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: 56
ISBN: 9781463244644
Pub Date: 08 Aug 2022
Description:
Jacob of Sarug's homily on the Apostle Paul's advice to those who prioritise worldly matters, leading to an afterlife remote from God.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 214
ISBN: 9781463244415
Pub Date: 31 Jul 2022
Series: Mother Tongue
Format: Hardback
Pages: 560
ISBN: 9781463244491
Pub Date: 31 Jul 2022
Description:
How many lives can one man save? Never enough, Horton realized. As his ship backed away from Smyrna’s wharf, he could better see the helpless, teeming crowd on the waterfront trapped between the sea and a raging inferno.
He was not consoled by rescuing his shipload of refugees, nor by the many other Christian, Jewish, and Muslim lives he had saved during his service as American consul. His focus was on the people before him threatened with fire, rape, and massacre. Their persecution, he later said, made him ashamed he “belonged to the human race.” Helping them would not be easy, however. His superiors were blocking humanitarian aid and covering up atrocities with fake news and disinformation to win Turkish approval for American access to oil. When Horton decried their duplicity and hard-heartedness, they conspired to destroy his reputation. Undaunted, Horton pursued his cause until it went to the President and then Congress for decisions that would set the course for America’s emergence as a world power. At stake was the outcome of WWI, the stability and liberality of the Middle East, and the likelihood of more genocide.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 393
ISBN: 9781463242411
Pub Date: 28 Jul 2022
Series: Perspectives on Hebrew Scriptures and its Contexts
Description:
Throughout the history of research on the Dead Sea Scrolls, the investigation of religious sacrifice has often been neglected. This book examines the views of sacrifice in the non-biblical sectarian Dead Sea Scrolls, through exploration of the historical and ideological development of the movement related to the scrolls (the DSS movement), particularly from the vantagepoint of the movement's later offshoot group known as the Qumran community.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 335
ISBN: 9781463206444
Pub Date: 28 Jul 2022
Description:
Along with the Qurʾān and ḥadīth, pragmatic documents negotiating land, taxes, and tribal relations are attributed to the Prophet Muḥammad (~570-632 CE) in early Islamic historiography. These are often viewed as relics reflecting the Prophet’s religio-political mission, or as anachronistic texts spuriously ascribed to him. Challenging both conclusions, this book argues that an indigenous Arabian legal and documentary tradition, distinct from classical Islamic law, can be traced in these documents.
Laying out the formularies and formulae of around 200 such documents, these are compared to early Arabic papyri as well as older corpora including Aramaic conveyance documents, Sabaic letters, and Nabataean tomb inscriptions. The book also maps the variation found across medieval redactions of some of the documents; the case of one distinctive legal clause; and the tribal traditions of those who received the documents. The documents of the Prophet maintain a register of everyday transactions and customary law which survives compilation and redaction and is embedded in older local and transregional infrastructures which circulate the language, media, and forms for documents. These documents encourage a reconsideration of the concepts of authorship, literacy, and authenticity applied to medieval texts, as well as the presumed centrality of confessional identity in the legal infrastructures described by medieval Islamic genres such as sīra (biography), ḥadīth (traditions), and taʾrīkh (history). Rather than reflecting authorship as the creative acts of individuals, literacy as the decoding of written text, and authenticity as the faithful transmission of original texts over time, the documents of the Prophet are reflective of transregional communication technologies, customs that trace long-lived, geographically diffuse infrastructures of which formulae are the remnants.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 284
ISBN: 9781463244385
Pub Date: 30 Jun 2022
Description:
A study of the life and background of ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī, putative founder of the Qādiriyya order, investigating the sources for his life and attributed works. The book seeks to elucidate the ideas of al-Jīlānī, and to formulate a picture of the most prominent trends of pious and mystical thought in Baghdad during the twelfth century, providing a cultural and geographical angle to the study of Islamic mysticism and piety.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 370
ISBN: 9781463243807
Pub Date: 30 Jun 2022
Description:
This book examines the role of tradition and discursive knowledge transmission on the formation of the ‘ulamā’, the learned scholarly class in Islam, and their approach to the articulation of the Islamic disciplines. This book argues that a useful framework for evaluating the intellectual contributions of post-classical scholars such as Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad al-Dardīr involves preserving, upholding, and maintaining the Islamic tradition, including the intellectual “sub-traditions” that came to define it.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 339
ISBN: 9781463244538
Pub Date: 30 Jun 2022
Description:
This book attempts to answer the question: what are the essential features of Greek education? In so doing, it explores the extent to which the educational ideals and practices of paideia have displayed continuity from classical Athens until modern times. The views of Plato, Photios the Great (9th century) and Nicodemos the Athonite (18th century) are examined in particular, revealing significant stages of development.
The book offers a presentation of what paideia holds up to be its own goal on its own terms. The proponents of the paideia tradition sought an answer to the age-old question, ‘What constitutes the human person?’ The response to that enigma determined everything else. Education took shape accordingly and led to a lifelong process of harmonising the respective functions of the soul and body. On account of its value on both a personal and communal level, paideia is of paramount significance for Plato and other exponents, such as Nicodemos. Their individual legacies stand like bookends on either side of some 22 centuries of Greek education that are appraised within these pages.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 143
ISBN: 9781463244347
Pub Date: 30 Jun 2022
Description:
During the 6th century AD, Īshōʿyahb I, Patriarch of the Church of the East, produced a code of law dealing with questions raised by Bishop Jacob of Darai in the Gulf. Perennial Church issues include priestly conducts, ecclesiastical rankings, and ordinations. Legal matters for the faithful concern wills, marriages, vows, lending at interest, and swearing.
Most interesting are names of church architecture that the Code gives, including bema, diaconicon, and qestroma, terms that are still used today.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 534
ISBN: 9781463244477
Pub Date: 24 Jun 2022
Series: Gorgias Handbooks
Description:
A sourcebook of major Arabic Christian theologians and texts from the 9th-11th centuries. Christian authors who spoke and wrote Arabic had no choice but to engage with Islam and the complex realities of life—initially as a majority, later as a minority—under Muslim rule. They had to express their theology in new ways, polemicize against the claims of a new religion, as well as defend their doctrines against Islam’s challenges.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 546
ISBN: 9781463244118
Pub Date: 28 Apr 2022
Description:
John D. Bengston offers a detailed analysis of the Euskaro-Caucasian hypothesis in this new volume, exploring the idea that the Basque language is most closely related to the North Caucasian language family. He builds on ideas proposed by prominent scholars in the 20th century, notably the work of C.
C. Uhlenbeck, Georges Dumézil, and René Lafon. Whilst important, their ideas were rather sporadic and consisted of scattered articles, and they never developed a comprehensive phonological and morphological model of Euskaro-Caucasian.Now thanks to advances in our understanding of Basque phonology and etymology, and in North Caucasian phonology and etymology, and improved linguistic methods, it has become possible to develop a comprehensive Euskaro-Caucasian phonological structure, including regular sound correspondences of vowels and consonants supported by significant numbers of etymologies. These correspondences, in turn, have allowed the author to evaluate objectively the etymological proposals of earlier investigators (which led to the modification or outright rejection of many of them), and have also provided clues to discovering some original etymologies. The nucleus of the Euskaro-Caucasian hypothesis is 'old', beginning in the 19th century, but the 'new paradigm' alluded to in this volume's subtitle refers to a focus on the North Caucasian language family as the closest surviving relative of Basque (as opposed to the 'South Caucasian' = Kartvelian family); a new and comprehensive scheme of comparative phonology; new discoveries in comparative morphology; and finally several hundred lexical and grammatical etymologies that supersede the more haphazard comparisons offered in earlier research.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 812
ISBN: 9781463243579
Pub Date: 25 Apr 2022
Description:
This volume explores the emergence of discourses of orthodoxy and orthopraxy in the Ottoman Empire between the 15th and 18th centuries, through empirical studies on confessional dynamics in early modern Muslim, Christian and Jewish sources.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 170
ISBN: 9781463244453
Pub Date: 11 Apr 2022
Series: Journal of Language Relationship
Description:
The Journal of Language Relationship is an international periodical publication devoted to the issues of comparative linguistics and the history of the human language. The Journal contains articles written in English and Russian, as well as scientific reviews, discussions and reports from international linguistic conferences and seminars.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 288
ISBN: 9781463243371
Pub Date: 30 Mar 2022
Series: Texts and Studies
Description:
Quotations in early Christian writers provide important evidence for the text of the New Testament as well as the ways in which Scripture was used and received in the early Church. The fourth-century archbishop Gregory of Nazianzus was one of the most influential and widely-read authors of his time, but because the majority of his output was in poetic form he has rarely been treated as a source for the biblical text. The present study brings together all the identifiable references to the Gospels in Gregory’s writings for the first time, comparing them with standard biblical texts and manuscripts in order to determine their significance for the history and transmission of the New Testament.
This collection also sheds new light on Gregory’s treatment of Scripture and the distinctive role it plays in his rhetorical style.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 86
ISBN: 9781463207021
Pub Date: 23 Mar 2022
Description:
This book is a study of the contribution of Isaac Barrow (1630-1677), Master of Trinity College (Cambridge), to Western perceptions of Islam in the 17th century. In particular, it provides a translation and study of Barrow's Latin essay on Islam (written in Constantinople), a Sermon on Islam and several other works that set out an embryonic theory of religion.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 217
ISBN: 9781463244361
Pub Date: 15 Mar 2022
Description:
In his Commentary on Daniel, the earliest extant Christian commentary, Hippolytus interprets the deeds and visions of Daniel against the backdrop of contemporary Roman persecution and eschatological expectation, thus providing much information about Christian affairs in the early third century. Throughout the commentary Hippolytus further discusses his distinctive Logos theology and also makes mention of various liturgical practices evolving baptism, anointing, the celebration of Easter and perhaps the date of Christmas.
