NITRIA, MONASTERIES OF

48 NITRIA, MONASTERIES OF

Joannes Moschus tells us that in his time •the beginning of the 7th century—the Nitrianmonks numbered three thousand five hundred,and gives us interesting details of the inner lifeof the monasteries at that time in his works, aspublished by Cotelerius in Mon. Eccles. Grace.,and in the Vitae Pair, or Hist. Eremit. inMigne’s Pair. Lat. lxxiii., Ixxiv., wherein will befound many of the ancient works alreadyreferred to in this article. After the invasionof the Saracens we principally depend upon theArab historians for information, the chief ofthem being al-Makrizi, who died A.D. 1441.His History of the Copts was published with aGerman translation by Wiistenfeld, at Gottingen,in the Abhandlung. der KonigL Gcsellsch. derBd. iii. and separately at the sameplace in 1845. The writings of Severus, bishopof Ashmunin, whose works form the founda-tion of Rennudot’s Hist, Pat. Alex., and ofGeorgius al-Makim (A.D. 1273), another Chris-tian writer, also help to throw light on theirmediaeval history. It is, however, with thehistory of the Convent of St. Mary Deipara, orof St. Sudani, as it is often called in modernworks, that we must now deal. It is one of thefour remaining out of the fifty or sixty whichexisted twelve hundred years ago. It is saidto have been founded by a holy man namedHonnes, whose tree is still shewn a couple of milessouth of the convent. It was originally con-nected with the Syrian Monophysites, perhaps insome such way as to this day different nationsace represented among the religious houses onMount Athos. We find fairly conclusive evi-dence in the history of John of Ephesus thatthis Syrian monastery existed as such in histime—the middle of the 6th century—as we aretold how that three bishops came to Nitria, and,by force, compelled the Syrian Theodore, whothen presided over a monastery there, to acceptthe patriarchate of Alexandria (John of Eph.H. E. trans. by R. P. Smith, p. 262). ThisSyrian monastery seems ever to have been themost literary of the societies, as the school ofEdessa, with which it was probably connected,was the most active and speculative of its age.They had strict rules for their library, and themembers seem to have been bound to add avolume each to its stores, which were stillfurther enlarged by gifts from private familiesin Syria, which practice continued so late as thellth cent., as we learn from inscriptions stillexisting on the MSS. It was fortunate, too, inits abbat, when the ages of literary darknesswere settling down over the West. A certainMoses entered the convent A.D. 307, bringingwith him the book of Ecclesiasticus as a presentfrom the family of Abu T-Bashar Abdu Utah ofTagrit (Wright, Cat. Syr. MSS., No. cliv.).He was abbat in 927, in which year he was sentto Bagdad to procure from the caliph the remis-sion of the poll-tax demanded from the monks.Having been successful in this, he journeyedthrough Mesopotamia and Syria, and returned in932, bringing with him 250 volumes, which canbe still recognised. In the same age Ephraim,or Abraham, patriarch of Alexandria a.d. 977-81,was a liberal donor to its library ; and even aslate as the beginning of the 16th century theabbat Severus tried to do something similar, butevil flays of ignorance had come, when even the

preservation of the books was difficult. The}were repaired and bound in 1194, 1222, 1493,and in 1624, when the library contained 403

volumes; but these successive reparations were

the cause of the destruction of several of themost ancient and valuable MSS., especiallythose of classical authors. Some of them havebeen restored as palimpsests. We now come tothe history of the convent and its library in latertimes. The first modern notice of the NitrianMSS. which we discover is in Gassend’s Life ofN. C. F. de Peiresc ., p. 269, Paris, 1641, wherewe are told that a Franciscan monk, EgidiusLoehiensis, informed that scholar of theitexistence in the year 1633. Some persons inEurope must have previously known of them, aswe find several of them in libraries prior to thatdate, and specially two splendid ones in theAmbrosian Library at Milan. Visits in search ofMSS. have been paid to Nitria by the followingpersons—by Robert Huntington, a.d. 1678, thenchaplain at Aleppo, and afterwards provost ofTrinity College, Dublin, and bishop of Raphoe,whose fine collection of oriental manuscripts nowadorns the Bodleian Library (Huntingtoni Epp.ed. Smith, 1704, Ep. xxxix.) ; by the Assemanis,Elias and his cousin Joseph Simon, in 1707,1715, and 1716, an account of whose missionwill be found in their Biblioth. Oriental, t. i.praef. sec. vii.; by the Jesuit Claude Sicard inDec. 1712, and again with J. S. Assem. in 1716;by Gen. Andreossy in 1799 {Mem. sur la Vallesdes Lacs de Natron ) ; by Lord Prudhoe in 1828 ;by Hon. R. Curzon in 1837 {Monasteries of theLevant) ; and by Archdeacon Tattam in 1838,who went looking for MSS., serviceable towardsa Coptic edition of the Bible. He on that occa-sion secured fifty Syriac MSS., which includedthe Theophania of Eusebius, which Dr. S. Leeforthwith edited and published A.D. 1842. Theinterest excited by this discovery led to thedespatch of Mr. Tattam a second time in1842, who secured a further consignment oftwo hundred volumes, which arrived at theBritish Museum March 1, 1843. It was nowthought that all the treasures of Nitria were ex-hausted, and Cureton wrote his celebratedarticle in the Quarterly Jieview of Dec. 1845(vol. lxxvii.), under this impression; but themonks had been too long trading on them to partwith all at once, notwithstanding the mostsolemn bargains. In 1844 Tischendorf paidthem a visit, and got some more. And nowthe spirit of deception spread from the monks toothers. Auguste Pacho, a native of Egypt, wassent from London in 1847 to search for moreMSS. He obtained several, but only handedover a part of them to the English authorities inNovember of that year. He obtained others,which he disposed of, partly to the Museum in1851, and partly to the Imperial Library of St.Petersburg in 1852. Even since 1870 rumourshave been current of large quantities of MSS.being still for sale in Cairo or Alexandria, andone at least of importance has been secured bythe famous Egyptologist, Dr. Brugsch, and soldto the Prussian Government. The full value otthese MSS. has scarcely been yet ascertained. Theyhave had, indeed, one important indirect resultalready in the vast development of Syriac studieswithin the last thirty years. The specimenswhich have been as yet translated by Lee,