Customer Reviews

Armenian History Attributed to Sebeos (Liverpool University Press - Translated Texts for Historians)

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A chronicle of the highest calibre, documenting the Persian -Byzantine wars in the East, as well as providing the earliest recorded information on Muhammad and the early rise of Islam.

Remarkably factual, written in a style reflecting the classical historians of the Greeks and Latins, reporting the good with the bad, in an elequent fashion.

Sebeos views come from the Armenian stand point, squeezed between the powerful empires of the Persians and Greeks. Incoporated in the chronicle are accounts of the schisms with the Grrek Orthdox Church, the persecution of the christian church by the Persians, and the actions and persuasions of the Armenian nobles of the time.

Higley recommended for the serious historian and the casual reader with a passion for classical or Medieval history.

You can get the Bedrosian translation of (pseudo)Sebeos online for free. So if all you want is to browse the text, you don't need this book.

If you are serious about the history of Dark Age Caucasia, though, you do need it - for Thomson's footnotes and especially Howard-Johnson's commentary. HJ goes in-depth into which sources "Sebeos" used, along with historical context from other sources - Arabic, Greek, Syriac and Udi.

"Sebeos" (with the commentary here) is also helpful for the history of the Arab frontier up to 660 AD. In fact it is, as far as I know, the ONLY contemporary narrative history of this time surviving in full. Everywhere else I just find fragments (John of Nikiu), bare chronicles (819 Chron), miscellanies (Khuzistan, the "Albanian" Udi history), propaganda masquerading as history (Maronite Chron, Bar Penkaye), and the hadith.

I'll append here a warning (not a criticism). You as reader do have to be aware that this translation often leaves the Armenian at transcription and not translation. So, when you see "Aluank", you are supposed to read "Albania" and *think* "the Udi in Azerbaijan". Making it more confusing, it was apparently an earlier convention to spell the Dark-Age Armenian "L" the way the Armenians pronounce it TODAY, which is "gh". So we see words like kathoghikos when they mean, of course, Catholicos; Aghuania for Albania. At least Thomson didn't inflict that upon us, but keep that in mind when searching for cross-references elsewhere.