle Path) school of Mahāyāna
Buddhism.
 Panini (520–460 B.C.E.), grammarian, author of Ashtadhyayi
 Patañjali (between 200 B.C.E. and 400 C.E.), developed the philosophy of Raja Yoga in his Yoga
Sutras.
 Pingala (c. 500 B.C.E.), author of the Chandas shastra
 Syntipas (c. 100 B.C.E.), author of The Story of the Seven Wise Masters.
 Tiruvalluvar (between 100 B.C.E. and 300 C.E.), author of Thirukkural, one of the greatest ethical
works in Tamil language
 Vasubandhu (c. 300 C.E.), one of the main founders of the Indian Yogacara school.
 Vyasa, author of several important works in Hindu philosophy
 Yajnavalkya (c. 800 B.C.E.), linked to philosophical teachings of the Brhadaranyaka Upanishad,
and the apophatic teaching of 'neti neti' etc.

Old Iranian philosophy

While there are ancient relations between the Indian Vedas and the Iranian Avesta, the two main
families of the Indo-Iranian philosophical traditions were characterized by fundamental differences in
their implications for the human being's position in society and their view on the role of man in the
universe. The first charter of human rights by Cyrus the Great is widely seen as a reflection of the
questions and thoughts expressed by Zarathustra and developed in Zoroastrian schools of thought.
 Zoroastrianism
o Zarathustra
o Avesta
o Gathas
 Mazdakism
 Manichaeism

India's Heroic Age (550 B.C. - A. D. 100)

Important Terms:

 Sanskrit
o ancient Indo-Aryan language
 Riga Veda
o last in series of 4 sacred hymn books, Hinduism's primary scripture
 dharma
o guiding principle of proper human conduct; sacred duty
 artha
o worldly profit, wealth, and political power
 Hinduism
o India's dominant religious tradition
 Islam
o the religious faith of Muslims including belief in Allah as the sole deity
and in Muhammad as his prophet
 Buddhism
o "unique combination of radical detachment from desire, the root cause of
karma, and an ethic of action directed only toward the welfare of one's
fellow creatures" (Norton 840)
 guru
o personal religious teacher and spiritual guide in Hinduism
 caste
 o one of the hereditary social classes in Hinduism that restrict the
occupation of their members and their association with the members of
other castes
 Brahman
o single, divine essence: the soul of man is a manifestation of the
Brahman; gods are seen as "personification of nature and the powers of
the cosmos" (Norton 838)
 kama
o pleasure and love
 mantra
o sacred counsel, formula; a mystical formula of invocation or incantation

EPICS of India's Heroic Age:

 originated in oral tradition, like Old Testament

 grounded in actual events, yet similar to Iliad and Odyssey.

Four classes (varna) of Indian society:

 brahman (priest) transmitter of vedas

 ksatriya (warrior/adminstrator/king)
 vaisya (merchant/farmer/producer)
 sudra (laborer)

karma: "action": principle that "all deeds, good and bad, have inevitable results,
which must be borne by the doer in an existential state, so that the soul is trapped in
an endless cycle of birth and death" (Norton 840)

moksa: ultimate goal of life--liberation from constraints of worldly existence- denied

to sudras and women
(lesser goals include dharma, artha, and kama)

Men: bound by a prescribed program of sacred duty (dharma) that is appropriate to

their class (varna)

Women: "form a class in themselves, for a woman's dharma is defined as that of a

wife, allowing women no identities or aspirations apart from their allegiance to their
husbands" (Norton 839).

Caste system: larger number of "service" castes subordinated to a small number of

elite groups.
Quatama Buddha (563-483 B.C.) & Mahavira (d. 468 B.C.)

 In Buddhism, "every person, regardless of caste, gender, or social status, could

follow the Buddha's path (the Dharma) with the ultimate aim of becoming
liberated from karma rebirth by becoming abuddha, or ‘an enlightened one'"
(Norton 840).
 "The populist, egalitarian religions preached by Gautama Buddha and his near-
contemporary Mahavira presented a formidable challenge to the elaborate
socio-religious system engineered by the Hindu elites" (Norton 841).

Hinduism:

 absorbed and synthesized features from its rival religions, incorporating

concepts of salvation and grace, thus allowing it eventually to triumph over
competing religions in India, including Buddhism and Islam, but especially
Buddhism.
 "For Hindus the terror of rebirth [and karma] is mitigated by belief in a triad of
great gods who are the highest manifestations of the divine principle
underlying the universe" (Norton 841).
 "Although there are many gods [including Brahma, the creator],Visnu, the
preserver, and Siva, the destroyer, stand out as supreme deities, for Hindus
worship one or the other as God, whose grace will help deliver them from the
bonds of karma rebirth" (Norton 841).
o All three are components of Iswara, creator of the universe, communion
with whom can be achieved only through samadhi, "a meditative state
that breaks consciousness with the physical world" (Khorana 555).

Mahabharata (ca. 400 B.C. - A. D. 400)

See link with more extensive background discussion

 100,000 verses: 8 x (Iliad + Odyssey)

 Depicts war (ca. 1400-1300 B.C.) between two branches of the Bharata family,
the Pandavas, the five sons of Pandu (including Arjuna, "son" of warrior
god, Indra) and Kauravas, the one hundred evil sons of Dhrtarastra, elder
half-brother who's disqualified from being king because blind.
 "Every clansman in North India [allies] himself with the one or the other party"
(Norton 907).

Bhagavad-Gita (1st century B.C.)

"Song of the Lord" part of 6th book of Mahabharata
  "response of brahman thinkers who stood to lose the most from the potential
disintegration of the Hindu social system" (Norton 958).
 "articulates a new doctrine that will justify the hierarchies of class and social
duty. . . at the same time that it offers universal access to the ultimate goal of
the emancipation of the soul from suffering and rebirth" (Norton 958).
 "In short, social and moral law takes care of the content of action, but the
individual has control over the spirit in which he performs the action and,
therefore, over how his deeds will affect his soul" (Norton 959).

Roman Literature
Definition

by Donald L. Wasson
published on 27 September 2017
The Roman Empire and its predecessor the Roman Republicproduced an abundance of
celebrated literature; poetry, comedies, dramas, histories, and philosophical tracts; the Romans
avoided tragedies. Much of it survives to this day. However, Roman literature cannot stand
alone. They owe a debt to their neighbor, the Greeks (more specifically Athens). Most educated
Romans were well aware of their own literary inferiority, and because of this Roman writers
could easily copy Greek classical themes, even going so far as to translate many of the notable
Greek works into Latin. However, to many Romans, this exercise would have been needless, for
a number of highly educated citizens could speak and read both Greek and Latin. Many young,
upper-class Romans even continued their education in Athens. Although the link to Greek
Hellenism would remain for years to come, the Romans would soon develop a rich literature of
their own.

Greek influence
ROMAN LITERATURE OWES A DEBT TO THE GREEKS,
MORE SPECIFICALLY ATHENS.
This indebtedness to Greece was even recognized by the writers themselves. Horace, one of the
poets of the Golden Age of Roman literature wrote that Greece introduced the arts "into a
backward Latium." Historian Nigel Rodgers in his Roman Empire wrote that Greek authors
originated many philosophical and political concepts that influenced such Romans as Cicero,
Seneca, Boethius, Catullus, and Virgil - "a Greek and Roman synthesis" (258). He added
that Rome could not and did not deny that Greece was more refined and superior in both
intellectual and cultural pursuits from technology and philosophy to poetry and sculpture. In
reality, Rome could hardly deny a closeness to Greece since Greek cities had existed on both the
lower peninsula and Sicily for decades.

Comic playwrights
According to Rodgers, there was little in the way of Roman literature before the Punic
Warsagainst Carthage (264 – 146 BCE). It was during this time that Rome became involved in
the Macedonian Wars, eventually absorbing the Greek city-states. Roman literature began near
the end of the 3rd century BCE with the emergence of such comic playwrights as Plautus,
Terence, and Ennius. Quite often their plays would be performed during one of the city’s many
festivals where the audience was mostly male.

The first of the three was Plautus (254 – 184 BCE). Of his more than 130 plays, only 20 complete
works survived. According to ancient sources, he was born in Umbria and began his career as a
stage carpenter. He did not begin to write anything until middle age, adapting Greek comedies
into Latin. He used the usual jokes, puns, and songs (duets and arias) which quenched the
Roman desire for slapstick. Although he did not write in Greek, all of his characters had Greek
names and resided in Greek cities. Two of his more notable works are Aulularia (The Pot of Gold)
and Captivi (The Prisoners).
 Plautus

Publius Terentius Afer, better known as Terence (195 – 159 BCE), and Ennius (239 – 169 BCE)
were Plautus’ contemporaries. Terence arrived in Rome as a slave from North Africa,
eventually gaining both his freedom and an education. Many of his plays, such as the
comedy Eunuchus (The Eunuch), did not appeal to many of the unsophisticated Romans; he was
criticized by his contemporaries for "cannibalizing" Greek plays.

Ennius, however, was more highly touted than either Plautius or Terence and is considered to
be the "father of Latin poetry." Born in Calabria in southern Italy (Magna Graecia), he served in
the Roman army in Sardinia, arriving in Rome with fellow writer Cato the Elder around 204
BCE, eventually obtaining the much-desired Roman citizenship. Even though he claimed to be
the reincarnation of Homer, only fragments of his works have survived. Rodgers notes that he
demonstrated how Latin poetry had achieved greatness while still emulating Greek forms.
His Annals was a history of Rome from the mythical Trojan hero Aeneas through his own day.
Unfortunately, he died in poverty.

Golden Age of Roman Poetry

As foretold by Ennius, Latin literature would soon truly come into its own. The Golden Age of
Roman poetry (c. 70 BCE – 14 CE) produced such memorable writers as Virgil, Horace,
Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid. According to Rodgers, Virgil, Horace, and the
exiled Ovid created a classical style of writing comparable to many of the great Greek authors.

One of these distinguished poets was Publius Vergilius Maro or Virgil (70 – 19 BCE). Unlike
many of the poets who followed him, Virgil provided his audience with a more romanticized
picture of Rome. Hailing from Cisalpine Gaul and a family of modest farmers, many of Virgil’s
themes demonstrate his love of the rural life. His Eclogues, written around 37 BCE, spoke of the
loves and lives of shepherds, while his Georgics, written around 29 BCE, praised Roman country
life: plowing, growing trees, tending cattle, and even keeping bees. However, his most
memorable work is the Aeneid, an epic telling of the journeys of Aeneas after the fall
of Troy through the founding of Rome by Romulus and Remus to the age of Augustus. As
Aeneas was the ideal model for the Roman way of life, Augustus believed the poem
demonstrated a fulfillment of Rome’s destiny.

Portrait of Virgil

Quintus Horatius Flaccus, more commonly known as Horace (65 BCE – 8 BCE), was the son of a
freedman. Although he fought on the wrong side at the Battle of Philippi (against Augustus),
he endeared himself to the emperor partially because of his poetry but also due to his friendship
with Virgil. In keeping with his Epicurean philosophy, Horace’s poems demonstrated a joy for
life and a love of nature. Among his many works are Satires, which was a criticism of the vice
that was rampant in Rome, Epodes, inspired by the Greek author Archilochus, and Odes, a
celebration of life in Rome during the age of Augustus. In all of his works, Horace always
demonstrated a deep respect and admiration of the Greeks and believed Rome had to
acknowledge the Greek superiority in all intellectual and cultural fields.
This new age under the reign of Augustus also produced many young poets who reacted
differently to the changes in Roman politics and society. The leader of these emerging poets,
Gaius Valerius Catullus (84 BCE – 54 BCE) is considered one of the greatest of all Roman lyric
poets. Avoiding any personal involvement in politics, he looked to his neighbors to the east,
such Greek authors as Sappho and Callimachus, for inspiration. According to historian
Rodgers, his poetry mingled both passion and urbanity with an awareness of life’s
impermanence and he "raised colloquial Latin to new heights" (386). Similarly, historian
Norman Cantor in his Antiquity said that Catullus recognized the mortality of man and exposed
a different side of Roman life. His poems revealed the existence of pessimism, individualism,
and deep feelings of self-indulgence within Roman society:

Furius, you who have neither a slave, nor a money-box, nor a bug, nor a spider, nor a fire, but
who have a father and a stepmother too, whose teeth can chew even a flintstone, you lead a
merry life with your father and that dry stick, your father’s wife. (Catullus, Poem 23)

Other poets were inspired by long lost loves. The first of these lovelorn poets was Sextus
Propertius (54 – 16 BCE), the son of an equestrian who unlike his fellow poets received legal
training but rejected any career in politics. His most famous book of poems was Elegies. A friend
of both Ovid and Virgil, he even received a home from the patron of arts Maecenas on
the Esquiline Hill; however, unlike some of his contemporaries, he refused to write an epic
about emperor Augustus. Like Propertius, Albius Tibullus (50 – 19 BCE), another son of an
equestrian family, wrote about a lost love, Delia, and, like Virgil, he idealized the country life.

Probably the most famous or infamous poet of the era is Publius Ovidius Naro or Ovid (42 BCE
– 18 CE). After Ovid, Roman poetry would take a brief hiatus. Rodgers wrote that with Ovid
Latin poetry had finally attained an "elegance and lyricism" to rival that of any Greek. To Ovid
love was the only "game worth playing." His Amores, published in 22 BCE, told in a very
lighthearted style about the misadventures of a young man and his love for an unobtainable
young girl. His Heroides was a series of 15 letters supposedly written by Greek and Roman
mythological female figures such as Penelope and Dido to their lovers who had either
mistreated or abandoned them. His Ars Amatoria mirrored Horace’s Ars Poetica. However, his
most famous work is the 15 books of mythology Metamorphoses, an epic poem that spoke not
only of humanity's interaction with the gods but also of heroes and heroines. Unfortunately,
Augustus did not look upon his poetry with admiration and exiled him. Although not
appreciated during his lifetime, his works of poetry have influenced many of the great authors
throughout history including Chaucer, Milton, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe.
Silver Age of Roman Poetry
Two famous Roman poets linked to what has been called the Silver Age of Roman poetry
are Marcus Annaeus Lucanus, better known as Lucan (39 – 65 CE), and Publius Papinius
Statius (45 – 96 CE). Lucan, born in Spain, was the nephew of Seneca, the advisor of
Emperor Nero. He even studied Stoic philosophy in Athens; however, his suspected
involvement in the Piso conspiracy would cost him his life. Pharsalia, his most famous work,
dealt with the Roman civil war of the 1st century BCE. His lesser known contemporary Statius
wrote the twelve books of Thebaid concerning Oedipus’s curse on Thebes.

Roman Prose
While there was an abundance of poets in Rome, there were also many outstanding writers of
prose. The city was alive with orators who took to the stage in the Roman Forum to voice their
views to the masses. It was a platform as well for lawyers who wished to plead for their clients.
One of the more memorable was Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 – 43 BCE), not only a brilliant
statesman and author but also an orator who, besides his 911 letters, wrote on subjects ranging
from art to education. In a series of caustic letters, he spoke out against the corrupt ex-governor
of Sicily Verres forcing him into retirement, though the ex-governor would later be set free
by Caesar. He wrote political essays such as De re publica (On the State) and De legibus (On the
Laws) as well as five books in Latin on ancient philosophy – De finibusbonorum et malorum.
His Epistulae ad familiares (Letters to family and friends) act as vivid historical and cultural
documents of the period and give an insight into the inner workings of late
Republic. Unfortunately, he had spoken out against Julius Caesar, something that angered the
dictator’s heir Octavian (Augustus). Having been exiled once, Cicero could not save himself
and was executed before he could escape Rome.
 Cicero

Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BCE – 65 CE) was a student of Stoic philosophy and tutor to Emperor
Nero. Not only an essayist, he wrote nine plays based on such Greek legends as Oedipus,
Heracles, and Medea. He also authored 124 essays on subjects ranging from vegetarianism to
the humane treatment of slaves. After being implicated in the Piso conspiracy, he was forced to
commit suicide by Nero.

Pliny the Elder (23 – 79 CE) or Gaius Plinius Secundus was a Roman administrator who wrote
on the Germanic wars and whose Natural History (Naturalis Historia) contained information on
the known universe as well as tracts on animals, trees, and plants, all in 37 volumes. Volume III,
for example, describes the geography of Italy and the topography of Rome:
If one were further to take into account the height of the buildings, a very fair estimate would be
formed, that would bring us to admit that there has been no city in the whole world that could be
compared to Rome in magnitude. (Pliny the Elder,Natural History, Book III, 67)

Observing the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 CE, Pliny the Elder died after inhaling fumes. His
nephew Pliny the Younger (61 – c. 112 CE) had a successful career as both a senator
and consul under Emperor Trajan. He is most noted for his long series of letters on a variety of
topics to the emperor.

There were also a number of Roman novelists: Petronius, Apuleius, Martial, and Juvenal.
Petronius or Gaius Petronius Arbiter (c. 27 – 66 CE) served as both a consul and governor of
Bithynia. His most famous work and the only one to survive is the Satyricon, a work considered
witty but amoral and hedonistic. Unfortunately, like several of his contemporaries, he was
implicated in the Piso conspiracy during Nero’s reign and was forced to commit suicide in 66
CE.

Lucius Apuleius (c. 124 – c. 170) from North Africa wrote a number of excellent works including
the amoral The Golden Ass which is the only complete Roman novel to survive. One of the
eleven separate books included in the novel spoke of the adventures of a young man named
Lucius who is transformed into an ass. His other works include Apologia, Florida, and De Deo
Socratis.

Marcus Valerius Martialis (c. 40 – c. 104 CE), better know as Martial, although originally from
Spain, spent most of his life in Rome. A close friend of Emperor Domitian, he wrote epigrams
on a variety of subjects, some of which might be called pornography:

Why don’t I kiss you, Philaenis? You’re bald. Why don’t I kiss you, Philaenis? You’re red-
headed. Why don’t I kiss you, Philaenis? You’re one-eyed. Whoever kisses all that, Philaenis,
sucks. (Martial, Epigram 2.33, in Williams, 128)

Decius Junius Juvenalis or Juvenal (c. 60 – c. 130 CE) is considered the greatest of the Roman
satirists. Unfortunately, he ran afoul of Emperor Domitian who believed he had been portrayed
negatively in the writer’s Satires and may have been exiled to Egypt; his place of death is
unknown.
Later Roman Literature
The spread of Christianity gave rise to a new type of literature from the 4th century CE, with
clerics writing on Christian morality in sharp contrast to the amoral and often sexually explicit
works of the previous centuries. One of the premier clerics of the 4th century was St. Ambrose
(c. 340 – 397 CE). Ambrosius was the son of the praetorian prefect of Gaul and schooled in the
classical Greek tradition. He served as bishop of both Rome and Milan as well as governor of
Aemilia-Liguria despite often challenging the Emperor Theodosius. Among his writings
are De officiis ministrorum, a discussion of morality and ecclesial discipline as well
as De obitu Valentiniani and De obitu Theodocii which established the concept that a Christian
emperor was a son of the church.

St. Ambrose

Decimus Magnus Ausonius (310 – 395 CE) came from Bordeaux and served as the tutor for the
future emperor Gratian; he was a noted grammarian and rhetorician. He was less concerned
with Christian values and wrote on a variety of subjects. His more noted works
are Praefatiunculae (Prefaces) and Eclogarum Liber (Eclogues), verses on astronomy and astrology.
Lastly, one cannot forget the writings of St. Augustine (354-430 CE). He is most famous for
his De civitate Dei (The City of God) which he wrote near the end of Western Roman Empire at
the time of the invasion of 410 CE and his Confessions.

While Ambrosius, Augustine, and Ausonius represented the emergence of Christian writers,
one pagan author also appeared on the scene, Claudius Claudianus (370 – 404 CE). Claudianus,
a native of Alexandria, was the court poet under Emperor Honorius. He wrote panegyrics for
Honorius and Stilicho, the Roman general. Influenced by earlier poets, both Roman and Greek,
he is considered the last important poet of the classical tradition.

Historians
Besides the writers of poetry and prose, there were the historians: Sallust, Tacitus, Livy,
and Suetonius. Unfortunately, much of early Roman history is based on myth, and some
historians sadly accepted it as fact. However, real or not, it gave the Romans a sense of identity.
The first historian of note was Gaius Sallustius Crispus or Sallust (c. 86 – 35 BCE), a former
senator expelled for immorality. So inspired by the Greek historian Thucydides, he turned to
writing history. An enemy of Cicero, he sided with dictator-for-life Julius Caesar who helped
him fight charges of malpractice while governor of Africa. His most famous works
include Bellum Catilinae, which dealt with the Catiline conspiracy, Bellum Iugurthinum,a book
concerned with the Roman war against the Numidian king Jugurtha, andHistories, which
remains only in fragments.

Livy (59 BCE – 17 CE) wrote a detailed history of Rome in 142 books, however, unfortunately
only 35 survive. Although he accepted many myths as fact, his history demonstrated his belief
in Rome’s destiny.
 Livy's Roman
History, 1664

Cornelius Tacitus' (58 – 120 CE) works include De vita Iulii Agricolae, which spoke of his father-
in-law’s time as governor of Britain; Germania, dealing with the wars against the tribes of
Germany; and the fragmented Annals and Histories.

Lastly, Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (c. 69 – c. 130 CE) must be mentioned.

His De virisillustribus included short biographies of Roman men of letters; poets, grammarians,
orators, and philosophers. His De vita Caesarum (The Twelve Caesars) spoke of the Roman
'caesars' from Julius Caesar to Domitian. Using earlier histories as sources, his works are
considered interesting but not totally reliable. They are concerned more with an emperor’s
personal habits than with his political accomplishments.

Unfortunately, Rome did not produce many philosophers like Greece; however, there are two
who should, at least, be mentioned. Marcus Aurelius was not only an excellent emperor but
also a Stoic philosopher; his Meditations was written Greek. Finally, T. Lucretius Carus (99 – 55
BCE) wrote On the Nature of the Universe, an Epicurean doctrine that said the world was
mechanistic, operating without divine intervention and true happiness existed from complete
withdrawal from public life.
Legacy
From its infancy, Roman literature borrowed heavily from the Greeks. However, they were able
to shake the shackles and create a vibrant literature of their own; poetry, prose, and history. The
Roman authors influenced countless others in the decades and centuries that followed – Dante,
Shakespeare, Milton, and many more. One cannot enter either a library or bookstore without
seeing Roman poetry and prose on the bookshelves; Cicero, Tacitus, Suetonius, as well as Virgil
and Horace. Western literature owes a debt of gratitude to the Romans for what they have
given the world.

INDIAN LITERATURE
In 1835, Britain's Lord Macaulay scoffed that "a single shelf of European books [is] worth the whole literature of
India and Arabia." Hindu literature says MIT philosophy professor Huston Smith lacks a tragic element because
in the Hindu view no one lifetime determines achievement or failure.
The family is important in Indian literature and drama. Both the Mahabharata and Ramayana—the two most
famous works of Indian literature and theater— are family epics, featuring cousins, uncles and aunts “struggling
and killing each other over land and dharma and then mourning inconsolably." Many American dramas feature
tough individuals. When these stories are adapted to India the individuals are first given a mother, father and
ideally a brother or sister. The Hindi version of Harry Potter sells for $3.60. In Kerala, books in Malayalam
outsell English books 10 to 1.
Many Indians ave a passion for Persian poetry. Laila Majnu is a great Persian love story also well known in
India. Sufism—mystical Islam—has had a strong impact on Indian literature. This is most evident in the poetry
of great masters such as Kabir (1440-1518) a poet saint who helped introduce Sufi mysticism to wide audience
among Muslims , Hindus and Sikhs.
The Gupta Empire (A.D. 320 to 647) is regarded as the classical period or golden age of Hindu art, literature
and science. Art (often erotic), architecture and literature, all patronized by the Gupta court, flourished.
Philosophy and science also enjoyed a kind of golden period. Under the Guptas, the Ramayana and the
Mahabharta were finally written down in the A.D. 4th century. India's greatest poet and dramatist, Kalidasa,
acquired fame expressing the values of the rich and powerful. Poetry in the Gupta age tended towards a few
genres: religious and meditative poetry, lyric poetry, narrative histories (the most popular of the secular
literatures), and drama. The Nalanda University in Bihar, came to fame during the Gupta rule. [Sources:
Glorious India, Library of Congress *]
Although Sanskrit was the language of learning and theology in South India, as it was in the north, the growth
of the bhakti (devotional) movements enhanced the crystallization of vernacular literature in all four major
Dravidian languages: Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, and Kannada; they often borrowed themes and vocabulary
from Sanskrit but preserved much local cultural lore. Examples of Tamil literature include two major poems,
Cilappatikaram (The Jewelled Anklet) and Manimekalai (The Jewelled Belt); the body of devotional literature of
Shaivism and Vaishnavism--Hindu devotional movements; and the reworking of the Ramayana by Kamban in
the twelfth century.
English is arguably the most important thing the British left behind in India. English helped unify the Indian
subcontinent by providing a common language for a region with a multitude of languages and dialects. It also
provided a common tongue for administration and education. The Indian constitution and Indian legal code are
written in English and the famous speech delivered by Nehru after India became independent was in English.
English is especially popular among the affluent middle class. As was true in the colonial era, English is a
prerequisite to getting ahead, especially in the outsourcing and technology world. English is more widely
spoken in southern India than northern India in part because southerners loath to use Hindi.
 The way English is spoken varies a great deal from place to place and with levels of fluency and wealth. It is
commonly said that there are at least 15 different kinds of English, one to go with each of the each of the
official languages.
See Kama Sutra Under Sex

Early Indian Literature and Theatre

Dr. Jukka O. Miettinen of the Theatre Academy of Helsinki wrote: “Theatre and dance, which are inseparable
art forms in Indian culture, are present even in the earliest works of Indian literature. The Veda literature, or the
four Vedas, which forms the basis of early Brahmanism and later Hinduism, mentions dance and open-air
theatrical performance. Otherwise, the Vedas mainly include invocations and hymns to the gods, ritual
formulas, and short stories. [Source: Dr. Jukka O. Miettinen,Asian Traditional Theater and Dance website,
Theatre Academy Helsinki /=/]
“The Vedic tradition evolved orally through the centuries and received its written form much later in the post-
Vedic period. Towards the end of the Vedic period, various gods, which were originally rather simple
personifications of aspects of nature, began to acquire complicated mythologies, which personalised them.
These mythologies were further elaborated in the early centuries A.D. by the Purana literature, while at the
same these mythical stories became the main theme for much of the Indian theatrical arts. /=/
“Indian literary heritage includes several shastras or manuals (also code, theory, treatise) covering a vast
range of subjects from cooking, elephant and horse breeding, and lovemaking, as well as several art forms,
such as poetics, music, theatre, and dance. The earliest treatise for theatre and dance is the Natyashastra or
the Drama Manual. Other shastra manuals also give information about theatrical practices, each according to
their own specific viewpoint. The Kamashastra (Kamasutra), the treatise on love, informs us about the kind of
role that theatrical performances had in the life of the upper class educated male citizen. The Arthashastra, the
treatise on politics and administration, on the other hand, gives detailed information about the role of different
kinds of performers in the ideal, yet highly hierarchical, society described in this manual written in the 4th
century B.C.” /=/

Sanskrit and Early Indian Literature

Sanskrit, Prakrits and the History of Indo-Aryan Languages of India

Modern linguistic knowledge of the process of assimilation of Indo-Aryan language comes through the Sanskrit
language employed in the sacred literature known as the Vedas. Over a period of centuries, Indo-Aryan
languages came to predominate in the northern and central portions of South Asia. [Source: Library of
Congress *]
Sanskrit is the ancient language of India and the sacred language of Hinduism. The Asian cousin of Latin and
Greek, it is ideal for chanting as it is full of sounds that resonate in a special way. Traditionally it was a taboo for
any caste other than Brahmans (India’s highest caste) to learn Sanskrit—"the language of the gods." The
Hindu epic Ramayana described a lower caste man who had molten metal poured in his ear after he listened to
Sanskrit scriptures reserved for upper class Brahmans.
As Indo-Aryan speakers spread across northern and central India, their languages experienced constant
change and development. By about 500 B.C., Prakrits, or "common" forms of speech, were widespread
throughout the north. By about the same time, the "sacred," "polished," or "pure" tongue--Sanskrit--used in
religious rites had also developed along independent lines, changing significantly from the form used in the
Vedas. However, its use in ritual settings encouraged the retention of archaic forms lost in the Prakrits.
Concerns for the purity and correctness of Sanskrit gave rise to an elaborate science of grammar and
phonetics and an alphabetical system seen by some scholars as superior to the Roman system. By the fourth
century B.C., these trends had culminated in the work of Panini, whose Sanskrit grammar, the Ashtadhyayi
(Eight Chapters), set the basic form of Sanskrit for subsequent generations. Panini's work is often compared to
Euclid's as an intellectual feat of systematization.*
The Prakrits continued to evolve through everyday use. One of these dialects was Pali, which was spoken in
the western portion of peninsular India. Pali became the language of Theravada Buddhism; eventually it came
to be identified exclusively with religious contexts. By around A.D. 500, the Prakrits had changed further into
Apabhramshas, or the "decayed" speech; it is from these dialects that the contemporary Indo-Aryan languages
of South Asia developed. The rudiments of modern Indo-Aryan vernaculars were in place by about A.D. 1000
to 1300.*
It would be misleading, however, to call Sanskrit a dead language because for many centuries huge numbers
of works in all genres and on all subjects continued to be written in Sanskrit. Original works are still written in it,
although in much smaller numbers than formerly. Many students still learn Sanskrit as a second or third
language, classical music concerts regularly feature Sanskrit vocal compositions, and there are even television
programs conducted entirely in Sanskrit.*
Dr. Jukka O. Miettinen of the Theatre Academy of Helsinki wrote: ““The classical language of Indian civilisation
is Sanskrit. The four Vedas were written in Sanskrit, and later an enormous corpus of literary works of various
kinds, including the so-called Sanskrit Dramas, which will be discussed later, were written in Sanskrit. Panini,
the great grammarian of Sanskrit, mentions a short text on acting in the 5th century B.C. Sanskrit remained the
language of the educated elite until the Indian Medieval Period. The way people informally spoke Sanskrit,
however, changed through the centuries. Thus Sanskrit ceased to be a natural, spoken language, a process
similar to the fate of Latin in Medieval Europe. [Source: Dr. Jukka O. Miettinen,Asian Traditional Theater and
Dance website, Theatre Academy Helsinki /=/]
“The opposite of standard Sanskrit is Prakrit, varieties of dialects, which evolved from Sanskrit. For example,
one revolutionary aspect of the Buddha’s career as a teacher was that he preached in Prakrit, which was
understood by ordinary people too. Prakrit became an important element in classical Sanskrit Drama, since the
clown and many minor characters spoke vernacular Prakrit. India now has dozens of languages, including
English, which, alongside Hindi, is a kind of universal language throughout the country. Sanskrit, however,
remains an important key to understanding India’s religions and philosophy, as well as classical literature and
theatre.” /=/

Buddhist Literature and Theatre

The Jatakas is a group of stories that tell of Buddha's rebirths in the form of Bodhisattvas and animals, with
each story embodying lesson from Buddha's teachings.
Dr. Jukka O. Miettinen of the Theatre Academy of Helsinki wrote: “Buddhist literature indicates that early
Buddhism also created a rich theatrical tradition. For example, the Pali Suttas (5th–2nd centuries B.C.) mention
theatre groups and various kinds of performers. It was by no means forbidden to portray the Buddha himself on
stage, as has been sometimes the case later. [Source: Dr. Jukka O. Miettinen,Asian Traditional Theater and
Dance website, Theatre Academy Helsinki /=/]
“The Buddhist theatrical tradition spread later via the caravan route network, or the “Northern Silk Road”, to
East Asia, and influenced the development of early theatre in Central Asia, China, Korea and even Japan.
Another wave of influence spread to the regions of the Himalayas, where a rich tradition of monastery dramas
evolved. /=/
“The Indian cultural sphere was the source of important Buddhist literature, which has been employed by
numerous theatrical traditions both in ancient India and present-day Southeast Asia. The Buddhist Jataka or
Birth Stories are morally instructive stories that came about at different times, in which the main character is an
animal, a human being or a superhuman being seeking to do good. They were gathered into a collection of 547
(or 550) stories in the Pali language, the sacred language of Buddhism. The main characters were described
as early incarnations of the Buddha. The Jatakas give much valuable information about various theatrical
practices from the period they were written, i.e. c. 600–200 B.C.” /=/

Panchatantra and Other Old Indian Stories

The Panchatantra is one of the best-known collections of old stories. "Panchatantra" is a Sanskrit word that
means "five books." Each book has a framework story, sort of like Arabian Nights, into which shorter stories are
interwoven. The fable-like stories ar e full of humor and sagely advice. Many scholars say that The
Panchatantra was originally composed in Kashmir about 200 B.C. According to legend, it was written for three
princes to teach them the principals of "right living." Many of the stories are attributed to a writer named Bidpai,
a wise man from India.
 The Gupta period (A.D. 320 to 647) literature consists of fables and folktales written in Sanskrit. These stories
spread west to Persia, Egypt, and Greece, and became the basis for many Islamic literary works such as, Ali
Baba and the Forty Thieves and Aladdin and his Magic Lamp. The Panchatantra and Kamasutra were written
during this period. [Source: Glorious India <>]
Storytelling has been a popular form of entertainment in India for centuries. Many regions and ethnic groups
have their traditions of folk stories. The Hitopadesa ("Book of Good Counsel" in Sanskrit) is another book of
fables written after The Panchatantra. The stories from Arabian Nights are very popular in India, Many of the
stories originated in India. Ancient philosophers were articulated by Shakyamuni.
Balladeers today begin learning the art of storytelling, dancing singing and playing the 19-
stringed ravanhatta at the age of ten or eleven. By the age of about 15 they become full-
fledged bhopas, balladeers and to tell and act out a 14th century story about a Rajput chief named Pabuji. The
story is traditional performed at night in front of a huge illustrated scroll and it can take up to a week to relate.
[Source: Veenu Sandal, Smithsonian]
Books: 1) O’Flaherty, Wendy Doniger, Hindu Myths. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1975; 2) Zimmer,
Heinrich., Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992; Ions,
Veronica; 3) Indian Mythology. New York: Peter Bedrick, 1984; 4) Jaffrey, Madhur, Seasons of Splendour:
Tales, Myths, and Legends of India, New York: Athenaeum, 1985.

Little Black Sambo

The Little Black Sambo story is set in India. It was originally a children's book written and illustrated by Helen
Bannerman, and first published by Grant Richards in October 1899. The story was a children's favorite for half
a century until the word sambo was deemed a racial slur in some countries and the illustrations considered
reminiscent of "darky iconography". Both text and illustrations have undergone considerable revision since.
[Source: Wikipedia +]
Sambo is a South Indian boy who lives with his father and mother, named Black Jumbo and Black Mumbo,
respectively. Sambo encounters four hungry tigers, and surrenders his colourful new clothes, shoes, and
umbrella so they will not eat him. The tigers are vain and each thinks he is better dressed than the others. They
chase each other around a tree until they are reduced to a pool of melted butter. Sambo then recovers his
clothes and his mother, Black Mumbo, makes pancakes out of the butter. +
The book has a controversial history. The original illustrations by Bannerman showed a caricatured Southern
Indian or Tamil child. The story may have contributed to the use of the word "sambo" as a racial slur. The
book's success led to many pirated, inexpensive, widely available versions that incorporated popular
stereotypes of "black" peoples. For example, in 1908 John R. Neill, best known for his illustration of the Oz
books by L. Frank Baum, illustrated an edition of Bannerman's story. +
In 1932 Langston Hughes criticised Little Black Sambo as a typical "pickaninny" storybook which was hurtful to
black children, and gradually the book disappeared from lists of recommended stories for children. In 1942,
Saalfield Publishing Company released a version of Little Black Sambo illustrated by Ethel Hays. During the
mid-20th century, however, some American editions of the story, including a 1950 audio version on Peter Pan
Records, changed the title to the racially neutral Little Brave Sambo. +

Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Indian Writers

Novelist Bankin Chandrra Chatterji (1836-94) wrote European-influenced literature. The great Tamil poet and
journalist Subramania Bharari (1881-1921) was from Madras. He was exiled by the Raj to the French enclave
of Pondicherry.
Trinidad-born, Indian writer V.S. Naipaul is often named as a possible recipient of the Nobel Prize for
Literature. He won the Booker Prize for his book India: A Million Mutinies.
Kannada-language novelist, critic and poet U.R. Ananthamuthy (1932-2014) was born in Thirtahalli Taluk and
is considered as one of the pioneers of the Navya movement. He was to be honored with the Jnanpith Award
for the Kannada language, the highest literary honour conferred in India. In 1998, he received the Padma
Bhushan award from the Government of India.[4] He was the vice-chancellor of Mahatma Gandhi University in
Kerala during the late 1980s. He was one of the finalists of Man Booker International Prize for the year 2013.
 Nirad Chaudhuri was 90 when his 979-page analysis of Indian intellectual life, Thy Hand, Great Anarch! India:
1921-1952, was published. Sometimes called the enfant terrible of Indian letters, he made a name for himself
in 1951 with his first book, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, described by Winston Churchill as "one of
the best books he ever read." Educated in an East Bengal village and in Calcutta, Chauduri wrote a biography
on the founder of the British Raj, Robert Clive, but turned down a requests by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to
write a biography on her second husband Aristotle Onassis. He was 100 when his bookThree Horsemen of the
Apocalypse was published.

R.K Narayan
R.K Narayan (1906-2001) is famous for his novels set in the small, fictional town of Malgadi in southern India.
Bibhuti Bhushan Banerji wrote the Apu trilogy and Pather Panchali, made into a movie by the great Indian
filmmaker, Satyajit Ray. Khushwant Singh is one of India's best known contemporary authors. A Sikh with a
reputation as a eccentric, his book books include serious works of history, dirty joke books and The Fantasies
of an Octogenarian, written when he was 84. His works captured the essence of ordinary life.
Often compared to William Faulkner, Narayan is one of the greatest and celebrated novelists in India. He is
distinguished for his simple and unpretentious English writing style and is one of the most widely read Indian
novelists. His stories were grounded in a compassionate humanism and celebrated the humour and energy of
ordinary life. R.K. Narayan’s writing style was marked by simplicity and subtle humour. He told stories of
ordinary people trying to live their simple lives in a changing world. Narayan was nominated for the Nobel Prize
in Literature multiple times but did not win the honor. His popular works include The English Teacher, The
Financial Expert and Waiting for the Mahatma. [Source: Lelobook, Encyclopedia Britannica <^>]
Narayan was born on October 10, 1906 in Madras. His father was a provincial head master. Narayan spent his
early childhood with his maternal grandmother, Parvathi in Madras and used to spend only a few weeks each
summer visiting his parents and siblings. R.K. Narayan studied for eight years at Lutheran Mission School
close to his grandmother’s house in Madras, also for a short time at the CRC High School. When his father was
appointed headmaster of the Maharaja’s High School in Mysore, R.K. Narayan moved back in with his parents.
He obtained his bachelor’s degree from the University of Mysore.
Narayan’s original name was Rasipuram Krishnaswami Narayanswami. He took the name R. K. Narayan at
the suggestion of Graham Greene. He learned Tamil and English in school. Narayan completed his education
in 1930 and briefly worked as a teacher before deciding to devote himself to writing. He began with his first
novel Swami and Friends in 1935. Besides novels, he wrote short stories, travelogues, condensed versions of
Indian epics in English besides his memoir. <^>

Books by R.K Narayan

Naryan’s His first novel, Swami and Friends (1935), is an episodic narrative recounting the adventures of a
group of schoolboys. That book and much of Narayan’s later works are set in the fictitious South Indian town of
Malgudi. Narayan typically portrays the peculiarities of human relationships and the ironies of Indian daily life,
in which modern urban existence clashes with ancient tradition. His style is graceful, marked by genial humour,
elegance, and simplicity. [Source: Lelobook, Encyclopedia Britannica <^>]
Narayan wrote fourteen novels, five volumes of short stories, a number of travelogues and collections of non-
fiction, condensed versions of Indian epics in English, and the memoir My Days. Among the best-received of
Narayan’s novels are The Bachelor of Arts (1937), The Dark Room (1938), The English Teacher (1945), The
Financial Expert (1952), Waiting for the Mahatma (1955), The Guide (1958), The Man-Eater of Malgudi (1961),
The Vendor of Sweets (1967), Malgudi Days (1982), A Tiger for Malgudi (1983) and and The Grandmother’s
Tale (1993). Narayan also wrote a number of short stories; collections include Lawley Road (1956), A Horse
and Two Goats and Other Stories (1970), and Under the Banyan Tree and Other Stories (1985). In addition to
works of nonfiction (chiefly memoirs), he also published shortened modern prose versions of two Indian epics,
The Ramayana (1972) and The Mahabharata (1978). <^>
In 1958 Narayan’s work The Guide won him the National Prize of the Indian Literary Academy, his country’s
highest literary honor. In 1980 he was awarded the A.C. Benson Medal by the Royal Society of Literature and
in 1982 he was made an Honorary Member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
Besides, he was also conferred honorary doctorates by the University of Mysore, Delhi University and the
University of Leeds. Narayan died in 2001 at the age of 94. He wrote for more than fifty years, and published
until he was eighty seven. <^>

Rabindranth Tagore
Rabindranth Tagore (1861-1941), a poet, philosopher and writer from Calcutta, was the first non-European to
win the Nobel Prize in literature. He was a formidable personality who played a major role in shaping the
cultural life of India at the turn of the 20th century, “when the country was struggling for its independence and
searching for its identity in the international community. He also helped introduce Indian literature to the West.”
[Source: Suketa Mehta, Time, August 23, 1999, Dr. Jukka O. Miettinen,Asian Traditional Theater and Dance
website, Theatre Academy Helsinki]
Tagore had a long white beard. He looked more like a holy man than a writer. In addition to being a poet and
fiction writer he was also a dramatist, composer, playwright, painter, educator political thinker, and philosopher
of science. Although he has been forgotten in much of the world and India he remains greatly loved among
Bengalis in India and Bangladesh.
Nehru once wrote, "Gandhi and Tagore. Two types entirely different from each other, and yet both of them
typical of India...There are many of course who may be abler than them or greater geniuses in their own line...It
is not so much because of any single virtue, but because of the tout ensemble, that is felt. Among the world's
great men today Gandhi and Tagore were supreme as human beings."
Tagore won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. The chairman of the committee that selected him said, "In
times to come, history will know better how to appraise the importance and influence of his work and draw
inspiration from it.” While he was in Sweden to receive the award Tagore insisted that a goat be taken his
Stockholm hotel room so that he could a fresh supply of goat milk.

Tagore's Life
Tagore was born in north Calcutta on May 6, 1861 into one of the richest and most progressive families in
Bengal. His father was Maharishi Deberndranath Tagore, a famous intellectual in his own right. Tagore briefly
studied in England in 1878-80, exploring the works of Shakespeare, but returned to India to take care of his
father's estates.
Tagore came from an influential Bengali Brahman family of several generations of intellectuals. 1901 he
moved to Santiniketan in eastern India, and established there an institution that was to become his own
Santiniketan University. Tagore died on August 7, 1941 at the age of 80 in the house where he was born.
Tagore was good friends with Satyajit Ray. Most of Ray's best films were adaptions of Tagore works. Ray said
the great poet was intimidating. "You could never really get very close to him because he was a remote kind of
thinker. His looks and everything, his beard and his enormous height, even his speech was very florid. He
never used a wrong word. Everything was so incredible perfect. That's off-putting.” [Source: Julian Crandall
Hollick, Smithsonian magazine]
Tagore traveled widely around the world. His visit to Southeast Asia in 1927, in particular, opened his eyes to
realise the role of Indian culture in a wider Asian framework. Despite being rich, Tagore had great empathy for
the poor. He had a famous meeting with Albert Einstein on July 14, 1930.

Works by Tagore
Tagore wrote more than 2,500 songs about God, nature and love as well poems and prose. He also produced
more than 2,000 paintings and drawings, 28 volumes of poetry, drama, operas, short stories, novels, essays,
diaries and large number of letters. The emotional impact of the world was also equal yo the output.
Tagore's works initially won him recognition in Bengal. Gitanjali, an English translation of some of his poems,
won worldwide acclaim in 1913, and paved the way for his winning the Nobel prize. The surprising thing about
this work was that would probably have been better if Tagore hadn't translated the poems himself. Tagore
wrote Gitanjali after his wife, son and daughter died in quick succession.
 One of his more interesting short stories, Kabuliwalah, is about the friendship between a murderous Afghan
merchant and a small girl told in the eyes of an upper-class Bengali man. Tagore’s novel Home and the World
is about a housewife who turns her back on her family and joins the struggle against British colonialism.
Tagore songs are collectively known as Rabindrasangeet ("the music of Rabindra"). They are frequently heard
on the streets of Calcutta and are fixtures of wedding and festivals. One goes something likes this: "the
necklace bruises me; it strangles when I try to take it off. It chokes my singing. Take it from me! I'm ashamed to
wear it. Give men a simple garland in its place."
On his dabbling with dance and opera, Jukka O. Miettinen of the Theatre Academy Helsinki wrote: “He was
particularly interested in, what he called, the “operatic” Southeast Asian theatre forms. He exclaimed that India
had lost this kind of forms and he dedicated much energy to creating his own theatrical style, also combining
dance and music Tagore had seen Manipuri dances even as early as in 1919 and became a great admirer of
them. He invited an important teacher-guru to teach them at his own university, Santiniketan. He used the
Manipuri style as the basis for his own dance plays, called rabindra nritiya natyas. He also wrote a drama-
opera, Valmiki, and plays dealing with social issues, such as The Post Office and Untouchable Girl. In many
ways he was an influential personage, who gave the cultural life of new India an internationally recognisable
face. [Source:Dr. Jukka O. Miettinen,Asian Traditional Theater and Dance website, Theatre Academy Helsinki
/=/]

Tagore and Indian National Anthem

Tagore Rabindranth wrote a poem which became the Indian National Anthem. It goes:
Where the mind is with fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not
been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
...Where the clear stream of reason has not lost it way
into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
...Into that heaven of freedom, my Father. let my country awake
Another song-poem Amar Sonar Bangla ("My Golden Bengal") became the national anthem of Bangladesh.

Tagore, the Activist

In 1901, Tagore founded the Santiniketan school in rural Bengal to protest the existing system of education. It
was a school and a university combining what he believed where the best of India and British learning, with a
strong emphasis on the arts. Among those who studied there Indira Gandhi, Amartya Sen and Satyajit Ray.
After Tagore died Santiniketan went into decline and eventually closed.
Although Tagore was no great fan of the British, he had strong views about the direction that the
independence movement should take. Tagore did not support Gandhi's non-cooperation movement with the
British. After the Amritsar Massacre in 1919 Tagore renounced British knighthood given to him in 1915.
Tagore was a strong anti-nationalist. Explaining his ideal of the Universal Many he wrote, "Patriotism cannot
be our final spiritual shelter; may refuge is humanity."
Image Sources:
Text Sources: New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Times of London, Lonely Planet
Guides, Library of Congress, Ministry of Tourism, Government of India, Compton’s Encyclopedia, The
Guardian, National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, Reuters, AP, AFP,
Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic Monthly, The Economist, Foreign Policy, Wikipedia, BBC, CNN, and various
books, websites and other publications.

© 2008 Jeffrey Hays

Last updated June 2015
 THE GOLDEN AGE OF ISLAM
 After the death of Muhammad, Arab leaders were called caliphs.
 Caliphs built and established Baghdad as the hub of the Abbasid Caliphate.
 Baghdad was centrally located between Europe and Asia and was an important area
for trade and exchanges of ideas.
 Scholars living in Baghdad translated Greek texts and made scientific discoveries—
which is why this era, from the seventh to thirteenth centuries CE, is named the
Golden Age of Islam.
A love of knowledge was evident in Baghdad, established in 762 CE as the capital
city of the Abbasid Caliphate in modern-day Iraq. Scholars, philosophers, doctors, and
other thinkers all gathered in this center of trade and cultural development..
Academics—many of them fluent in Greek and Arabic—exchanged ideas and
translated Greek texts into Arabic.

Chief Muslim leaders after Muhammad’s death were referred to as Caliphs.The era of
the Abbasid Caliphs’ construction and rule of Baghdad is known as the Golden Age
of Islam. It was an era when scholarship thrived.

Abbasid Caliphate
After the death of Muhammad, the Umayyad Dynasty gained the reins of power.
Based in Damascus, Syria, the Umayyad Caliphate faced internal pressures and
resistance, partly because they displayed an obvious preference for Arab Muslims,
excluding non-Arab Muslims like Persians. Taking advantage of this weakness, Sunni
Arab Abu al-Abbas mounted a revolution in 750 CE. With support from his followers,
he destroyed the Umayyad troops in a massive battle and formed the Abbasid
Dynasty in its place.

Baghdad
 A map of the city of Baghdad. The city center is round with the river Tigris running
through the outskirts on the eastern side of the city.

The leaders of the Abbasid Dynasty built Baghdad, the capital of modern-day Iraq.
Baghdad would come to replace and overshadow Damascus as the capital city of the
empire. It was located near both the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, making it an ideal
spot for food production that could sustain a large population.
The Abbasids built Baghdad from scratch while maintaining the network of roads and
trade routes the Persians had established before the Umayyad Dynasty took over.
Baghdad was strategically located between Asia and Europe, which made it a prime
spot on overland trade routes between the two continents. Some of the goods being
traded through Baghdad were ivory, soap, honey, and diamonds. People in Baghdad
made and exported silk, glass, tiles, and paper. The central location and lively trade
culture of the city made a lively exchange of ideas possible as well.

A map of the extent of the Abbasid Dynasty from 750 to 1258. Extent of Abbasid
dynasty is shown in red and covers most of the modern-day Middle East and North
Africa.

Baghdad attracted many people, including scholars, to live within its borders. To get a
sense of what living in the newly constructed city was like, here’s an excerpt from the
writings of Arab historian and biographer, Yakut al-Hamawi, describing Baghdad in
the tenth century:
The city of Baghdad formed two vast semi-circles on the right and left banks of the
Tigris, twelve miles in diameter. The numerous suburbs, covered with parks, gardens,
villas, and beautiful promenades, and plentifully supplied with rich bazaars, and finely
built mosques and baths, stretched for a considerable distance on both sides of the
river. In the days of its prosperity the population of Baghdad and its suburbs
amounted to over two [million]! The palace of the Caliph stood in the midst of a vast
park several hours in circumference, which beside a menagerie and aviary comprised
an enclosure for wild animals reserved for the chase. The palace grounds were laid out
with gardens and adorned with exquisite taste with plants, flowers, and trees,
reservoirs and fountains, surrounded by sculpted figures. On this side of the river
stood the palaces of the great nobles. Immense streets, none less than forty cubits
wide, traversed the city from one end to the other, dividing it into blocks or quarters,
each under the control of an overseer or supervisor, who looked after the cleanliness,
sanitation and the comfort of the inhabitants.

Tenth-century historian Yakut al-Hamawi, from Lost History 60-61

Pursuit of knowledge
Abbasid Caliphs Harun al-Rashid and his son, al-Ma’mun, who followed him,
established a House of Wisdom in Baghdad—a dedicated space for scholarship. The
House of Wisdom increased in use and prestige under al-Ma’mun’s rule, from 813 to
833. He made a special effort to recruit famous scholars to come to the House of
Wisdom. Muslims, Christians, and Jews all collaborated and worked peacefully there.

The translation movement

Caliphs like al-Rashid and al-Ma’mun directly encouraged a translation
movement, a formal translation of scholarly works from Greek into Arabic. The
Abbasid rulers wanted to make Greek texts, such as Aristotle’s works, available to the
Arab world. Their goal was to translate as many of these famous works as possible in
order to have a comprehensive library of knowledge and to preserve the philosophies
and scholarship of Greece. The Abbasids aimed to have philosophy, science, and
medicine texts translated. In addition to Arab Muslim scholars, Syrian Christians
translated Syriac texts into Arabic as well.

Why were the Abbasids so interested in a massive translation undertaking? In addition

to their desire to have a comprehensive library of knowledge and the Qur’an’s
emphasis on learning as a holy activity, they also had a practical thirst for medical
knowledge. The dynasty was facing a demand for skilled doctors—so having as much
knowledge as possible for them to access was a must.

One way the Abbasid dynasty was able to spread written knowledge so quickly was
their improvements on printing technology they had obtained from the Chinese; some
historians believe this technology was taken after the Battle of Talas between the
Abbasid Caliphate and the Tang Dynasty in 751. The Chinese had guarded paper
making as a secret, but when the Tang lost the battle, the Abbasids captured
knowledgeable paper makers as prisoners of war, forcing them to reproduce their
craft.

In China, papermaking was a practice reserved for elites, but the Arabs learned how to
produce texts on a larger scale, establishing paper mills which made books more
accessible. In turn, Europeans eventually learned these papermaking and producing
skills from Arabs.

Abbasid advances
During the Golden Age of Islam, Arab and Persian scholars—as well as scholars from
other countries—were able to build on the information they translated from the
Greeks and others during the Abbasid Dynasty and forge new advances in their fields.
Ibn al-Haythm invented the first camera and was able to form an explanation of how
the eye sees. Doctor and philosopher Avicenna wrote the Canon of Medicine, which
helped physicians diagnose dangerous diseases such as cancer. And Al-Khwarizmi, a
Persian mathematician, invented algebra, a word which itself has Arabic roots.
Summary
Scholars living in Baghdad during the Abbasid Caliphate contributed to the
preservation of Greek and other existing knowledge about philosophy, astronomy,
medicine, and many other disciplines. In addition to preserving information, these
scholars contributed new insights in their fields and ultimately passed their
discoveries along to Europe.