Alphonse Mingana

Alphonse Mingana ( Syriac -Aramaic: ܐ ܠ ܦ ܘ ܢ ܨ ܡ ܢ ܥ ܢ ܐ Given Name: Hormizd; * December 23, 1878 or 1881 in Scharanesch in Zakho ( Northern Iraq ), † December 5, 1937 in Birmingham ) was a Christian theologian and orientalist.

Hormizd, the eldest of eight children of the Chaldean Catholic priest Paolo Mingana and his wife Maryam Nano, was educated from 1891 at the Séminaire Saint Jean, the Chaldean Seminary in Mosul. There he learned Turkish, Persian, Kurdish. Latin, French, Arabic, Syriac and Hebrew. In 1902 he was ordained a presbyter ( "priest" ) by Patriarch Emmanuel II Thomas ( 1900-1947 ) and took on the name Alphonse. After a short pastoral activity in his home village, he was appointed professor of Syriac and Arabic at the seminary. He collected Syrian manuscripts and worked as a proofreader for the printing of the Dominicans in Mosul.

1905 began the scholarly and ambitious Mingana with its own publications, a Syrian grammar and an edition of the works of Narsai of Nisibis, Edessa. In 1907 he published in Syriac and French, soon famous chronicle of Arbela. Your only manuscript was acquired on October 21, 1907 by the Prussian State Library in Berlin. Here concealed Mingana that it is a contemporary, artificially aged manuscript. About the publication of this text, there were clashes with the patriarch, in whose wake Mingana 1910 left the seminary. Finally, he broke with the Chaldean Church and traveled on January 7, 1913 from Mosul from.

Mingana went in 1913 to England, where he was promoted by James Rendel Harris and David Samuel Margoliouth. On 14 July 1915 he married the Norwegian Lutheran Emma Sophia Floor from Stavanger. The marriage produced a son and a daughter were born. 1920 Mingana received British citizenship. He never gained a doctor's degree, but let him enter in his passport.

From 1915 to 1932 he was curator of handwriting in Manchester, starting in 1932 as a successor to Harris ' in Birmingham. On three journeys to the Orient, 1924, 1925 and 1929, he earned nearly 600 manuscripts with partly hitherto unknown content, which became the nucleus of the " Mingana Collection" in Selly Oak.

His edition of the "Chronicle of Arbela " (1907 ) is considered controversial and was Mingana the charge of handwriting forgery one, not least because those in the 7th or 6th century dated oldest source for early Syrian church history, only in a manuscript from the 19th century the events of the 17th century mentioned, is present, which also has significant deviations from Minganas Edition. His colleague Jean -Baptiste Chabot also reported that Mingana have kept the manuscript in his presence before a fireplace, to age it artificially. 1967 showed Jean -Marie Fiey ( Auteur et date de la Chronique d' Arbèles In: . L' Orient Syria XII Paris 1967, p 265-302. ) After that it is a forgery. Nevertheless, the discussion is not silenced, since Peter Kawerau, who, like his successor Wolfgang Hage the Chronicle for holding genuine, she edited in 1985 as a facsimile.

Works (selection)

• Clef de la langue araméenne, ou Grammaire complète et pratique des deux dialectes syriaques et occidental oriental ( Mosul 1905)
• Narsai Doctoris Syrian Homiliae et carmina prime edita ( Mosul 1905)
• Sources syriaques, 2 vols (Leipzig nd), in Volume 1, the "Chronicle of Arbela " (p. 1-168 )
• The Orde and Psalms of Solomon, 2 vols (Manchester 1916/20 ) with Rendel Harris
• Remarks on the Early Spread of Christianity in Central Asia. In: Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 14 (1930 )
• Wood Brooke Studies, Vol 1-7 ( Cambridge 1927-1934 )
• Catalogue of the Collection of Manuscripts Mingana, 2 vols ( Cambridge 1933/36 )
• Catalogue of the Arabic Manuscripts in the John Rylands Library (Manchester 1934)