
Maria Conterno, “Storytelling” and “History writing” in Seventh-Century Near East, FMSH-WP-2014-80, september 2014.
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Abstract
The present paper is a study on the circulation of historiographical material across linguistic, religious and political borders in the seventh-century Near East and Mediterranean. Contrary to other scholars, who have tried to explain the similarities among certain historical texts looking only for shared written sources, the author points out the importance that oral transmission must have had in the circulation of historical information, before and beside written production, and finds evidence for that in eight medieval chronicles written in Greek, Latin, Syriac and Arabic.
The author
Maria Conterno, Department of History, University of Ghent (Belgium), BA and MA, University of Padua; Ph.D., Istituto Italiano di Scienze Umane (Florence), works primarily on the interactions among Greek, Syriac and Christian Arabic cultures in Late Antiquity and Byzantium. Her doctoral dissertation, currently in print, is focused on the Oriental sources of Theophanes Confessor’s Chronographia. After a research stay in the United States (Princeton, Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies), and in Paris (“boursière Fernand Braudel”, Labex RESMED), she now works at the University of Ghent within a project on Late Antique historiography, conducting a research on the reception of Greek ecclesiastical histories in Syriac and Christian Arabic historiography.
The text
This text was written in the frame of a Fernand Braudel IFER Fellow ship, February-October 2013.
Résumé
Cet article présente une étude sur la circulation des matériaux historiographiques à travers les frontières linguistiques, religieuses et politiques au Proche-Orient et à travers la Méditerranée au septième siècle. Les similarités que l’on observe entre certains textes historiques ont toujours été expliquées par l’utilisation de la même source écrite, mais l’auteur fait ici remarquer que la transmission orale devait aussi jouer un rôle très important dans la circulation des informations historiques, avant et à côté de la production écrite. On en trouve notamment des traces dans huit chroniques médiévales écrites en grec, latin, syriaque et arabe.