Without Mushe of Nisibis, Where Would we Be? Some Reflections on the Transmission of Syriac Literature

Tiresome delays when dealing with tax officials are a familiar enough feature of every age, and so one can have sympathy with Mushe/Moses of Nisibis, the Abbot of the Syrian Orthodox Monastery in Egypt, who experienced a particularly long delay at the tax offices in Baghdad well over a thousand years ago. Without the good use to which Mushe put this delay, however, the topics covered by this, and other Syriac Symposia, would necessarily have been very different from what they are and have been. In this paper I hope to explain why and how.