Saint Ephrem's Hymns on Fasting

An Annotated Translation and Concordance

Gary A. Anderson, Sidney Griffith, and Robin Darling Young

Introduction

This electronic archive represents a sample version of an electronic and print edition of the St. Ephrem's Hymns on Fasting. This edition will eventually include a translation of all the Hymns found in Beck's original CSCO edition and a transliteration of the entire Syriac text. In addition this translitered text will also serve as the basis for a concordance to the entire work which will be linked by electronic "hotbuttons" to the the entire transliterated text.

The work can be accessed through a "Table of Contents" page which is a descriptive summary of the Hymns themselves. The summaries have been, by and large, taken from Beck's edition. For the convenience of English readers, they have been translated from the German.

The transliteration has been done with all ASCII characters so that any computer can use the data. Over the next year it is hoped that this version can be electronically filtered in such a way that it can be read by a syriac font on either a DOS or Macintosh machine. We have chosen the convention of transliteration to enable a one-to-one correspondence between a syriac letter and its machine-encoded representative. This allows for the very easy production of concordances and other searching conventions. It also allows for usage of the information across the network. We can only hope that with the arrive of Unicode that all of the problems of font display may finally be solved.

It is hoped that this edition will expand to include the entire Pascha cycle of St. Ephrem.

CLICK HERE FOR A DEMONSTRATION OF EPHREM'S: HYMNS ON FASTING