Talk:Michael the Syrian - Misplaced Pages

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Starting the page

I've added whatever I had to get this article under way. There is more in the German article, but my German is a bit shaky. The only bits of the Chronicle that I can find are in French and about the crusades, so I have translated those and stuck them in here. But they give an unbalanced impression of his history, so if anyone can add more, that would be good. Roger Pearse 21:29, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

The Hill Museum and Manuscript Library digitally photographed the entire 1598 copy of the 12th century Chronicle, the Edessa-Aleppo Syricac Codex, in Aleppo, Syria in 2008. Facsimile copes of the Chronicle will be printed by the Gorgias Press in 2009. Reader: T. Barrett , 19 May 2009. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 38.115.185.130 (talk) 17:10, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

Edit-war and distorted quote

There has recently been renewed edit-warring about a purported quotation from Michael the Syrian. Having checked up on it, I'll copy here the results of my check, for later reference.

We are dealing with this repeated edit, ostensibly including a literal quotation from Michael the Great, sourced to an Assyrian POV website, from there ostensibly sourced to Adai Scher, and ultimately ostensibly sourced to an 19th-century edition, by J.-B. Chabot, of Michael's chronicle. ("History of Mikhael The Great Chabot Edition p. 748, 750, quoted after Addai Scher, Hestorie De La Chaldee Et De "Assyrie" ")
The website http://www.christiansofiraq.com is dead, but it's archived here
If you look at that website, you will see that it is highly ambiguous as to whether it is ascribing the words in question to Adai Scher or to Michael himself. Apparently the entire paragraph is something written by Scher, with some bits in it ostensibly quoted from Michael, but it isn't typographically clear where those internal quotations begin and end. The website also does not contain the alleged page references to the Chabot edition.
The second-level reference, to Scher, is misspelled – the title of that work is not Hestorie De La Chaldee Et De "Assyrie" (which isn't correct French), but Histoire de la Chaldee et de l'Assyrie. I have not been able to locate an online version of this work, and there is no page number given for it. The book appears to be in French (based on an original apparently in Arabic), while the purported quote is in English, without explanation of whose translation it is. This English translation, together with the curious misspelling of Scher's title, occurs nowhere else on the web but on Misplaced Pages and on various partisan Assyrian websites and messageboards, all evidently blindly copying from each other.
The third-level reference, to the Chabot edition of Michael, is also wrong, as the Chabot edition doesn't even have pages numbered "748" and "750". (It's three volumes, and each volume goes to between 300 and 500 pages or so.) However, a full-text version of the Chabot edition is available on archive.org. In it, there is a passage that appears to be vaguely related to the alleged quote, not in "pages" 748/750, but in "sections" 748/750, which can be found in Vol. III, pp. 442-443 (§748) and pp. 445–446 (§750) respectively (large PDF file, may take a while to load.) I have read that text (in French). There are a few snippets that might somehow be related to snippets of the purported quote:

Alleged quotation	Chabot text	My translation of Chabot text
Your Syrian sect has no importance neither honor, and you did never have a kingdom, neither an honorable king'. The Jacobites answered by saying
that even if their name is "Syrian", they are originally "Assyrians" and they have had many honorable kings
Syria is in the west of Euphrates, and its inhabitants who are talking our Aramaic language, and who are so-called "Syrians", are only a part of the "all", while the other part which was in the east of Euphrates, going to Persia, had many kings from Assyria and Babylon and Urhay.	Ainsi, on voit que la Syrie était à l'ouest de l'Euphrate; et qu'on appelle par métaphore «Syriens» ceux qui parlent notre langue à nous, Araméens, et dont les Syriens ne sont qu'une partie; tout le reste' habite à l'est de l'Euphrate, c'est-à-dire depuis les rives de l'Euphrate jusqu'en Perse. Et depuis les rives de l'Euphrate jusqu'à l'Orient, il y eut de nombreux rois.	So, one can see that Syria was to the west of the Euphrates, and that the name "Syrians" is applied by way of metaphor to those who speak our language, the Arameans, of which the Syrians are only one part; the others all live east of the Euphrates, that is from the banks of the Euphrates all the way to Persia. And from the banks of the Euphrate towards the East, there have been numerous kings.
Assyrians, who were called "Syrians" by the Greeks, were also the same Assyrians, I mean "Assyrians" from "Assur" who built the city of Nineveh.	Josèphe appelle Asùr «Assour», en langue grecque : «Assour, de qui proviennent les Assyriens, bâtit Ninive»	Josephus calls Asùr "Assur", in Greek: "Assur, from which derive the Assyrians, built Niniveh".

I am concluding that the alleged quotation is indeed fabricated, and am warning everybody against reinserting it.

The other quotation is more or less correct as far as Michael's text goes, but it is WP:OR as long as it is not supported by a reliable WP:Secondary source explaining what its significance might be. Fut.Perf. ☼ 19:31, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

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