Ester Petrosyan

PhD Student

Fields of Study

Areas of Interest

  • Syriac and Christian Arabic manuscript studies
  • Arabic Garshuni and Armenian Garshuni sources
  • Syro-Armenian literary connections

Biography

My MA thesis treated a trilingual, Syriac-Arabic-Armenian Garshuni manuscript, MS Syriac 11 from the collection of the Franciscan Order in Cairo (17th c.). The manuscript was written by a scribe from the Mesopotamian city of Gargar and contains the Syriac-Arabic dictionary of Eliyah of Nisibis (975-1046), supplemented with a third column, containing the Armenian Garshuni equivalent of the words. I studied the manuscript both from linguistic and historical perspectives.

As a researcher at the Matenadaran, Yerevan, I have studied and published the catalogues of the Christian Arabic and Arabic Garshuni sources housed at the repository.

Currently, I am involved in a research project that intends to scrutinize one of the little explored examples of apocalyptic literature in the Christian tradition, The Revelation of Saint Gregory the Illuminator/of Edessa in Armenian and Georgian. The text is one of the earliest translations from Syriac.

Education

  • MA, Central European University
  • BA, Yerevan State University

Current Supervisor(s)

Amir Harrak

Publications

  • Catalogue of the Arabic Garshuni Manuscripts of the Matenadaran, Yerevan (Louvain, forthcoming).
  • "The Armenian Life of Barsawmo the Northerner", in Matenagirq hayots (Armenian classical authors) vol. 22, 12th century (Antelias, forthcoming).
  • Catalogue of the Christian Arabic Manuscripts of the Matenadaran, (with Movses Khecho), (Yerevan, 2021).
  • “Manuscript Cairo Syriac 11 as a Gateway to Understanding the Seventeenth-Century Environment in Diyarbakir”, in Banber Matenadarani (Herald of the Matenadaran) N 24 (Yerevan, 2017).