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: 174
ISBN: 9781463240523
Pub Date: 31 Dec 2020
Series: Gorgias Studies in the Ancient Near East
Description:
Drawn from Akkadian and Sumerian tablets in the Yale Babylonian Collection, many of them previously unpublished, this collection of readings brings to life the vibrancy of ancient Mesopotamian literature, beyond its better-known myths and epics. The book’s unique thematic structure presents a wide range of timeless subjects, while the individual selections open new perspectives, thanks to their vivid details. The texts include letters, poems, prayers, humorous sketches, dialogues, and proverbs.
Each theme is introduced, followed by brief commentaries on the dozen or more illustrative texts. Suggestions for further reading are also provided, as well as a map, chronological outline, and general introduction.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 329
ISBN: 9781463207199
Pub Date: 28 Dec 2020
Description:
This study of Sayf al-Dīn al-Āmidī’s (d. 631/1233) teachings on creation offers close analysis of all of his extant works of falsafa and kalām. Some of these were not known to previous scholars, yet they bear witness to key facets of the interaction between the historically inimical traditions of Hellenic philosophy and rational theology at this important intellectual moment.
Al-Āmidī is seen to grapple with the encounter of two paradigms for the discussion of creation. On the one hand, Ibn Sīnā’s metaphysical concept of necessity of existence is the basis of his doctrine of the world’s pre-eternal emanation. On the other, for the mutakallimūn, the physical theory of atomism bolsters the view that God created the world from nothing. This study is of interest to scholars of Ibn Sīnā and Ash‘arism alike, as it advances our understanding of the ongoing tradition of rational theology in the Islamic world, long past Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī’s (d. 505/1111) famous attack on the philosophers.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 335
ISBN: 9781463241070
Pub Date: 28 Dec 2020
Series: Texts and Studies
Description:
This book consists of a series of studies of Codex Zacynthius (Cambridge, University Library MS Add. 10062), the earliest surviving New Testament commentary manuscript in catena format. A research project funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council has produced new multispectral images of the palimpsest undertext in order to enable a thorough investigation of the manuscript and the creation of a complete electronic edition.
This volume, co-authored by the members of the project, will provide a full account of the research undertaken by the project. Many advances have resulted from this research, which will be presented here for the first time in print.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 244
ISBN: 9781463240875
Pub Date: 28 Dec 2020
Description:
One of the distinctive characteristics of the writings of Ambrose of Milan is his frequent and lengthy borrowings from the works of Philo of Alexandria. He treated the 1st-century Jewish philosopher as an authoritative predecessor and made use of his works to a far greater extent than any other Church Father did. This study seeks to fill a lacuna in the current scholarship by investigating Ambrose’s use of Philo in his collection of letters, focusing on a set of three letters concerning the topic of the Genesis creation account (Ep.
29, 31, & 34 [PL#43, 44, & 45]). In all three cases, Ambrose fielded questions on the Six Days of Creation (Hexaemeron) by drawing upon Philo’s treatise De opificio mundi. Each of these letters is undeniably Philonic and yet uniquely Ambrosian. This study seeks to clarify why Ambrose found Philo to be particularly valuable in spite of his Jewishness and also to investigate how Ambrose interpreted, adapted, and ultimately re-created his source.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 100
ISBN: 9781463241896
Pub Date: 28 Dec 2020
Description:
Recognized as a saint by both Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian Christians alike, Jacob of Sarug (d. 521) produced many narrative poems that have rarely been translated into English. Of his reported 760 metrical homilies, only about half survive.
Part of a series of fascicles containing the bilingual Syriac-English editions of Saint Jacob of Sarug’s homilies, this volume contains two of his homilies on Jacob. The Syriac text is fully vocalized, and the translation is annotated with a commentary and biblical references. The volume is one of the fascicles of Gorgias Press’s Complete Homilies of Saint Jacob of Sarug, which, when complete, will contain all of Jacob’s surviving sermons.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 369
ISBN: 9781463207175
Pub Date: 28 Dec 2020
Series: Gorgias Eastern Christian Studies
Description:
This monograph traces how ‘Jewish’ elements were introduced into and disseminated throughout the Ethiopian Orthodox Täwaḥədo Church through a series of multi-layered, socio-politico-cultural processes. Drawing on historical and literary evidence, Afework tracks the incorporation of Jewish features into the Ethiopian Orthodox Church from pre-Aksumite Christianity, before the fourth century, through the sixteenth century.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 318
ISBN: 9781463242046
Pub Date: 12 Dec 2020
Series: Harvard Oriental Series - Opera Minora
Description:
Since its discovery and the initial efforts toward its critical edition, the Paippalādasaṃhitā of the Atharvaveda (PS) has attracted the attention of Vedic scholars and Indologists for several reasons. It constitutes a precious source for the study of the development of the earliest language. The text contains important information about various rites and magical practices, and hints about the oldest Indo-Iranian and Indo-European myths.
All of this makes the PS a text of inestimable value for the study of Indian language and culture.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 292
ISBN: 9781463239183
Pub Date: 10 Dec 2020
Description:
Cline advances a suggestive reading of Justin Martyr's Apologies as a subjective appropriation of the forms and practices of the Roman system of petition and response. He offers an historical contextualization of the Apologies within both contemporary administrative culture and the wider literary environment, comparing the Apologies with extant Roman-era petitions, and using this comparison to shed light on Justin's transformations of the genre and their communicative significance.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 119
ISBN: 9781463242626
Pub Date: 09 Dec 2020
Series: Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies
Description:
A refereed journal published annually by the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 607
ISBN: 9781463242251
Pub Date: 27 Nov 2020
Series: Bibliotheca Nisibinensis
Description:
An edition and translation of the four treatises of John of Dara (d. 860) On the Resurrection of Human Bodies.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 437
ISBN: 9781463242589
Pub Date: 19 Nov 2020
Description:
In the nightstands of hotel rooms, kept under lock and key, in the poetry of a pre-apocalyptic environmental cult, and quoted by children, atheists, and murderers alike - the Bible is omnipresent in the work of Margaret Atwood. The Bible is found not only in her novels but also in her poetry, short stories, and non-fiction work. "Who Knows What We'd Make of It, If We Ever Got Our Hands on It?
” assembles cutting edge literary and critical readings of Margaret Atwood and the Bible. In the nightstands of hotel rooms, kept under lock and key, in the poetry of a pre-apocalyptic environmental cult, and quoted by children, atheists, and murderers alike—the Bible is omnipresent in the work of Margaret Atwood. This volume, the first of its kind, assembles cutting-edge literary and critical readings of Atwood and the Bible. The essays span the breadth of Atwood’s work, including The Handmaid’s Tale, Alias Grace, the MaddAddam trilogy (Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam), poetry, essays, and more. Taking as a model Atwood’s own playful dialogues with the Bible, the contributors employ a variety of theoretical approaches (feminist, deconstructionist, animal theory, affect theory, and so on) to explore both the ancient and modern corpus of texts in dialogue with each other. In The Handmaid’s Tale, the Bible is famously used as a text that structures an entire society—though for precisely this reason it is a dangerous text that must be controlled by the elite, kept out of the hands of those who may turn it into an “incendiary device.” This volume explores what happens when Atwood, and we as readers, take the Bible into our own hands.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 421
ISBN: 9781463206024
Pub Date: 09 Nov 2020
Series: Texts and Studies
Description:
This work represents the first time that a major part of the masorah of the great Leningrad Codex, that of the Former Prophets, is being published with an English translation and commentary. The translation and commentary is preceded by an Introduction which deals with topics such as description of the importance of the Leningrad Codex, the Masorah and its development, the Masorah of the Leningrad Codex, and the relation of the Leningrad’s Masorah to the accepted text of the Hebrew Bible. Every masoretic note in the Leningrad Codex that accompanies the text of the six books of the Former Prophets (Joshua, Judges, 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel,1 Kings, and 2 Kings) is transcribed, translated and annotated Every occurrence of each lemma is provided with its biblical references, and an indication is given as to where else in the ms.
a note for any particular lemma may be found. Furthermore, and most originally, an attempt is made to suggest a reason for each note. The presentation employed in this work is user friendly so, for example, catchwords that occur in the Masoretic notes are arranged horizontally to correspond to their biblical references. This arrangement not only enables readers to immediately see the contexts where lemmas occur, but also to see where the lemmas are distributed in various sections of the Bible. Another aid for students is that all Hebrew references, other than in the ms., are given in a fully vocalized form.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 179
ISBN: 9781463242510
Pub Date: 05 Nov 2020
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: 374
ISBN: 9781463241230
Pub Date: 31 Oct 2020
Description:
How the Jewish and Christian communities that emerged in the early Roman Empire navigated a "Hellenistic" world is a longstanding and unsettled question. Recent scholarship on the intellectual cultures that developed among Greek subjects of Rome in the so-called Second Sophistic as well as models for culture and competition informed by mathematical and economic game theories have provided new ideas to address this question. This study offers a model for a kind of culture-making that accounts for how the cultural ecosystems of the Roman Empire enabled these religious communities could win legitimacy and build discourses of self-expression by competing on the same cultural fields as other Roman subjects.
By considering a range of texts and figures - including Justin Martyr, Tatian, the "second" Paul of the Acts and Pastoral Epistles, Lucian of Samosata, the author of 4 Maccabees, and Favorinus of Arelate - this study contends that this competition for legitimacy served as a mechanism out of which those fledgling religious communities could develop cultural identities and secure social credibility within the complex milieu of Roman Imperial society.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 261
ISBN: 9781463242008
Pub Date: 30 Sep 2020
Series: Mother Tongue
Description:
Journal of the Association for the Study of Language in Prehistory.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 334
ISBN: 9781463242145
Pub Date: 17 Sep 2020
Series: Gorgias Handbooks
Description:
The British Library possesses one of the most important collections of Syriac manuscripts in the world, with large numbers dating back to the second half of the first millennium CE. The publication of important Syriac texts from these manuscripts has been going on for some 180 years and still continues. The aim of the present volume is to provide a guide to these scattered publications: following the sequence of the shelf-marks (call numbers), for each manuscript indication is given of what texts have been published from it.
For convenience, a concordance between Wright’s Catalogue numbers and shelf-marks is provided, along with a list of palimpsests and of joins with manuscripts in other libraries, in particular with those still in the Library of Dayr al-Surian in Egypt, the monastery which was the source of over 500 manuscripts and fragments purchased by the British Museum in the mid nineteenth century.
