Record Keeping and Chronicle Writing in Antioch and Edessa

It's long been noticed that a common historical material focusing on Edessa could be tracable in the Syriac chronicles. Yet we have no evidence of the existence of a so-called 'City Chronicle'. The article is an attempt to show that the chroniclers did create chronological entries, and not simply copied out what they found in the city archives or in previous texts. A common Edessenian material coming from the 'book of the archives' under a brief analytic form or taken from independent lists of civil or ecclesiastical rulers was used by the chroniclers interested in Edessa and completed with additional informations. It's not a longer form of Edessenian – or Antiochan – material coming from the archives or a whole embracing original chronicle which must be postulated, from which the chroniclers would have exerpted what they were interested in. That's not likely because of the very function of the archives: they kept documents and records of the main events but were not by themselves a history of the city.