Daniel of Mardin (1327 – after 1382) [Syr. Orth.]

Author.

Author. His father’s name was ʿĪsā. He studied at the Monastery of Noṭpo (outside Mardin ) where he was ordained priest. In 1356 he went to Egypt and spent 17 years there. Most of his writings were in Arabic; these include a summary of Syr. Orth. canon law under 17 headings (listed in Assemani, BibOr II, 463), resumés of various works by Bar ʿEbroyo , and two theological works; he was also the copyist of some of Bar ʿEbroyo’s works (Takahashi, 491). His only surviving work in Syriac is an account of how he was interrogated and tortured in March 1382 by the ruler of Mardin, Malik al-Ṭāhir and his vizier, after a book in which he had criticised other religions had fallen into the wrong hands and he was denounced to the authorities. The work survives in an autograph (Paris, Bibl. Nat. Syr. 244, ed. Nau) and in Mingana Syr. 306. His Arabic works sometimes give the author’s name as ‘Daniel ibn al-Khaṭṭāb (or al-Ḥaṭṭāb in Mingana ms. Chr. Ar. 100) of Mardin’; this is usually thought to be a confusion with the Daniel bar Ḥaṭṭāb to whom Khamis bar Qardaḥe addressed a question incorporated into a poem by Bar ʿEbroyo (A. Scebabi, Gregorii Hebraei Carmina [1877], 153–4), whence it has been deduced that Daniel bar Khaṭṭāb was a younger contemporary of Bar ʿEbroyo. This assumes that the question and answer are not (as would seem more likely) a later interpolation. Since Khamis’s dates are equally uncertain, it is possible that only a single bar Ḥaṭṭāb is involved; if this is the case, then Daniel bar Ḥaṭṭāb of Mardin provides a 14th-century date for Khamis, rather than 13th. Daniel of Mardin should be distinguished from the ‘Malphono Daniel’ known from an Esṭrangela epitaph probably dated 1172/3, published by J. Jarry (‘Un écrivain syriaque inconnu du Tur ‘Abdin’, Syria 52 [1975] 131–7; on which see A. N. Palmer, in OC 71 [1987], 85–7).