Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition

we're delighted that so many of you are here today and we hope very much that you will find this and an interesting and instructive and fun on session connected with the exhibition that we have just opened Byzantium and Islam age of transition its own view of stairs on the second floor in the Cantor gallery and we hope very much that you will all go to it during the course of its run through July 8th today we're going to have three distinguished speakers who in varying ways have been very involved in the exhibition or in events connected to the exhibition and then a performance by Allen gamble who is researching origins of musical notation that reach back into this period and who is also a very distinguished classical pianist I am going to try to keep everything more or less on time so we can get all the interesting material in by minimizing the length of my introductions um you've come so you must know these people that are going to speak are extremely interesting and the first of our speakers today is father Justin of the monastery of st. Catherine at Sinai in Egypt father Justin and I met when he came in 1997 to the end of the glory of Byzantium my first exhibition and we have grown to know each other over the years in which he has served at the holy monastery in particular in charge of their library one of the greatest repositories of manuscripts related to the Orthodox world and in a special context of trying to arrange for a very sophisticated digital images of all the works in his role at the monastery he is very involved with the icons and with although they were unable to come to the exhibition because of the situation in Egypt we look forward to his remarks today on the icons at Sinai would you join me in welcoming father Justin it's a great joy to be here at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and to be a part of these presentations I'll be speaking on the theme the icons of Sinai continuity at a time of controversy the eighth and ninth centuries with dis an intense debate over the very principles of Christian imagery this was the iconoclast controversy which lasted over 100 years from the beginning in the year 726 to its final resolution in 843 but the issues that were then in conflict were not new we will better understand them if we begin by looking briefly at the earliest surviving examples of Christian art these are to be found in the Roman catacombs vast underground cemeteries that surround the city of Rome epitaphs and tomb paintings from the catacombs date principally from the 2nd to the 4th centuries the first example now in the Lateran museum is dated to the 4th century and is thought to account from the catacomb oozing calestous or predict status it reads Aurelius casters who lived 8 months Antonia sporangia made this for her son below as a depiction of a shepherd he bears a lamb on his shoulders and two sheep recline at his feet these early Christians express their faith instinctively in both text and images but inscriptions are accessible in a way that imagery is not depictions such as this offer the initiate and require explanation Jesus told a parable about a shepherd who sought out the sheep that had gone astray bearing it on his shoulders he returned it to its place in the fold he also said I am The Good Shepherd the Good Shepherd giveth his life for the Sheep the Colossians sacramentary which preserves some of the oldest Latin liturgical prayers includes a prayer for the burial service that refers to the dead as carried home on the shoulders of the Good Shepherd other recurring Christian symbols are the anchor or the Dove bearing an olive branch in its beak on later appetizers we find more overt Christian symbols the cairo monogram or the Alpha and Omega the catacomb oka medulla contains an image of Christ dating from the late 4th century in the catacomb of Saint Priscilla when finds a depiction of the Virgin Mary dated to the 2nd century here also in the third century Christians painted The Good Shepherd and doves bearing olive branches they also painted the three children and the fiery furnace of Babylon examples of courage and perseverance and reminders of God's protection at a time of persecution the upper house of these early Christians reveal much about their faith we read to deira cariocas sweetest son miss they'll live in the Holy Spirit Regina may sell live in the Lord Jesus Matrona Matrona who lived a year and 52 days pray for thy parents and Natalya's made this for his well deserving son who lived 7 years 7 months and 20 days may thy spirit rest well in God pray for thy sister the catacombs inscriptions are ill composed ill written not infrequently ill spelt half Latin half Greek but neither bad grammar nor defective orthography condemn or distort the light with which the consciousness of an immortality floods and glorifies these subterranean vaults such inscriptions or popular expressions are the same hope that we mind and a theological treatise that mortally tatta written by Cipriano cartridge in the year 252 he reminds his flock that death is not an ending but a transit and this journey being traversed a passage to eternity the dead are not lost but sent before he writes he regard paradise as our country we already began to consider the patriarchs as our parents why do we not hasten and run that we may behold our country that we may greet our parents there a great number of our dear ones is awaiting us and adults crowd of parents brothers children is longing for us already assured of their own safety and still solicitous for our salvation in this spontaneous expression of their faith through words and images had Christians gone too far the Roman world was filled with paintings and statues of the pagan deities the Jews had always been careful to distance themselves from this idolatry there were those who felt that such Christian depictions were an unguarded appreciation from the pagan world Eusebius of Caesarea in the 4th century church history relates that the woman with an issue of blood who was healed by Christ made a bronze statue to commemorate this miracle Christ was depicted standing and blessing her and she was portrayed kneeling and looking up to him in gratitude Eusebius writes that he has seen this statue for himself yet we cannot miss the note of criticism in his voice when he goes on to write nor is it strange that those are the Gentiles who have all were benefited by our Savior should have done such things since we have learned also that the likenesses of the Apostles Paul and Peter and of Christ himself are preserved in paintings the ancients being accustomed at is likely according to a habit of the Gentiles to pay this kind of honor indiscriminately to those regarded by them as deliverers one would want to know what these 4th century paintings of Christ and the Apostles Paul in Peter looked like but paintings are fragile and in general they have not survived from the world of Late Antiquity the exception to this is Sinai this remote desert monastery with his dry and stable climate and an unbroken history extending back to the early 4th century holds what is today the most important collection of pandal icons 36 of which have been dated to the sixth or seventh century the icon of the Sinai Christ is the most famous it was painted in the wax encaustic technique which uses wax as the medium for the pigments the gold halo is set off by alternating 4 & 8 peddled punched rosettes Christ's mantle and tonic were rendered in a saturated purple he blesses with his right hand and his left he holds the gospel a thick volume closed with two class the cover is adorned with a cross executed in precious stones and decorated with pearls the formal frontal depiction of Christ conveys a sense of timelessness yet the many intentional departures from strict symmetry add a naturalistic effect in the subtle manner the artist has attempted to convey both the divine and human nature's in Christ a second icon depicts the Virgin Mary and the Christ child enthroned here also Christ blesses with his right hand while with his left he holds a scroll the Virgin wears red shoes an imperial prerogative and holds Christ tenderly she gazes off into the distance a soldier st. stands to either side wearing the ceremonial robe of the Imperial Guard these are identified by later iconographic types as st. George to the viewers right and st. Theodore to the viewers left above two Archangels holding scepters look up towards heaven the hand of God extends from an orb an array of light descends to the halo of the Holy Virgin the true Archangels rendered in a continuation of the Hellenistic tradition contrast with the enthroned virgin and Christ child into soldiers scenes which reflect the splendors of the imperial court giving the icon a complexity and richness the third icon shows the Apostle Peter in his right hand he holds three keys the keys of the kingdom of heaven and is left he holds the staff through mounted by a cross the artist is painted the garments of the Apostle in shades of olive using Criss crossing highlights rendered in bold brushstrokes the gaze of the viewer is drawn to the calm and pensive eyes the face set off by whirling turfs of hair and beard the Apostle has the face of the sunburned fisherman but he also has the aristocratic demeanor of the leader of the church the three medallions above depict Christ in the center Kurt Weitzman identified the other two as depictions of the Virgin Mary and Saint John the theologian though it has been recently suggested that they may be instead X photo images included as an expression of Thanksgiving by those who commissioned the icon all three icons are thought they've been painted in Constantinople and may have been sent to the monastery in the 6th century as gifts of imperial patronage when the Emperor Justinian order the construction of the great Basilica and the surrounding fortress walls as such they are examples of the icons that would have been in Constantinople at the outbreak of a conic lesson which the Emperor Leo the 3rd the asourian began to institute in the year 726 there were two phases of a conic lesson the first came to an end the Empress Irene in 787 an iconoclast policy was instituted again in 815 by the Emperor Leo v the Armenian the second phase was brought to an end in 843 by the Empress Theodora the origins of a conical Azam have been much debated the seventh century was a very much an age of transition for the Byzantine Empire it was a culmination of a long process of centralization by which Constantinople emerged as the dominant center of power in the same century the Empire lost Syria Egypt and North Africa to the Arab world while Slavs threatened its hold in the Balkans and lombards became more assertive in Italy the Arab forces attacked Constantinople itself instead of 674 to 678 and again in 717 to 718 the Greeks famously defending their city with Greek fire all of these far-reaching changes in conflicts caused a reassessment of the Byzantine polity this brought into the open issues concerning the place of Christian imagery that have remained unresolved one must look to these conflicts for the origins of a conical Azzam more than to any infiltration of the church and the Empire by alien ideas God commanded Moses thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above or that is in the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth thou shalt not bow down thyself to them nor serve them the central charge brought by the Econo class again and again is that of idolatry any image that has been created for use in worship draws attention to the visible material creature rather than the invisible deity st. Paul it is epistle to the Colossians refers to Christ as the image the icon of the invisible God in the language of the Creed Christ is one in essence Oh Moses consubstantial with the father for the Econo class in order of an image to be true it must be the same in essence is that which it represents there must be a formal identity between a model and its archetype a portrayal differs in its very nature from that which it represents and is therefore insufficient if not deceptive Jesus said God is a spirit and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth created images could not be allowed to intrude in worship which must remain entirely spiritual in a number of churches econo class removed icons of Christ and replaced them with the depiction of the cross the cross being a symbol did not detract from the worship that is due to God alone st. Stephen the new was insistent in his veneration of the holy icons he was brought before the Emperor Constantine v who asked him do you imagine that Christ is trampled upon when we trampled upon these images st. Stephen had expected this and it brought with him a coin he showed it to the Emperor and as whose is this image and superscription it is mine answered the Emperor the Saint place it on the ground and trampled on it the Emperor's guards were outraged and ready to avenge this affront to the imperial dignity but the Emperor called them off the Saint had made his point and yet while everyone knew that there had been a cons in the church for centuries in many ways they had been taken for granted they were passing references to them in the writings of the fathers but there was no formal theology of the icons what could be said in their defense those who reverence the icons pointed out that God had a deed forbidden the making of graven images but at the same time he had commanded Moses and thou shalt make to cherubims of gold of beaten work shall make them in the two ends of the mercy-seat the second commandment was thus not a prohibition against representational art but it was a prohibition against attempting to betray the deity for God had revealed himself but not in any form Moses said to the children of Israel for you saw no manner similitude on the day that the Lord spake unto you in Horeb out of the midst of the fire but in the fullness of time the word was made flesh and dwelt among us the word of God who was uncircumcised Obol condescended to be circumscribed by time and place and he who was in depict Abel became depict Abel st. dear to the steward I'd wrote that in Christ the divine nature and the human nature were united into a single prosopon person and a single opposed disease a subsistent entity which has individual characteristics and can be portrayed and Saint John of Damascus Road I do not venerate the creation instead of the creator but i venerate the creator created for my sake who came down to his creation without being lord or weakened that he might glorify my nature and bring about communion with the divine nature i do not depict the invisible divinity but i depict god made visible in the flesh icons are a witness to the historical christ a refusal to accept icons was a refusal to accept the full implications of the Incarnation courts of Roman law had an image of the Emperor and this image was honored as if the Emperor himself were present Basil the Great in the 4th century pointed out that this does not mean that there are two Emperor's because the honor offered to the image crosses over to the archetype an image conveys the likeness of the original person image an archetype or thus set to share the same likeness saint-denis OCC Arabic ight and is ecclesiastical hierarchy had written for the truth is shown in the likeness the archetype in the icon each and the other with the difference of essence this was quoted by patriarch Nikifor so Constantinople in the early 9th century who himself wrote like this is an intermediate relation and mediates between the extremes I mean the likeness and the one of whom it is a likeness uniting and connecting by form even though they differ by nature and yet a traditional icon was not a simple portrait the likeness is conveyed in the icons were those who Christ or the Saints who live in heaven here Saint John appealed to the example of the tabernacle that have been constructed for the worship of God in the Sinai wilderness God said to Moses and let them make me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them according to all that I shew thee after the pattern of the tabernacle and the pattern of all the instruments thereof even so shall you makin the tabernacle on earth shared the likeness with the tabernacle in heaven that have been revealed to Moses because of this correspondence the Ministry of the priests within the tabernacle was unto the example and shadow of heavenly things as we read and the Epistle to the Hebrews st. John of Damascus writes and this whole Tabernacle was an icon and look said the Lord to Moses that they'll make everything after their pattern which was should be in the mount the tabernacle is called an icon and that it is a reflection of the heavenly prototype icons of Christ and the Saints are also reflections each corresponding to an archetype in heaven I think due to the steward I wrote the copy shares the glory of the prototype as a reflector shares the brightness of the light Christ said to his disciples blessed are your eyes for they see and your ears for they hear Saint John of Damascus invoked this verse as he stressed the parallels between hearing the Holy Scriptures and seeing the holy icons are hearing a sanctified and blessed when we hear Christ's words in the Holy Gospels even as we also rejoice and are assured beholding in the holy icons his bodily form his miracles and all that he endured both gu scriptures and icons are distinct but complementary means of knowing the gospel narrative where a caller class here created a dualism depreciating the material world and their reference for the spiritual those who have venerated the icons pointed to a material world sanctified by the Incarnation and the means of our ascent to the spiritual we read in st. John of Damascus for a sense we are twofold fashion of soul and body and our soul is not naked but as it were covered by a mantle it is impossible for us to reach what is intelligible apart from what is bodily and st. theodora Road so whether in an image or in the gospel or in the cross or in any other consecrated object their God is manifestly worship in spirit and in truth as the materials are exalted by the raising of the mind towards God the mind is not remain with the materials because it does not trust in them that is the error of the auditors through the materials rather the mind ascends towards the prototype this is the faith of the Orthodox the theology of icons championed by John of Damascus theatres the steward aiight and a multitude of other saints was formally proclaimed by the bishops who assembled in 787 at the second council in Nicaea the seventh Medical Council sign I became a part of the world of Islam in the year 633 even so both monks and pilgrims continue to come to this remote wilderness attracted by its austerity is biblical associations and its reputation as an established center of monasticism the area was thus outside the Byzantine Empire in the eighth and ninth centuries and remained unaffected by a conical ISM 14 panel icons assigned I have been dated to this time there are special importance and that they show the continuity of the Econo cleric tradition during the period of a conical ISM an icon of the crucifixion has been dated to the eighth century because of many similarities with a fresco is Santa Maria Antiqua in Rome that can be dated to 741 to 752 grace is depicted affixed to the cross wearing a red brown columbium streams of blood and water issue from his side to his right stands the Virgin Mary she points to Christ with her right hand and with her left holds a handkerchief to her cheek above other monograms for yahia Maria the holy Mary the Christ loved as a youthful John the theologian his depiction is described simply Yanni's John above angels look on and wonder while the Sun and the moon are darkened below three soldiers divide Christ's garments this is the earliest icon giving the names of the two thieves Gustus to Christ's right and demas to his left earlier icons invariably portray Christ with his eyes opened before his death an important example is the fear she Morgan Stavros Sookie which also dates from the 8th century kept here in the Metropolitan Museum of Art the Sinai icon is the first to depict Christ with his is closed and bearing the crown-of-thorns this was done to emphasize his human nature Anastasio Sinai in the Eau de Grasse the guidebook written in the six 80s notes the importance of depicting the reality of Christ's death this and several stylistic details make it possible that this icon was painted as Sinai an icon data to the eighth or ninth century depicts st. irene the inscription above gives her name Yahia adeney st. irene she stands in a frontal pose in her right hand she holds a cross emblem of her martyrdom while in her life she holds a handkerchief she is dressed in the Hughton originally of blue which is turned green amma for ian's of carmen and red shoes the figure of the saint is disproportionate the emphasis given to her face at the base of the icon the donor has been depicted venerating the saint he wears a light brown tunic and a black mantle an description above gives his name Nikolaus savatya knows the icon shares the likeness of its prototype in heaven as we have learned from the passages quoted above the donor has caused his own likeness to be included in the icon the likeness of the saint and the likeness of the donor meet on the plane of the icon the donor in veneration of his beloved saint concerning the veneration of saints Jonah Damascus Road the Saints are the sons of God sons of the kingdom and co-heirs of God and oh Christ and in this case we should say daughters of god and daughters of the kingdom and co-heirs of god in christ therefore i venerate the saints and glorify them slaves and friends and co-heirs of christ slaves by nature friends by choice sons and daughters and heirs by divine grace he also said from the time that he who himself is life and the author of life was numbered among the dead we do not call dead those who have fallen asleep in hope of the Resurrection and faith in Him Sinai has an icon of the three children of the fiery furnace of Babylon it was executed in the encaustic technique that has been dated to about the seventh century enough of the inscription survived to identify the three from the viewers left and an eyes Azariah and Mishael they are depicted wearing persian garments an angel has descended into the fiery furnace he places his left hand confidently on the shoulder of Ananias and with a cross her mounted staff he anoles the burning of the flames the panel icon fits into a frame which has been inscribed with verses from the Book of Daniel an angel of the Lord came down and to the furnace to be with as a rise and his companions and made the inside of the furnace as if a moist breeze were whistling through the three children and the fiery furnace inspired the early Christians they were no less an inspiration to the monks of Sinai in the seventh eighth and ninth centuries examples of courage and steadfastness and reminders of God's protection in the isolation of the Sinai desert icons continued to be painted even during the eighth and ninth centuries the time of a counter classroom these icons form a link to earlier iconography that can be traced back in time to the Roman catacombs where Christians express their faith instinctively in both inscriptions and images st. John of Damascus justified the place of icons in Christian worship and veneration in his writings we also find the same consciousness of an immortality that was so pronounced and the epitaphs from the Roman catacombs it is not only the imagery that has continued from those early centuries but the faith and hope as well that place the images and epitaphs in the Roman catacombs long ago thank you Father Justin came to us by way of Texas and Sinai our second speaker professor Stephen fine of yeshiva university comes to us from California and Manhattan he is an expert on Jewish art and history and his present arms on an award-winning book that's on sale and exhibition gift shop art and Judaism in the greco-roman world we very much appreciated that he expanded the definition of greco-roman through to the ninth century in his essay Farah catalog please join me in welcoming dr. Klein when Helen heaven calls up and says we're doing an exhibition about material that you know something about but we know that you don't know so much about the part afterwards you think you can try it anyway that's one of those challenges that many of us can't miss and so I'm really very grateful the reason that we can't miss it is because for all of our fields this period between the seventh and ninth and tenth centuries is what in Jewish Studies at least is called the great black holes that transition point between things that we think we know those of us who do Late Antiquity which are in Hebrew and Aramaic and Greek and some Latin and that other side where they do Arabic which we don't know on the other hand the folks who do Arabic on the other side don't know the things that we know and so we're left with a period where because everything is in transition where we go from people writing on scrolls to writing in codices and from writing in a homiletically to writing phil illogical studies from writing the Bible in a way that doesn't have punctuation and Hebrew to writing it in a way that does have punctuation in Hebrew we've come from such a long distance that Jewish history becomes a kind of canary in the coalmine because after all the Jews were the smallest of all the nations not exactly the ones who were causing this transformation as opposed to Byzantium or Islam but were in between and participating in this transformation now if the Jews were mahalo name the smallest of all the nations then even smaller than the Jews were the other Israelites the descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel the Samaritans of which they're about 700 50 today and so what I'd like to do with you in the next little while is go through and talk about just two of the artifacts in our exhibition and use them as exemplars of two different things number one we're going to look at this mess on the right of the screen it's poem says this rewritten piece of manuscript to talk about all the different culturally sophisticated and interesting and messy things that went on in the period between the glories of late antiquity and the rise of Islam and number two we're going to look at a plate which might be Samaritan it might not be Samaritan but no one ever asked about were Samaritan until we began to ask these questions about transition times and the liminality the force of being neither in the world of Byzantium nor in the world of Islam that might lead to us interpreting the material differently and so there are two issues one is the physicality of the transformation which is this literal in this small piece of parchment which really is rather small you can see it upstairs and the conceptualization the new way of thinking scholars have developed because of the kind of research that this exhibition has has caused and that a whole change has developed within the scholarly community over the last decade this exhibition wanted being one of those great catalysts for that change that we'll be reading about for generations to come now number one appalling sis culture in an age of transitional pollicis is a piece of parchment that some would had written on somebody else came and scrubbed off what was underneath and written something else the only reason you would do that is because the parchment is very expensive because it's made out of animal skin and it's not simple this particular one you can see has was found in the Cairo Genizah in Egypt now the Cairo Genizah the great repository of the ben ezra synagogue in cairo was a place where Jews in this city in this central fat amid place through anything they had that vaguely looked like a holy book into the attic why did they do that because holy books in Judaism are to be preserved and buried and maintained and not burnt as they are in other traditions so in this attic in Cairo the Jewish community over a five hundred year period through all sorts of stuff now I can tell you that it is Shiva Key University all sorts of things end up in this hidden place in these boxes that's shouldn't because I'm the one who puts them there and so whether it be my Xeroxes or whether it be the receipt that falls between the Xeroxes or whether it be the piece of paper that I didn't mean to be between the Xeroxes of all of these holy texts it all gets thrown into a box and goes to the cemetery and gets buried okay the same thing happened in Cairo all of these wonderful things whether they be love letters or whether they be magical texts or whether they be biblical texts that weren't hardly known before in Hebrew like the book of ecclesiasticus Ben Sira or whether they be trade documents or whether it be Tom what a text or whether they be medieval um letters or even text written in Yiddish found their way into this collection of documents that began to dribble out in Cairo at the end of the nineteenth century and which Solomon Schechter the great scholar of Cambridge came and bought in mass and brought back to Cambridge now this was a mess I would love to have been in this room right because each piece that you see there is valuable whether it be a love letter whether it be a met a magical incantation whether it be a new commentary by Maimonides all those things are sitting in those piles waiting for someone to read them okay now this thing is one of those documents and it was noticed really early because of the Greek that you can see underneath now what is it well it's a sixth century or so manuscript written and Greek and very large and profound letters which somebody purchased in Cairo in the 11th century it's a long time later and scrap with all of the writings scratched off and wrote something else on now again that was not male intent it was just reuse of resources who used Greek in Cairo in the 11th century of other than Christians they were not the majority interest for Jews and Moslems at that point Greek was a declining language even among Christians and part of the Near East and so here we had a Greek document and somebody scratched off but there's a real problem with the iron based gall nut ink that was used in these inscriptions you can scratch it all you want but eventually it's going to oxidize and pop back again right that's why one of the tumble to grab eyes once said that it's better to be to learn when you are young when you're like new paper as opposed to when you are old when you are like reused paper because the older information from your childhood is going to come back up to the surface so it's a wonderful metaphor of a polymer system now this is the kind of scroll that Jews used in the ancient world that's the great Isaiah scroll on the right that grimy looking thing on the sheet on the left that grimy looking thing on the right is a piece of the Song of Songs beginning of Exodus you see if this works there it is that happens to now be at Duke University from the seventh century it's the oldest Jewish biblical text in Hebrew between the Dead Sea Scrolls in the first centuries and the Cairo Genizah documents Jews wrote on Scrolls down to writing Talmudic text on Scrolls in the years before the coming of Islam but a scroll it made me holy it may be the one that came from outside I may be the ultimate Jewish icon but it is not a very convenient book by codex is far more convenient and Jews rather early starting in the 8th century where the first gas survival on the right would you can go see upstairs written in Palestine it's a very nice document or the great Aleppo codex on your left which was finished in the ilat in the 10th century and by the way my mana T is considered to be the standard for all tourists or torrid ex biblical texts two-thirds of which is now in Jerusalem one-third of which was burnt you can see Jews taking on a new technology taking on a codex form which was which was common to Christians common to Moslems not common to Jews by writing on the entire page oops go back the folks of the gas-turbine were very much in the tradition of quran script and the construction of the or the organization of the page in the three columns Jews were very much similar to what Christians were doing in their manuscripts or ghen ization but Jews started writing like this except for Torah scrolls that were used in synagogue's on the Sabbath and holidays and so our fragment comes from this tradition and you can see it up close it is a true mess underneath our text from 2 Kings 23 11 to 27 and that's what immediately caught everyone's attention so in 1897 soon after Schefter returned with these materials from Cairo to Cambridge Charles Birkett a biblical scholar looked underneath these manuscripts started to read the under text followed by a fellow named Charles Taylor around 1900 and started publishing them and realized that they had before them were biblical texts in Greek that we know about from origins greats hexapla origin of Caesarea and Palestine who collected biblical texts and what we had was a text by a fellow named aquila s' now ik Willis was a convert to Judaism in the second century who associated himself with the great fount one of the great founding fathers of the religion of the rabbis a fellow named Akiva son of Joseph now Robbie Akiva had a principle in interpretation which was that every letter matters in the Hebrew text you know how when you translate things from any language there's always going to be some form that doesn't transfer well the otherwise it feels like a clunky translation well a kiba's translation the translation that he wanted into Greek must present every jot and tittle of the original Hebrew because every jot and tittle matters and that's what Aquila is created now we find it here for the first time sort of now this is a Christian manuscript of about the same time this is the Sinai manuscript of the new tests of the Bible which is from the 4th century which unfortunately is no longer at Mount Sinai but spread through four museums and libraries in the West just to give you a sense of what was underneath now Jews use Greek quite a bit in the ancient world going back to the first centuries but in the seventh century in a synagogue on Ashkelon we see a very good example of how Greek and Aramaic lived side by side in this synagogue at Ashkelon Jews using both languages sometimes and often using the translation of Aquila s' and this is an even better one this is a stone in a baptismal pool in a place that used to be called Nicaea and is now called iznik in turkey in northern Turkey now this stone was reused in the eighth century as part of the city walls that's what the inscription above is about but you can see how later on the stone was taken and the stone with this nice menorah was set into the side of a baptismal pool and this is what it looks like vertically now in 1943 in Berlin this inscription down below was published which I'll come back to in a minute but and the guy in Berlin with a book that had a swastika on the cover I didn't mention much about this thing up here now I don't think it's because he was writing in Nazi Germany I think it's because often don't see the things that there's objects there texts are next to and that's pretty common to this day that you'll find books that will tell you everything to know about this but nothing about this which is probably the nicest Madore ever found in Turkey but that's a different story now down below is a Greek text which translates from Psalm 136 he who gives bread to all living things for his abundant love endures forever which is a quote in the translation of Aquila s' so we know that in P Jews in Asia Minor in the 6th century we're using this translation that we found on the back of our palm cyst let's go one step further this is the crease found at knocketh affair which is one of the canyons near the Dead Sea where documents were found in the second century from the Jewish revolt against Rome of 132 to 135 of the Prophet Habakkuk and you notice the name of God scoops the name of God here is written in an ancient Hebrew script it's hard to see I know especially since whoever copied it probably didn't know that ancient Hebrew script but in fact Aquila s' in his text as preserved by this Ganesa document also writes god's name in an ancient hebrew script a way of of presenting the antiquity of the holiness of the Tetragrammaton which Protestants often pronounce Jehovah as a sanctified object and within the manuscript and so this is another one of those ties between ancient Jewish text and our polym system by the way this script is still used by the Samaritans to this day and we'll come back to that let's go back to our mess on top of the Greek was written all that beautiful Hebrew right which is very shiny and very nice and easy to see and no one paid any attention to it because there's so much Hebrew found in the Cairo Genizah now imagine what happened Solomon shefter looked at it and said oh it looks liturgical great that's sort of like saying it's a cult object when you deal with archeology right um it looks liturgical and the canaracuni is that that's not too hard number two they published an image of this in the Jewish encyclopedia of 1901 in front of God and anybody in anybody who wanted to read it without being in a technical journal but no one bothered to read the Hebrew because we were interested in the text of a quill is underneath it wasn't until the period right after World War one when a scholar at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York named Israel Davidson sat down and started reading the letters of the Hebrew and he realized that what was before him was a poem by a guy named yan I spelled you're known you'd you'd how do we know that's how it's spelled because he signed his name down the side of the poems which is similar to what Byzantine authors are doing at the same time he lived in the fifth century fifth sixth century in Palestine and he was a synagogue liturgical poet and folks knew about him because after all the 10th the 11th century scholars had written about him as a ancient author of the Terkel poetry and one of his poems was preserved in the Passover Haggadah a poem called it happened at evening by Heba hotsia Lila and so one of his poems was preserved thanks to the Cairo Genizah we now have Oh more than two hundred and sixty-four of them well published among the most important Hebrew liturgical poetry ever discovered now into two editions and a third book recently published by Laura Lieber of Duke University that translates just his commentary on Genesis which takes about seven hundred pages just to give you a sense okay let me give you a sense let me go on with it okay the Natan synagogue in the Galilee just four atmospherics may give you a sense of one of his poems the nation called Jews who deem because they thank the name of God llamo Dean in truth they are called one because they constantly unify the one rejoice in fear and trembling serve him with awe and quivering come forth with praise and thanks call out to Torah and to testimony the multitudes will not say holy above meaning the multitude in heaven until the believers say blessed below on earth and when they stand and whisper in their mouths below standing the angels will slacken their wings above and beside holy holy holy is the lord of hosts and that's just one little paragraph out of poems of at least four or five pages each 260 something of them now that's one of the ways that an object can give you a sense of the transitional nature of community how the text went from being a Jewish translation of the second century to a text preserved by Jews and Christians into the 3rd 4th 5th 6th centuries to be a piece of manuscript that no one needs anymore and hence is scraped off to be reused for a completely different career at first purpose in the 11th century which was to preserve Jewish traditions of the 6th century that cool now you find along let's take a look at this plate which you can also see upstairs it's from the Louvre we used it and sacred around the emergence of the synagogue in the ancient world in 1986 at whyyou Museum it's a very nice plate the importance of having it here is for me astonishing because in these photographs you can never see how thick these things are and you can't get your nose into them and really understand these objects until they're together which for all of us who were involved in the exhibition and I hope for you who are coming to it that's an important factor putting your nose up to it and seeing what it is before the guard stopped you um now let's take a look if you look close up on this plate you can see a very nice menorah right here little bulbs crossed a piece going across the top to hold it together some little flames over here it's more rubbed but you can see another object which is a Torah arc right which I'll come back to in a minute there it is that's my drawing don't take it seriously here you see the arc you can see a little conch shell up above inside the arch right there it is down there and my decrepit drawing here you see the panel's of the doors right and there are some olive branches on either side you see those right okay that comes through a little bit better and when you see the object you'll have to squint to see all of this now this object was found at a place called not Anana work next to what's now kyboot Oona on South of Lourdes in the Strait in the Judean shayla while a train was being built between Jerusalem and Jaffa in the late 19th century and a British explorer and archaeologist named Charles Claire manga know was walking around looking for Jewish and Christian and and all sorts of antiquities which he eventually brought back to the Louvre along with the plate that you just saw and he found that plate along with this very nice column up above and the column says on it ace tails one God now ace tails one God hardly ever shows up on Jewish inscriptions note and as never yet of the hundreds of synagogues found in Israel and the pieces of synagogues found in Israel shown up on a Jewish object except maybe this one it's pretty common in church context but pictures of Torah arcs and menorahs are less common there now Clement Gunnoe knew that just a few years before this piece had been discovered at a place called Emmaus which is famous from the New Testament which is on the road to Jerusalem heading into the giant hill country and this stone from a mouse is written in Samaritan script the same stuff that the God name of God was written on in our palm cest in Samaritan script here and it says baruch shem ola ola may his name be blessed eternally and on the bat in hebrew and on the back one god is tails and he said gee maybe this stone up above from now on and this stone down below can help explain each other maybe if this one Samaritan it says one god maybe this stone ax Samaritans has one god that means maybe the plate is Samaritan and then everybody more or less forgot what he said because no one really thought much about Samaritan anything at the end of the 19th century and both of these objects - the stone from a miles were assumed to be Jewish now just to give you a sense of what we're talking about here you see the area of kibbutz not of nan na na here you see the area of a mile right by just to give some context over here is Jaffa over here is Jerusalem so we're in this region right here near the D in Judea okay now not surprisingly in 1949 Eleazar lippo sukenik the Israeli archaeologists found another Samaritan synagogue in this area here at a place called shallow Veeam which is lovely stone mosaic with a picture of the Samaritan holy mountain they don't face toward Jerusalem they found face toward Mount grism which is in Nablus here there's as monk regime the Oppel is otherwise known as Nablus with nice Samaritan script on it and what does it say God will rule forever and ever Hashem Ilocano Lamba ed great so more Samaritan evidence never put together now if you don't know these are the Samaritans on the right is a high priest of the Samaritans claims to be a descendant of Aaron the high priest the Samaritans claim to be descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes there's no reason to think that they're not descendants of ancient people from this region of the Israelite background here you see a Torah scroll of the Samaritans written in Samaritan meaning paleo Hebrew script this is the abhishek role which they believe was written soon after the exodus from egypt which we know is an 11th century manuscript but don't tell them I said Saul over here you can see a Samaritan synagogue in Tata near Tel Aviv in Cologne you can see the menorah in the front of the synagogue because of again menorahs and Samaritans a pretty common thing up above Baruch Aqaba by abu kitab would say to her listener you call me when you're coming and busted are you and you're going another quote from Deuteronomy and down below to prove that I'm really not colonialist here you see a Samaritan scribe ritual slaughter er an artist in his home he made these lovely pictures which are which contain Samaritans script and they call the mezuzot they put them on the equip on the doorpost of their homes and inside their homes in the same way that you put little pieces of parchment on their doors and the squirt of the book in the front which is a Bible book a book of the Pentateuch he copied it now going back to the Samaritans here you see our object with it's very nice once again conch up above and it's one two panels three four and these little feet right down here right okay great it's a good reason people would say that these were Jewish after all it looks just like this one from a synagogue near Tiberias where you see similar panels and a similar cons G if that's Jewish why shouldn't that be Jewish right or these the synagogue at door opals in Syria with its Concha from the 3rd century or the Roman glass which happens to be in the collection of the metropolitan museum of art with its Torah Ark or this Torah Ark found in the Upper Galilee complete with conch and place for suspending lamp down here what today they call it near to meet an eternal light why shouldn't any do you think it was Jewish except that these things started coming out of the ground in the 1980s this floor from herbert samara in the in the West Bank from a Samaritan synagogue where you see exactly the same imagery that we saw in on our plate and so now we have it that Jews and Samaritans are using exactly the same imagery and that makes it even harder for people like me to figure out who and what belongs to whom and where or this really great one which is from a place called Earth elphaba also in Samaria in the West Bank with this lovely Torah Ark with its conch this table in the middle set for dinner notice the little dots on the table we'll come back to those this menorah right here with a incense shovel and a horn a shofar all right very nice thing there are people who want to say that this table in the middle is the table of the showbread at the temple except I don't think they had dinner in the temple so I don't know what that table does in a Samaritan context now notice again our object in comparison to the Samaritan object from the floor the mosaic is this picture they are really very close down to the little conch up here and the little conch up here now this floor was found in 1960s in becha ants go topless just north of the city and it's a very nice floor and I use it for all sorts of purposes because of its delicious colors but notice once again our Gable here our conch here but what's most interesting to me is that here you have what looks like an olive twig and another olive twig and down here you have a shofar and over here you have to believe me is a incense shovel but what's missing that you'd expect there to be is the Paramount Jewish symbol of the festival of Sukkot that appears on almost every object representing the biblical festival of Tabernacles the lulav here you see a palm frond complete with willows complete with myrtles complete with an a where's my life is he gone so young they lose him okay fingers in front of him complete with a citron standard Jewish stuff that the Samaritan object simply doesn't have Samaritan floors as you see down below may have a incent shovel and may have a shofar but it is not going to have this because Samaritans do not use this for the festival of Tabernacles it is a Jewish invention it's an old Jewish invention in fact Simon Barco Seba in the midst of the war wrote a letter to his art to his officers and said make sure that you provide palm fronds and Citron's and willows and and and then with the other one and had assumed and myrtles to your armies because we need them the camp requires them for the festival Jews had used this for a very long time but Samaritans never did and so root jacobi of the Hebrew University realized in looking at all of these images that one of the ways to identify a samaritan object was by its not having a love now that's a very subtle difference but it is a difference between these communities now none of us had paid much attention to that fact and so it's a good bet there's again our table and our plate this plate was used in a Samaritan context I can go you one step better you see this plate has these nice little flowers decorating it look at my nice little flowers here now I'm not making too much of this I'm just suggesting that it's a very similar plate Illustrated on this mosaic to the one that was discovered at nan the point being that through careful detective work it is possible to take apart the pieces to figure out the complex identity issues that appear in literature and the art of this period to imagine a world which is in transition to imagine a world where a document like that could exist with all of the complexities involved or that a plight like this could be misinterpreted for about a hundred years because we didn't have eyes to see differently and so thank you very much and I hope you'll enjoy the exhibition what I thought was very interesting about this series of talks and not totally expected was the degree in which the speaker's encouraged the idea of coexistence so before we start this I would like to thank the coing this foundation which I hope is pleased with its funding of today what I'd like to ask each of you is do you think that the idea of your talks and the exhibition really do encourage us to think of these communities living together and interacting more than being a structure in which one imposes itself on the other you're looking at here well there are lots of yeah we have lots of these things it's hard when I was putting together the talk one of the things I had most difficulty with was title because I didn't want to talk about influence and I didn't want to talk about different communities I don't think you're on okay is that better sorry I did want to speak about influence I didn't want to speak about different communities that prejudges the issue that assumes that they are separate and that they need to to cross lines that we've imagined and I think it's an interesting way to look at the material without starting with the assumption that there are such lines that need to be crossed and late in the process of this a friend honor from the University of Chicago publish the book called Muhammad and the believers which takes a very similar point of view that it's not so clear that at least in the seventh century that these professional divisions were already firmly established Stephen I always tell my students that can you hear me now perfect I always tell my students that I start with the premise that Jews are more or less the same as everyone else until they're not which gives me the sense of the shared culture for a minority community which is obviously different than for the Byzantine community visiting Christian community or for the community because I'm dealing of this little tiny group and so sometimes they're persecuted sometimes they're not persecuted but they were really happy when Islam came along and made them into subservient people as opposed to hated people that was a major moment it was better to be subservient and not be able to ride a horse than it was in their mind to live under Christian Byzantium if they've had all sorts of different cultures left now when we talk about Christian Byzantium were actually talking about a variety of Christian communities not all of whom are liked by the the state so father Justin's monastery st. Catherine at Sinai is part of the official church from Constantinople would you see that tremendously different than the Coptic or the Syriac or the Church of the east these other communities who are also like Stephens community not legal under the Empire in the fullest form Sinai was a part of the Holy Land and that's why remain and ecclesiastically a part of Jerusalem and a part of Constantinople when many Christians in Egypt left that Center Sinai had existed for centuries before the coming of Islam and it's extraordinary that you have a center that has retained its link to the world of Late Antiquity the greek-speaking world has which has continued to this very day but at the same time is managed to live in peaceful relations and harmonious relations with the new Islamic rulers I think one of the things we're trying to do in the exhibition and I think it does come through in these talks is there's not just one community of any one thing that even within the small community of Judaism we have inscriptions upstairs in Aramaic in Greek in Hebrew we would have if the most floor mosaics from home and leaf mosaic inscription survived it would be in Latin so obviously that limited small community has diversity certainly the elite of the Empire and 600 are appointed to their offices from the Capitol and need to be Orthodox to be appointed but then they are surrounded by very learning communities that are arguing I think one can never under estimate our failed to repeat often enough that these religious debates that are happening in the area from Syria through Egypt to North Africa are among people that would be the equivalent of Cambridge and Oxford and NYU today they're not people who are making up their own religions because they don't know Connexions it's because they are so very sophisticated in their argument about the nature of the holy and the holy is always so difficult to describe is that a fair statement can I hope that's better when I started looking at this material I was supposed to teach a course on the arts of the Islamic world which suggested one and they're just many when you read the documents from the seventh century there's very little about the Christian story students there's a great deal about the rivalry between different clans should the tradition follow should the Caliph be chosen from the family of the Prophet Muhammad or or chosen by the elders of the community should you know how should we run the taxes what's what's the point of prayer what actually is the the Shahada the the confession of faith does it mention Muhammad as the Prophet or not and that the notion of a kind of monolithic Christian we've known better I think about that for a long time because of the language and other distinctions in the East but it's true also I think in the Jewish material that there are rival groups and sects and they're just arguing among themselves all the time and that's true in Islam what we're really seeing is that our idea that you have these units and that they all agree with each other and in some way have a nice wall around them increasingly as we study it just cannot be supported and I think Larry made the point even if the work is made for one community it's perhaps made by people from another religious community there is much less solidity than the easiest description offers and so now in this generation of scholarship we are trying to understand how communities argued did not argue work together did not work together is it true that in Muslim community in areas where Muslims had taken the town you have no large mosque did they use synagogues and churches for worship in the first generation before they were ready to build a friday mosque a friday mosque is where all the muslim community comes together to pray and to hear what is happening and in the first generation you may have had relatively few people there compared to the larger population of the area Syria's supposed to have been predominantly Christian into the 13th century and yet the great center of the Umayyads the first important and ruling dynasty of the Islamic world is in Damascus it doesn't mean everybody in Greater Syria became Muslim as the Umayyads were there and Sinai is to me a particularly important place because it's one of the first religious sites with great sanctity over many centuries that the armies of the Prophet would reach I don't know of ones particularly south of there but do you father Justin we know that the area came under the jurisdiction of Islam in the year 633 so quite early and it is that shared veneration for cyanide that has ensured the peaceful coexistence there for so many centuries of Christians and Muslims I hope all of you have a chance when you can go there I am being waved at if you will stay Allen gam pal who has been sitting very nicely at the end is doing research in terms of music that extends what we've been talking about today because he's looking in early Muse in early Helm's an early text of a number of religious communities for signs of how and when musical notation develops and that has grown out of his own career as an eminent classical pianist and someone who since he was a at 16 at the White House performing has been interested both in the beauty of the music and in the logic behind it so if you'll give us a minute to get the piano set up we're going to hear from him music in the form of liturgical chant was an integral part of all three monotheistic religions in the early Byzantine period from the third to the seventh centuries all three religions insisted that their scripture be sung and not just read aloud as can be seen in these quotes from the New Testament the Talmud and the Islamic Quran doing this formative period the liturgical and musical relationships between early Christianity and Judaism were quite strong many early Christians were recent Jewish converts and they were comfortable with Jewish liturgical music in spite of their changed theological faiths the Old Testament Psalms were the centerpiece of the Liturgy of the early church and for several centuries Jewish Cantor's were hired by certain Christian communities to teach the cantillation of the Old Testament and the singing of the Psalms in the fifth century the Christian Bishop of Minorca wrote about a procession of Christians and Jews quote we began to sing the ninth Psalm and the throws of Jews also began to sing it with a wondrous sweetness end quote obviously if the two groups were singing simultaneously the melodies must have been somewhat similar some earlier followers of the Islamic faith also shared musical liturgical elements with Christians and Jews one of the many hadiths attributed quotes attributed to Muhammad reads quote recite the Quran in the tunes and songs of the Arabs and beware the tunes of the people of the two books unquote the two books obviously references to the Jewish Old Testament in the Christian New Testament and this quote affirms on the one hand that the Koran was musically chanted and not just read it also suggests that some Islamic communities had adopted Jewish and Christian chant styles textual references like these help to understand the musical liturgical culture in the early Byzantine period however only musical notation may shed light on the music itself what we know about notation 2,000 years ago in this region the ancient Greeks had invented a very complex system of musical notation around 400 BC that used Greek letters sometimes inverted turned around chopped in half to represent notes or pitches of the 75 examples of this ancient notation that still exists today all our pagan except for a single Christian hymn here is an image of the papyrus of this him above the hymn to the Trinity found in Oxyrhynchus with a transcription of the ancient notation below on the left if this pointer does what it's supposed to do doesn't seem to be doing what it's supposed to doing in any case out there well I don't know hmm point there we go so here we see the musical symbols above the Greek text and on the right side of transcription into modern musical notation with the same text and the modern musical notes above let's listen to a short excerpt of this hymn sung by the ensemble carry loose ah that's enough this ancient notation fell out of use in the fourth century after this hymn was written perhaps the close association with paganism offended the Christian liturgy the musical explanation for the disappearance of ancient Greek musical notation is that Christian chant was improvisational unlike Greek and Roman Roman pagan music some words were sung with modal melismatic motives that would have been difficult to notate using the ancient Greek system a similar thing happened recently in the 20th century when jazz musicians invented a new notation system because standard notation didn't work for their improvisational music a completely different type of notation also existed during this ancient period every word in the spoken Greek language had a pitch accent which meant that the voice went up or down a specific amount on a specific syllable if the musical inflection was incorrect pronounced incorrectly the meaning of the word might change this musical element of Greek was called prosody from the Greek words proce meaning for and owed meaning song for song Greek became the standard administrative language throughout the eastern Mediterranean Basin when Alexander the Great conquered the region around 330 BC people who spoke local languages such as Aramaic or Syriac weren't accustomed to these pitch accents Aristophanes of Byzantium in about a hundred and eighty BC who worked in the Great Library of Alexandria in Egypt formalized a system of written prosodic accents in an attempt to save the old pitch pronunciation for Greek speaking Egyptians however the oral prosody in Greek gradually disappeared and was replaced by the more common syllabic stress accents prior to the ninth entry there are very few traces of Aristophanes accents although they became used standard as standard accents from the ninth century onward here are four examples of their use prior to the ninth century in a small passage on a papyrus of Romans from the New Testament from the 4th century we can see a circumflex accent over the letter Etta here from the Dhokla Oasis in Egypt that teachers dipinto an inscription on a classroom wall we can see many of these accents acute grove and sere complex and here on part of Homer's Iliad from the 6th century we can also see a variety of avec sense accents finally a sixth sense century papyrus with verses from the book of Matthew again all three of the accents can be found here all four of these examples follow the rules of accentuation in the choice and placement of the accents the rules established by Aristophanes for where to place them in which accents were to be used let's listen - Christos halkias chant or cantle 8 the first verse of Matthew on this papyrus committee member 6 our alum von Oy fools Bertrand a Yaakov under your nipple mother former school day on La Feria schools he saw was it's a long cut even on they met a more for fear was the left for lunch then for pro support a school or soy yours pave moth your school as an Ethel nesco or score Falls many Greek manuscripts of Christian hymns Christian hymns also contain accents however for the hymn texts which were not Kant elated but sung the accents don't follow the accent rules here is a fifth century papyrus of a hymn to marry with three accent marks and they're all in the wrong places you can see up here here and here the word duck so Luca seen the accent circumflex is here it should be over the oops oops it on earlier in the word here is a 6th century ostracon that's actually here at the Met of a Christian hymn with 13 accents again all in the wrong places why did the scribe choose the wrong accents and put them in the wrong places hymns were an important part of the early Christian liturgy and some byzantine hymnography instead of composing their own melodies wrote texts to be sung to standard well-known tunes the accent marks in these hymns didn't represent specific notes or intervals they indicated musical changes to a well-known melody to accommodate a different text for example to highlight an important word and add a melisma over the next few centuries this new musical use of accents in him texts increased and other signs were added as well here for example is an 8th century papyrus with a him by cosmos of myoma one of the great byzantine hymnography of the eighth century it's still sung today in the Byzantine Rite in this papyrus we see a far more developed system of accents let's listen - Christos halkias sing an excerpt of this hymn and notice the difference between his biblical cantillation from a few moments ago and this mellow melodic singing of a hymn all seven is awesome only Klaus and Flournoy Pierre marathon if I'm German foxes 44 men 1/4 or or Civil War Bogart even saw my two men war film for for soreness peril is the spawn zone ball the Byzantine accents for chanting Greek biblical texts served as the basis for a system of neumes for singing Greek liturgical hymns and both systems were used simultaneously for several centuries this chart oh sorry that was supposed to be up during the singing this chart by the musicologist david highly shows the close relationship between the pro sonic accents on the left the byzantine x phonetic accents in the middle and the neumes that were used for him singing on the right a system for of signs for the hebrew cantillation of the Old Testament called Tamim appeared about the same time as this complete Byzantine system some scholars claim that the Tamim also evolved from Aristophanes as prosonic accents here is the oldest extant example of the Tamim from the 9th century cairo codex we don't know what these signs originally represented but over the past millennium the musical motives associated with each tom-tom have been transformed to correspond with local traditional music for example the same two um sign might represent one musical motive in Kiev a different one in Madrid and a third in Prague you can see this this passage has been taken from this lower middle middle column the earliest Western manuscripts with musical signs all so appeared in the ninth century these signs in Latin liturgical texts are called neumes either from the Greek word Nahum which means sign or direction or the Hebrew word Naima which means tune here is an example of the earliest written Newman's also 9th century an Amana strict manuscript from sang gal French monks in the 19th century demonstrated the evolution of these signs by comparing manuscripts of identical texts with slightly changed musical signs over the course of several centuries they were able to show how these neumes developed into modern standard musical notation that we use today here is a Hebrew manuscript from the 11th century that illustrates an intermediary stage in evolution of Latin neumes many of the notes are distinct as in today's notation and they are written around three horizontal lines that you may be able to see more clearly here these horizontal lines show the relative pitch of the notes this Hebrew version of a portion of the Old Testament with Latin notation provides yet another illustration of the frequent exchange between Christianity and Judaism in the musical liturgical domain as a final demonstration of ongoing relationship between the liturgical music of the three religions let us move to three modern examples of Christian Jewish and Islamic based music first a short cello and piano piece that evokes Byzantine Psalm chanting samu dia then a cello and piano rendition of the Jewish prayer Kaddish by Ravel who was French Basque half Jewish and half Catholic and last Islam a a solo piece by Minnie Baraka deaf who was an Orthodox Russian composer very nationalistic born in Nizhny Novgorod the capital of the Volga region which has a very strong Muslim and had a very strong Muslim history and population you you you you you you the you you you you you

Channel: The Met

Views: 38,055

Rating: 4.5625 out of 5

Keywords: Met, Metropolitan Museum, Byzantium, Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Byzantine Empire, Sinai, Jewish Art, Byzantine Art

Id: --8oApudpEE

Length: 107min 40sec (6460 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 09 2012