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UCLA Library Special Collections has collaborated internationally to digitize and share Syrian cuneiform in our collections(opens in a new tab). We also brought in an objects conservator (UCLA/Getty Conservation graduate Elizabeth Drolet) to carefully label and store each cuneiform item into preservation enclosures so they can be more safely brought to the reading room for our users.
Other Syrian materials may be less well known, but offer insights into identity and the persistence of Syriac Christian traditions. One example is a 1868 Old Testament printed in the town of Urmia (in what is now Iran) by the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions.
This printed Syriac Old Testament known as the Urmia Bible(opens in a new tab) compares the classical Peshitta Syriac script taken mainly from Nestorian manuscripts, side by side with a modern Syriac text translation. Protestant missionaries had their own reasons for producing printed bibles, but nonetheless, this Bible preserves one version of the Syriac Christian text of the Nestorian or Assyrian Church of the East.
The cataloging of this book(opens in a new tab) gives a bit more information about its production. But what the catalog does not reveal is the way the bookbinding work done to protect the bible in 1868 signals the intensely Christian identity of the book. Every culture with a tradition of written words has its own bookbinding traditions. Often these traditions are as unique as fingerprints.
This 19th century book embodies early Syrian Christian craft and identity at least as old as the medieval period. The evidence for this lies in the endband and the way the leather covering the spine of the printed pages behaves. The image below shows the UCLA Urmia Bible handsewn endband, and the leather moving freely away from the spine when the book opens.
The UCLA Urmia Bible endband is quite different from typical machine made and adhesively applied endbands of the 19th century shown below.
In the Syriac Christian bookbinding tradition the core of the endband is made from rolling or folding projecting parts of a textile layer that was first adhered to the back of the printed pages and onto the outside of the hard boards on the front and back of the book. This textile layer was taller than the height of the printed pages, and once that textile was rolled or folded down to the same size as the printed pages and boards it formed the core of the traditional handsewn Syriac Christian endband. That rolled or folded textile was then anchored to the book by hand with plain white thread using holes in one hard cover board, traveling through holes made in the back of the printed pages, and finally the same white thread was used to secure the textile layer to holes in the other hard cover board. Once this primary anchor of white thread was in place, two colors of decorative thread were woven in a special pattern around those white threads, starting again in one hard cover board, continuing the pattern across all the back edge of the printed pages, then finishing the two color pattern in the other hard cover board. Only Syriac Christian bookbinding creates its endband this exact way. The image below shows some of the hidden layers of a traditional Syriac Christian endband.
Justin Perkins, a new England Protestant Missionary who brought a printing press to Urmia, may have never seen a Syriac Bible with a traditional Syriac bookbinding style. But since Perkins likely did not bring in mechanized bookbinding equipment and machine made modern endbands to Urmia along with his printing press, chances are that most of the freshly printed pages of the bible he published were given the same hand-done traditional bookbinding style that Syriac Christian Bibles had been given for generations. More copies of the Urmia Bible would need to be carefully examined to understand the full story of how the Bible was prepared for distribution to readers after printing.
The Syriac branch of Christianity fell victim to the same forces as the Armenian and Greek Genocides in the early 20th century. Their books are rare survivals, and UCLA Library is lucky to have this interesting 19th century example of the persistence of Syrian Christian bookbinding craft traditions that originated in the middle ages or earlier. For other links to conservation of a Syriac book, see Chester Beatty Syriac treatment.