Papers by Alexey Lyavdansky
JSS, 2024
The article discusses dialectal and folkloristic features of an oral narrative in a NorthEastern ... more The article discusses dialectal and folkloristic features of an oral narrative in a NorthEastern Neo-Aramaic (NENA) variety recently recorded in the Southern Russian village of Urmiya. The dialect of the tale belongs to the NENA varieties originating in the easternmost regions of Turkey, which is corroborated by the tale's speaker, who named its places of origin as Lewən, Albaq, and Gawar. These dialects remain largely undescribed and are highly endangered. The plot of the story is not known from hitherto published Neo-Aramaic field texts. Even though it resembles some of the folktales recorded in Iran and India, the story contains a unique combination of narrative motifs.
Research on Syriac charms has come to the place where one needs to reconsider its goals. Presentl... more Research on Syriac charms has come to the place where one needs to reconsider its goals. Presently more than 100 manuscripts of Syriac charms of the modern tradition 2 are known and available to study. They all originate from the East-Syrian tradition (mostly Assyrian) and are primarily composed in Classical Syriac, with the inclusion of words, phrases, or texts in North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic dialects. This corpus of manuscripts contain more than 2,500 individual texts (charms or spells). As is easily seen from the comparison of even a small number of these manuscripts, their content is very repetitive. At this point, publishing a hitherto unedited manuscript of charms would result in only a few previously unknown texts, because most of the texts in such a manuscript would be already known from previous publications. Therefore, the time is ripe for a new kind of research. There is a need for cataloging and indexing the available texts in order to organize this rich textual corpus into thematic groups and to determine which texts are copies or versions of other texts. The objective of this paper is to present one of the possible ways to classify Syriac charms. This classification is primarily functi onal, but it takes into account the specific typology of the texts, as will be clarified below.
Vestnik Drevnei Istorii 82/4, 911-940, 2022
The authors publish a hitherto unknown squeeze made from a North West Semitic inscription. The sq... more The authors publish a hitherto unknown squeeze made from a North West Semitic inscription. The squeeze originally belonged to the Russian Archeological Institute in Constantinople and is now hosted by the St. Petersburg Branch of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The inscription, performed in relief, may have been made on a large ornamented stone vessel. Paleographic features of the letters point to the mid‑9th century BC as its approximate date. Both paleographic and linguistic features of the text suggest that its origin is to be sought in Southern Canaan (Palestine).
The first part of our inquiry on Syriac love charms was devoted to the recipe-type charms. This a... more The first part of our inquiry on Syriac love charms was devoted to the recipe-type charms. This article edits four more Syriac love charms, which we attribute to the socalled prayer-type. The special features of this type of Syriac love charms are addressed and compared with that of the recipe-type texts, edited in Part I. The commentary to each text provides philological notes and parallels, both from within and outside of Syriac magical tradition.
Oral Tradition 35(2), 2022
The field studies of Neo-Aramaic dialects that have proliferated recently have yielded many folkl... more The field studies of Neo-Aramaic dialects that have proliferated recently have yielded many folklore texts. During the author's fieldwork (together with Christina Benyaminova) with one speaker of Neo-Aramaic, the sophisticated plot of a folk story with a hero named Mirza Pamat attracted his attention. A comparison of this story with other Neo-Aramaic field corpora has revealed not only that the plot of this story has clear parallels, but that the hero of the story is popular among several Christian groups of Neo-Aramaic speakers. Further research has shown that Mîrza Mihemed as a folktale hero is not restricted to the oral tradition of Aramaic-speaking Christians. Similar names may be found in Persian, Arabic, and Azerbaijani folk traditions, but the hero with the name Mîrza Mihemed or Mîrza Mehmûd is especially popular in the Kurdish oral tradition of fairytales. This suggests that the corpus of Kurdish tales about Mîrza Mihemed is the possible source of the Neo-Aramaic fairytales with this name of a hero. This article explores the Kurdish and Neo-Aramaic oral corpora of texts with Mîrza Mihemed as a protagonist.
Semitic Languages and Cultures, 2020
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Papers by Alexey Lyavdansky