Gorgias Press
Founded in 2001 Gorgias Press is an independent academic publisher of books and journals related to history, languages, and religious studies, with specific areas of expertise in the Ancient Near East, Arabic and Islamic Studies, Archaeology, Biblical Studies, Classics, Early Christianity, Jewish Studies, Linguistics, and Syriac.
Gorgias [GOR-gee-us] Press was originally created by George and Christine Kiraz as a specialty press that could keep up with their research interests. With a background in computational linguistics, George Kiraz envisioned combining cutting-edge technology with humanities research. The new company would be completely online, with no physical storefront, and it would use automation and digital printing technology rather than traditional print runs. With these tools, the press could afford to publish rare and understudied topics that were previously considered unprofitable, and Gorgias soon became known for its pioneering work in language and linguistics, religion, and especially Syriac and Eastern Christianity.
Gorgias’ philosophy of “Publishing for the Sake of Knowledge” rather than profit, attracted a number of new authors, and the press’ areas of interest rapidly began to expand. Today, Gorgias Press publishes 50-60 new titles a year, including monographs, edited volumes, translations, and more, and Gorgias books can be found in academic collections all over the world.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 104
ISBN: 9781463241346
Pub Date: 13 Dec 2019
Description:
The Law Code of Simeon of Rev-Ardashir, originally written in Persian, was translated into Syriac by a monk of Bēṭ-Qatrāyē. The Code's author, possibly to be identified with a rebellious metropolitan mentioned in the letters of Patriarch Īšoʿ-yahb III, aims to clarify theoretical scriptural law, and to address specific cases of inheritance law.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 205
ISBN: 9781463240981
Pub Date: 19 Nov 2019
Series: Gorgias Eastern Christian Studies
Description:
The year 652 marked a fundamental political change in the Middle East and the surrounding region. An important and contemporary source of the state of the Christian Church at this time is to be found in the correspondence of the patriarch of the Church of the East, Išū‘yahb III (649–659), which he wrote between 628 and 658. This books discusses Išū‘yahb’s view of and attitudes toward the Muslim Arabs.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 88
ISBN: 9781463241117
Pub Date: 10 Nov 2019
Series: Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies
Description:
JCSSS is a refereed journal published annually by the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies Inc. (CSSS), located at the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. JCSSS contains the transcripts of public lectures presented at the CSSS and possibly other articles and book reviews.
JCSSS focuses on the vast Syriac literature, which is rooted in the same soil from which the ancient Mesopotamian and biblical literatures sprung; on Syriac art that bears Near Eastern characteristics as well as Byzantine and Islamic influences; and on archaeology, unearthing in the Middle East and the rest of Asia and China the history of the Syriac-speaking people: Assyrians, Chaldeans, Maronites and Catholic and Orthodox Syriacs. Modern Syriac Christianity and contemporary vernacular Aramaic dialects are also the focus of JCSSS. The languages of the Journal are English, French and German, and quotations from ancient sources are given in the original languages and in translation. The articles are interdisciplinary and scholarly; the Editorial Committee brings together scholars from four American, Canadian, and European universities. The CSSS that publishes JCSSS was founded in 1999 at the University of Toronto, Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations, as part of the latter’s academic programme in Aramaic and Syriac languages and literatures. It was incorporated under the Canada Corporations Act in January 23, 1999. This volume includes articles by Alain Desreumaux, Alexander Treiger, Reagan Patrick, Narmin Muhammad Amin 'Ali, Amir Harrak, and Sihaam Khan.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 241
ISBN: 9781463239084
Pub Date: 30 Oct 2019
Description:
This book explores the process, effects, and results of codification of Egyptian personal status laws as seen through the eyes of the ‘ulamā’. The codification process began in the mid-1800s and continued until the abolishment of the Sharī‘a courts in 1955 with the absorption of personal status statutes into the newly drafted civil code and the national courts that administered them.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 329
ISBN: 9781463207090
Pub Date: 29 Oct 2019
Series: Perspectives on Hebrew Scriptures and its Contexts
Description:
Rest in Mesopotamian and Israelite Literature studies the concept of rest in the Hebrew Bible and ancient Near Eastern literature. Through close examination of Mesopotamian texts and selections from the Deuteronomistic History and Chronicles, Kim delineates a concept of rest for each body of literature, and employs a comparative approach to illuminate the rest motif in the Hebrew Bible in light of Mesopotamian literature.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 68
ISBN: 9781463241179
Pub Date: 22 Oct 2019
Description:
In this fifth installment of the long Homily 71, On the Six Days of Creation, Jacob treats of the events of the fifth day, the creation from the waters of the various species of fish and reptiles, as well as the assorted types of birds and other winged creatures. God created them all in wisdom and in love, prepared everything that they would need and endowed them with the natural characteristics required for their particular type of life. Jacob highlights the fact that the creation of these animals on the fifth day to inhabit the land and water separated on the third day is a symbol of the Resurrection of Christ.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 251
ISBN: 9781463240264
Pub Date: 22 Oct 2019
Description:
This work is a study of Jewish cultural memory as exemplified by rabbinic midrash of the Amoraic period, the second through fifth centuries of the Common Era, and especially midrash on the Akedah, the Binding of Isaac (Gen. 22:1–19). The Akedah is proposed and analyzed as a model for submission to the divine will through the act of interpretation.
Rabbinic sages constructed a framework for cultural memory that relies on mimetic acts of interpretive substitution that are employed to confront, interpret, and remember ruptures as evidence of divine care, and they found, in the Akedah, a model for this interpretive stance. The form of memory they devised, termed midrashic memory, is proposed as inherent to rabbinic textual interpretation and whose origins are traced to the Akedah narrative itself. Midrashic memory is analyzed in selections from Amoraic midrash, in Shalom Spiegel’s twentieth-century masterwork on the Akedah, The Last Trial, and is proposed as the crux of a theory and taxonomy of Jewish memory. Second Slayings analyzes the Akedah as a metonym for cultural reorientation through the reharmonization of the lived (‘temporal’) and the covenanted ( ‘anamnestic’) planes of experience.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 307
ISBN: 9781463241032
Pub Date: 22 Oct 2019
Description:
Beth Qaṭraye was an important cultural, linguistic and religious crossroads in the pre- and early Islamic periods. In this reissue of a facsimile edition of Duval’s edition of Bar Bahlul’s lexicon, Duval’s Latin introductory material has been translated into English by Samuel Barry.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 450
ISBN: 9781463241131
Pub Date: 22 Oct 2019
Description:
Beth Qaṭraye was an important cultural, linguistic and religious crossroads in the pre- and early Islamic periods. In this reissue of a facsimile edition of Duval’s edition of Bar Bahlul’s lexicon, Duval’s Latin introductory material has been translated into English by Samuel Barry.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 396
ISBN: 9781463241018
Pub Date: 22 Oct 2019
Description:
Beth Qaṭraye was an important cultural, linguistic and religious crossroads in the pre- and early Islamic periods. In this reissue of a facsimile edition of Duval’s edition of Bar Bahlul’s lexicon, Duval’s Latin introductory material has been translated into English by Samuel Barry.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 164
ISBN: 9781463240561
Pub Date: 17 Oct 2019
Series: Melilah: Manchester Journal of Jewish Studies (1759-1953)
Description:
Volume 13 of Melilah, an interdisciplinary electronic journal concerned with Jewish law, history, literature, religion, culture and thought in the ancient, medieval and modern eras.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 213
ISBN: 9781463240714
Pub Date: 09 Oct 2019
Description:
This book serves to correct the now accepted understanding of Irenaeus’s theodicy. This assumption of Hick’s theodicy as legitimately “Irenaean” remains due the gulf between Irenaean scholarship and discussion of the problem of evil. The present work offers a bridge between the two to allow for the continued discussion of both theologian’s distinct views.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 379
ISBN: 9781463239169
Pub Date: 30 Sep 2019
Series: Gorgias Eastern Christian Studies
Description:
This book examines the function and development of the cult of saints in Coptic Egypt, focusing primarily on the material provided by the texts forming the Coptic hagiographical tradition of the early Christian martyr Philotheus of Antioch, and more specifically, the Martyrdom of St Philotheus of Antioch (Pierpont Morgan M583). This Martyrdom is a reflection of a once flourishing cult which is attested in Egypt by rich textual and material evidence. This text enjoyed great popularity not only in Egypt, but also in other countries of the Christian East, since his dossier includes texts in Coptic, Georgian, Ethiopic, and Arabic.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 310
ISBN: 9781463207434
Pub Date: 25 Sep 2019
Description:
The Material Origin of Numbers examines how number concepts are realized, represented, manipulated, and elaborated. Utilizing the cognitive archaeological framework of Material Engagement Theory and culling data from disciplines including neuroscience, ethnography, linguistics, and archaeology, Overmann offers a methodologically rich study of numbers and number concepts in the ancient Near East from the late Upper Paleolithic Period through the Bronze Age.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 300
ISBN: 9781463205713
Pub Date: 19 Sep 2019
Series: Surath Kthob
Description:
This volume is part of a series of English translations of the Syriac Peshitta along with the Syriac text carried out by an international team of scholars. R. Gordon has translated the text, while Kiraz has prepared the Syriac text in the west Syriac script, fully vocalized and pointed.
The translation and the Syriac text are presented on facing pages so that both can be studied together. All readers are catered for: those wanting to read the text in English, those wanting to improve their grasp of Syriac by reading the original language along with a translation, and those wanting to focus on a fully vocalized Syriac text.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 399
ISBN: 9781463239794
Pub Date: 19 Sep 2019
Description:
A grammar of Classical Syriac. An introductory course of eight lessons presents the Syriac phonology and script, followed by the basic course of 40 lessons. The book is designed to cover one academic year.