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: Hardback
Pages: 555
ISBN: 9781593333119
Pub Date: 01 Jan 2005
Description:
This book is a pioneering introduction in English to Islamic law, based directly on the Arabic texts. It has stood the test of time as an ample account of Muslim legal theories with regard to state finance, done in English, using the terms of the legal texts themselves.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 244
ISBN: 9781593330972
Pub Date: 01 Jan 2005
Description:
Walenty Potocki was a young Polish nobleman who abandoned wealth, power, and unlimited worldly prospects to convert to new religion - Judaism. Potocki was betrayed by a member of the religious community he embraced and burned at the stake by the Church he left behind in 1749. This book examines eleven versions of this remarkable man’s story and the heated, previously unpublished, correspondence between the Potocki clan and one of his early biographers.
Noble Soul is the record of one man’s defining faith, and of the compelling human need for personal spiritual fulfillment.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 164
ISBN: 9781593333379
Pub Date: 01 Jan 2005
Description:
Mordecai Joseph Leiner of Izbica was a unique thinker in the history of Hasidism with a highly personal vision of Judaism. His teachings, partially derived from the Przysucha-Kotsk school, adopted the concept of absolute divine providence as a cornerstone. He also reinterpreted the Lurianic concept of tiqqun, originally intended as a cosmological concept, to apply to the individual, creating a new path to spiritual self-perfection.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 284
ISBN: 9781593331351
Pub Date: 24 Dec 2004
Description:
This book, based on six lectures by the author, gives the history of the conversion of India to Christianity from the earliest times until 1893. Smith’s work is useful for understanding the American missionary mentality of the nineteenth century.
Pages: 412
ISBN: 9781593332280
Pub Date: 17 Dec 2004
Pages: 407
ISBN: 9781463202675
Pub Date: 17 Jun 2014
Description:
Buchan’s work is an examination of the theological use of the doctrine of Christ's descent to the dead in the works of Saint Ephrem the Syrian (ca. 306-373 C.E.
). Ephrem's conception of Christ's descent to Sheol provides us with an important and distinctive vision of the significance of this salvific event. Ephrem's use of Semitic and non-Western poetic forms and structures as a mode of theological discourse, coupled with his preference for imagery and symbolism rather than definition, resulted in a variety of vivid depictions of Christ's descent to Sheol. The doctrine is shown to be an integral and multifaceted component of Ephrem's theology.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 459
ISBN: 9781593332310
Pub Date: 17 Dec 2004
Description:
This work aims at explaining how the recension of the Ugaritic text--based on the Northwest Semitic Philological Data Bank--originated and how it is produced.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 180
ISBN: 9781593332303
Pub Date: 17 Dec 2004
Description:
The book takes the reader on a journey of cross symbolism. Karim covers topics from the paradise of Eden to the Crucifixion and Golgotha. He discusses the cross as a symbol of historical, sacramental, and eschatological events.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 212
ISBN: 9781593330583
Pub Date: 22 Oct 2004
Description:
A stirring collection of fifteen articles, many of which have been previously published by the author who is a feminist Jew. The author unabashedly confronts difficult biblical and midrashic texts, without taking an apologetic stance.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 766
ISBN: 9781593330712
Pub Date: 22 Oct 2004
Description:
A concordance of the two text witnesses to the Old Syriac Gospel of the Distinct Evangelists (Evangelion da-Mepharreshe), namely Codex Curetonianus and Codex Sinaiticus. The text basis for this concordance is that found in George Anton Kiraz, Comparative Edition of the Syriac Gospels (Gorgias Press, 2nd ed., 2004) with a number of judicious emendations.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 748
ISBN: 9781593330705
Pub Date: 22 Oct 2004
Description:
A concordance of the two text witnesses to the Old Syriac Gospel of the Distinct Evangelists (Evangelion da-Mepharreshe), namely Codex Curetonianus and Codex Sinaiticus. The text basis for this concordance is that found in George Anton Kiraz, Comparative Edition of the Syriac Gospels (Gorgias Press, 2nd ed., 2004) with a number of judicious emendations.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 978
ISBN: 9781593330699
Pub Date: 22 Oct 2004
Description:
A concordance of the two text witnesses to the Old Syriac Gospel of the Distinct Evangelists (Evangelion da-Mepharreshe), namely Codex Curetonianus and Codex Sinaiticus. The text basis for this concordance is that found in George Anton Kiraz, Comparative Edition of the Syriac Gospels (Gorgias Press, 2nd ed., 2004) with a number of judicious emendations.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 2492
ISBN: 9781593332716
Pub Date: 22 Oct 2004
Description:
A concordance of the two text witnesses to the Old Syriac Gospel of the Distinct Evangelists (Evangelion da-Mepharreshe), namely Codex Curetonianus and Codex Sinaiticus. The text basis for this concordance is that found in George Anton Kiraz, Comparative Edition of the Syriac Gospels (Gorgias Press, 2nd ed., 2004) with a number of judicious emendations.
Pages: 304
ISBN: 9781593332075
Pub Date: 08 Oct 2004
Series: Cultures in Dialogue: First Series
Pages: 304
ISBN: 9781593333065
Pub Date: 09 Sep 2005
Series: Cultures in Dialogue: First Series
Description:
Born into the Ottoman Muslim elite, Zeyneb Hanoum and her sister Melek Hanoum were given a Western-style education by their progressive father, who expected them subsequently to live the segregated lives of Ottoman ladies. Rebelling, the sisters collaborated with the French author Pierre Loti, hoping that harnessing European intellectual support would speed up Ottoman social reform. Fleeing Istanbul in 1906 for fear of imperial reprisals, the sisters traveled in disguise to Europe, hoping to find "freedom" in the West.
With Zeyneb Hanum's letters punctuated by Grace Ellison's introduction, commentary, and footnotes, this book challenges Orientalist stereotypes and documents the vibrant engagement between Eastern and Western women at the fin de siècle.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 268
ISBN: 9781593331054
Pub Date: 08 Oct 2004
Series: Cultures in Dialogue: First Series
Description:
Hester Donaldson Jenkins (1869-1941), a professor at the American College for Girls in Constantinople from 1900-1909, wrote enthusiastically about the Young Turks who seemed to promise new freedoms for Ottoman women. Jenkins uses her own observations of Constantinople, her students, and their families to construct an account of a "typical" Turkish Muslim woman's life cycle at this turning point in Ottoman history. She directs her comments toward childhood, education, marriage, polygamy, and divorce, in order to correct Western misapprehensions.
In its confidence in the bright prospects of American influence and Ottoman reform, this book captures an optimistic moment in which social progress seemed to be thriving.
Pages: 316
ISBN: 9781593332037
Pub Date: 08 Oct 2004
Series: Cultures in Dialogue: First Series
Pages: 316
ISBN: 9781593333089
Pub Date: 09 Sep 2005
Series: Cultures in Dialogue: First Series
Description:
Born as a Greek Ottoman in Istanbul, Demetra Vaka Brown (1877-1946) moved to America where she became a journalist and novelist, revisiting Turkey to write several books about the twilight of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of the Turkish Republic. She based this, her first book, on experiences from 1901, when modernization had made inroads into Ottoman domestic life and the harem was becoming a thing of the past. Her reflections on life in the harem suggest the conflicted nature of her allegiances: Vaka is nostalgic for the Ottoman life that was rapidly disappearing, but she also enjoys the freedoms of a professional American woman.
Pages: 564
ISBN: 9781593332044
Pub Date: 08 Oct 2004
Series: Cultures in Dialogue: First Series
Pages: 564
ISBN: 9781593333034
Pub Date: 09 Sep 2005
Series: Cultures in Dialogue: First Series
Description:
As Anna Bowman Dodd (1855-1929), a New York travel writer and journalist, journeyed to Istanbul with the American Ambassador to France she embarked on a detailed account of the city and its people. Interested in documenting the changes in Turkey brought about by the "embrace" of modernity and progress, she considers Turkish women's rights, harems and marriage, the management of the household, education, slavery, the Sultan's reign, and nationalist movements in the last days of the Ottoman Empire. She caters to the American market for Orientalism but is also reflexive about its employment, both invoking and undercutting stereotypes as she addresses the "Eastern Question.
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