text:
The individual named on this seal must be identified with al-Ḥasan ibn Gabras, the amir and chamberlain in the service of Qilij Arslān (551/1156–599/1192).]]>
SG: Good morning.
JNSL: Today is Friday, August 7, 2009. My name is Jeanne-Nicole Saint-Laurent and I have the privilege of interviewing Dr. Sidney Griffith. We're at Dumbarton Oaks in the Fellows Building. Thank you for agreeing to do this.
SG: Well, you're welcome.
JNSL: I wonder if we might begin – what was the first time you heard of Dumbarton Oaks and in what context was that?
SG: Well, I'd heard of it in the course of my studies at Catholic University, and I knew many of the people who were here because they were very prominent scholars in their fields, of course. And faculty members at Catholic U. – many of them had connections with Dumbarton Oaks. Some of them had been Fellows here, including some of my own, most immediate colleagues like David Johnson, for example, and Dr. George Dennis, who is a friend of mine, who was a faculty member at Catholic University who was very much involved with Dumbarton Oaks. So, when I finished my degree and was beginning my teaching career at Catholic U., when the time came for me to have a sabbatical, it seems a reasonable thing to apply here even though I worked in areas to the east of Byzantium, as they called it or thought of it then. It seemed not unreasonable to apply for a fellowship, and I had previously participated in a symposium here having to do with east of Byzantium, so that had sort of inspired me to be bold enough to apply. And at first I was an alternate, but then some lucky thing happened and I got the fellowship and I was very happy to be able to live in the Fellows Building because it meant I was right near the library, and I didn't have to commute as local people normally did. The other Fellows had apartments in various places, but they were actually further away than I was in the end. So, that's how I knew of Dumbarton Oaks, because just prior to the time of my fellowship, Dr. John Meyendorff was here as Director of Studies and, of course, Ihor Ševčenko and Cyril Mango had been here, so they were very imposing people and those of us who lived in the city and who worked in the field were very well aware of them. Now, they were gone just prior to the time of my fellowship, which was when Giles Constable was the Director of Dumbarton Oaks, being a western medievalist, he had, let us say, a broader view of Byzantine history than, perhaps, some byzantinists, strictly speaking, may have had.
JNSL: Right, right. And how would you have described the tone of Dumbarton Oaks at that time in the early '80s – the environment?
SG: It was not an intense time. It was fairly relaxed. We had tea every afternoon and we had formal lunches together and we were expected to come to these, and people sometimes grumbled about that but, in fact, when we arrived I think all of us enjoyed the camaraderie. There were some very interesting people here at the time and both among the Junior Fellows and the so-called Fellows, so it was a very pleasant time. And, of course, it was an institution, and like every institution it had its own ethos and its own sort of mini-politics, I guess, and sometimes they used to say that there's nothing too small that it can't become a big issue at D.O. depending on the, you know, the day. But I don't recall any serious issues or problems like that, and I have a very happy memory of my time here and still think fondly of the people with whom I enjoyed the place. There were the incomparable resources of the library, of course, but it was not only just the library and the time to do one's work without much interference, but I think it was true to say, at least in my instance, that the opportunity to converse with others working broadly in the field was very, very educational, to use that, and inspiring. Well, I found it a very pleasant and extremely helpful experience.
JNSL: And as somebody who works in Semitic languages and Oriental languages, how did you find the collection here at Dumbarton Oaks, although it's always been famous for its Byzantine resources?
SG: Well, yeah, but I think the library staffs over the years have taken a fairly broad view of what needed to be in the library and by and large I was very impressed by the amount of material in my field that was actually accessible here. That's one thing I had wondered about a little bit coming from the library to which I'm accustomed at my own institution and, indeed, I did have to go back there for some things, but for the most part I was well served here and if a particular thing wasn't immediately available the library staff did everything to get what I needed, so I thought it had a lot more coverage in my areas of interest than I had expected. Now, it wasn't – that's not the focus of the library, so it didn't have everything I might have wanted, but yeah, especially in Arabic –
JNSL: Do you recall in particular some of your interactions with some of the other Fellows or people who were permanent scholars here? – any special anecdotes from those relationships?
SG: Well, yeah, there are some very interesting ones. There was another person who worked on eastern things, as I did, a man named Ahmad Shboul, who got his degree from SOAS [School of Oriental and African Studies] in London and now teaches in Sydney, Australia, and he worked on the view of the Byzantines or the Romans in Arabic literature. So, we were sort of natural allies and experienced many things together. Professor Irfan Shahid was very much a presence here, then as now, of course Professor Kazhdan was here. I had a very good personal relationship with him, in fact, I don't know if I should claim responsibility for this publicly, but during my year here I helped him learn to drive and get his license, which was something of a scary experience, and anybody who has ridden with him may wonder if I was a good enough teacher because of course he was an interesting driver. So, I remember another interesting experience, since I lived in the Fellows Building I got to meet people who came in and out for various periods of time – longer or shorter. And one of the most interesting was the art historian Kurt Weitzmann, who was here for some months, and the thing that I remember about him is that one holiday morning, I was sleeping late – because it was a holiday – and I woke up to Weitzmann shaking my foot because I hadn't shown up for breakfast and he wondered what was the matter. So, he came into my room and he said, "Wake up! Wake up! You mustn't lose any time for scholarship!" So it's not every day that you have someone of that, how shall I say, standing shaking you by the foot to wake up and get busy with your scholarship. So, yeah, that was an interesting little phenomenon. There were lots of other things, like the evening concerts and the lectures and all sorts of things like that. People generally were a little fearful when they had to make their presentation about the topic they were working on, and I remember that one of the Fellows here with me at the time was Walter Kaegi, and we used to have breakfast together every morning. And he would already have been up and read the paper and would tell me the news. But he would say that if you make a poor showing at your presentation it will be news all over the field by dinner time. Anyway, I remember my presentation – there was Ernst Kitzinger sitting there with a great sense of purpose and Ševčenko – neither of them were permanently here at the time, but just happened to be here that day, which, of course, added to my anxiety a little bit. Anyway, we didn't have a Director of Studies, as such, at the time. Michael McCormick, who is now a professor at Harvard, sort of oversaw the Fellows in terms of their scholarship and projects and things like that, and then Gary Vikan was also somewhat in that vein here at the time and they managed us, as it were, but very lightly.
JNSL: And was there a lot of interest and openness to topics about Syriac and Arabic from the other scholars?
SG: Oh yeah, I think so. We had a very interesting group of people and I think everyone who was here at the time realized that the Syriac speaking people or at least a large portion of them actually lived within what one would think of as the Byzantine empire and many of them had projects of their own that I think profited from having others around whose field was not so much focused just on Greek. There was a heavy presence of art historians so, for example, one of the fellows in my time was Danny Ćurčić, the architecture historian from Princeton, and his student Robert Ousterhout, who was a Junior Fellow, but they at the time were working on structures both in Jerusalem and in Constantinople, as I recall. Ousterhout later wrote about the Anastasis, and so, you know, there was an interest there. And there was Leslie...
JNSL: …Brubaker.
SG: Brubaker, yeah, who was an art historian but also very interested in eastern things, so yeah, it was an interesting time.
JNSL: And you had already been to the symposium "East of Byzantium;" it would have been in the late '70s?
SG: Yes, I don't recall the exact year, but yeah, I had presented a paper in that symposium. It was one of the symposia, if I remember correctly, for which they left some slots for people to make proposals to join the symposium. Quite frequently the symposium was put together by a symposiarch who simply chose all the people and things like that, but I don't remember being asked to participate. I think I sent a proposal and it was accepted.
JNSL: The publications from that symposium contain some very classic articles in our field now, and it must have been a very exciting interaction.
SG: Oh yeah, at that particular symposium – oh yeah, because there were people who worked in Armenian and, of course, D.O. has had something of a history of cultivating Armenian and Syriac, of course, and some of the major people in Syriac participated in that symposium. In addition to Sebastian Brock, who is ubiquitous in Syriac things, there was Robert Murray and Jan Drijvers, and, well, with those three you pretty much had the Syriac field, in the anglophone world anyway, present.
JNSL: Right, right. You mentioned earlier when we were walking over that you, from time to time, would see Elizabeth Taylor across – that must have been funny.
SG: Yeah, I remember one funny occasion when someone arrived at the door, I don't remember, this door right here, the door, the front door to the Fellows Building. I don't remember if it was lunch time or dinner time, anyway, it was a florist with this large preparation, I guess you could call it, for her but no one was home and they wanted to know if we would accept it and take it over later and the guy who answered the door was the Fellow from Chicago whose name I just mentioned, Walter Kaegi, he said, "No! No! We have nothing to do with them! Nothing! No! We won't accept it!" So they took it away. But other than that, it was just a matter of seeing her leaning on her railing over there and peering at the world.
JNSL: And what was Giles Constable's leadership like, how would you characterize that?
SG: Well, I found him a very supportive director. He was very interested in our well-being, I think it would be fair to say. He was approachable – one could visit him in his office and discuss whatever one had on one's mind, not necessarily a problem. I went to talk with him, for example, about how best to access the Syriac manuscript collection in the Houghton Library, because of course he was also a Harvard professor and was able to arrange for me to have a painless entree there. Things like that. He always was interested in having lunch or dinner with the Fellows, and he would move around to different tables to make sure he encountered everyone and was always wanting to know what one thought about this or that, was interested in bibliography, things like this. And he's one of those people who seems always to remember even others whom he hasn't seen in years. For example, just recently I was participating in a program at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton where he had held an appointment, he's actually retired now, but he was there and he remembered me and, I mean, that's after quite a few years. I'm not sure I'd remember someone whom I met that long ago. I found him very encouraging and very supportive. He seemed to administer the place with aplomb and I'm sure there were those who disagreed with this, that, or the other, but I personally had a very good relationship with him and I have the opinion that he was a fine director precisely because of the wider view he took of things, at least from my point of view. Now, I know that there were some who felt that things should be more focusedly Byzantine.
JNSL: In what year did you join the faculty at Catholic U?
SG: I think it was 1977 that, I mean, I had been there for a very long time, even by then, but I wasn't officially a faculty member until the fall of 1977.
JNSL: And George Dennis was already on the faculty?
SG: Yes, George Dennis was already a member of the History faculty, and I had known him before that, of course, because I had been a student at Catholic U.
JNSL: And you mentioned that already at that point there was some links through him and through you with Catholic U. and Dumbarton Oaks, I wonder if you might speak to how that has developed in the last thirty years or so, as you see it.
SG: Well, at the time, I think it was about that time or shortly after that time, that Dumbarton Oaks began to make arrangements with local universities whereby the local university and Dumbarton Oaks would jointly hire someone for a three year period and the person would be on a tenure track in one of the local universities, like Georgetown, like Catholic U., and the idea was that after the three year period when the individual was being supported by both D.O. and the local university, the local university would just take over the support of the person and he or she would become a member of the regular faculty there. That was a very, very productive program from my point of view. At the time, I was the director of Early Christian Studies, the program in Early Christian Studies at Catholic U., a job I had for about fifteen years. And we acquired Linda Safran, an art historian from the Greek and Latin department that way. Now, I know that it didn't work out quite so well every time with every other institution, by that I mean the individual involved didn't always get tenure in the institution which was sharing them with Dumbarton Oaks for whatever internal reasons, but even if it didn't work in the sense that the person got tenure, it still was a very fruitful exchange in that three year period where both institutions enjoyed having the individual, so I thought that was a very good program and I don't know when it actually came to an end, but I know that now there's another kind of an arrangement, but D.O. has always been interested in working closely with the local schools and I think has done so pretty effectively. There used to be a group of pretty steady former Fellows in the local universities who were constantly coming to D.O. I was among them for a while, although I haven't in recent years been as much or hardly at all involved with D.O., not from any disinclination, but one just gets in one's own groove and gradually we went our separate ways. And also in the earlier period, former Fellows had a lot more immediate access than they came to have in later times, so it was a pretty easy thing to, you know, come and go, and the procedures for entering and such were much, much more relaxed.
JNSL: Were you a part of Alexander Kazhdan's Greek reading group?
SG: Yes. I started reading with the group while I was a Fellow and I carried on with it afterwards for quite a long time. We were reading Psellos, as I recall, and Elizabeth Fisher was part of the group, and you may know that eventually she went on do quite a bit of work with Psellos, and I found that an extraordinary experience for me. I'm sure I was the poorest one in the group because it involved Michael McCormick and Elizabeth Fisher and one or two others and not everyone came every time. I think I pretty much did – but. And of course Kazhdan was a master, especially in a setting like that where we were reading texts together and he would come very well prepared and it was a very encouraging experience for me, not to mention the obvious: that my Greek improved considerably, albeit that I was probably not the most adept of the group. My focus had been on other languages, but what facility I did have in Greek was immensely improved by that experience.
JNSL: He sounds like quite an interesting man.
SG: Kazhdan?
JNSL: Yes.
SG: Oh yeah. He was an extremely interesting man. That was the period when he was beginning to put together the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium and many of us were involved in writing entries for it, including myself.
JNSL: I think that began in '84, maybe? Or previously?
SG: Well, it certainly was beginning even previously because I remember when I was a Fellow, Kazhdan brought along a list of the Syriac topics to be included and wanted me to review it and to add or subtract or whatever, so. And I wound up writing quite a few of them. There's an interesting thing there. For the other editors, they appreciated my entries because I always kept within the word limit and tried to be very succinct. So, I was getting all this praise from the other editors about my entries, but Kazhdan wound up being somewhat disappointed, and I remember getting a note from him telling me how he wept when he read my entries because he expected more, and it turned out that what he meant was that I hadn't included as much of the Russian scholarship as he would have thought important. And so in a couple of instances, he helped my articles along considerably. But I must say he certainly did improve them and I wasn't as astute in the matter of the previous scholarship in Russian as I should have been because, of course, I had always to have someone check my Russian, whether or not I had understood correctly and things like that because I wasn't so facile in Russian. Anyway, it was a very interesting experience. And I used to frequently go on hikes with Kazhdan – he loved to hike – especially on Saturday, and he knew every area around Washington where one could take a longish hike of several hours, so I often did that with him, and he would invite others, so I met some interesting people. I remember in particular one very long hike, I think it was in a park in Virginia, but I can't remember the exact location, and it was Kazhdan and Maria Mavroudi, and I, and Maria Mavroudi and I sort of engaged in a long discussion that lasted almost the whole hike about the Middle East and the level of Greek that persisted there after the Islamic conquest, all these things about which we still disagree. It was a very pleasant hike – that was a very Kazhdan thing to do, of course.
JNSL: That sounds lovely.
SG: He was very much of a presence here and easily accessible. He had this large file of bibliography that he kept on very small pieces of paper and you could go visit him in his office and have him consult this material and he was always willing to help.
JNSL: More broadly – a broader question – perhaps less related directly to Dumbarton Oaks, because we haven't had an opportunity to interview as many Orientalists in this project – can you describe for our institutional memory, how Syriac studies has changed, evolved, or some thoughts about that larger question in the last, say, since when you were a student and when you were writing a thesis?
SG: Well, when I was a student and writing my thesis in the area of Syriac studies, there weren't so many people working in it for itself. It wasn't unusual for people in Biblical studies for example to have had a semester or, if they were lucky, a whole year of Syriac study, but typically they didn't venture into Syriac literature itself, this was something they studied just to have a tool for other purposes like consulting the Peshitta, for example, the Syriac translation of the Scriptures. For among historians, I think fewer were involved in Syriac in those days, but because of the work of principally Sebastian Brock, of course, and Robert Murray, with his important book Symbols of Church and Kingdom, managed to stir up a considerable interest in Syriac studies in the anglophone world – Britain and America for the most part – and little by little people in various disciplines, particularly history or literature or theology or even Biblical studies still, began to dig in this area, let us say. I remember the very first Syriac symposium that we had in the U.S. at Brown, actually. We had very few people who came to participate but the group gradually grew until now there are quite a few, especially historians, late antique historians, who've cultivated an interest in Syriac. I think it had been encouraged at Princeton when Peter Brown came there. Of course, Susan Harvey was very much involved in it, and when she came here, home from her studies in England. So, it gradually grew and Dumbarton Oaks has played a particularly important part in it, I think, because a number of the people who wound up being very important in Syriac studies in the U.S. had been Fellows here at one point or another. Susan was and Kathleen McVey was and others, so, yeah, it's grown now quite a bit, and in the last couple of decades, I think, it got an impetus from the interest that Islamicists began to have in Syriac studies. Yeah, the interest in this field has grown considerably in Britain and in the U.S. in the last twenty to twenty-five years, and D.O. certainly had a hand in it by encouraging not only American students of Syriac but also bringing prominent Europeans here in the field, and Jan Drijvers, of course, was a Fellow here at one point, I think, and, of course, more recently his son.
JNSL: And what are you most grateful about in terms of your time that you've spent here through the years, in terms of what Dumbarton Oaks has provided for you?
SG: Well, if it's not heresy to say so, I think that it hasn't been for me so much a library, because in my field I do have access to a very good library, although I have certainly benefited immensely from the library, I think for me the most encouraging and most important part of my experience at Dumbarton Oaks – it may be different for other people – was the networking with other scholars from other places not only in the U.S. but abroad. That was, and continues to be, very broadening for me and very important. I am one who is encouraged by the opportunity to talk about my interests to learn about the interests of others and there are not that many places, even not many universities where you can have that kind of camaraderie, and I had that at D.O. not only as a Fellow but in subsequent years. And it continues now in a kind of distant way in that many interesting people come to D.O., and I often get to meet them, not often here on the premises, and to interact with them. And I no longer know the people who run the institution here, but occasionally I will come for a lecture or specifically to be with someone whom I know is a Fellow here that year. So, oddly enough, the networking, if one can call it that, or the interacting with others, has continued albeit slightly different. I mean, it's different from being actually present here and with the people every day, but there's scarcely a year that goes by that I don't have an interaction with the Fellows of that year, you know, in one way or another. Someone among them will either get in touch with me or I'll get in touch with them. It's not always that we had known one another from before, but because of our mutual interests our paths cross, so oddly enough an experience that began so long ago has continued in that way and I think that's been a very important part of the DO experience from my point of view.
JNSL: That speaks to things – we've heard similar things from other scholars who live in the Washington area in terms of D.O.'s place here in D.C., and it makes me wonder how different things would have been if that plan back in the '70s to move the library to Harvard would have actually happened.
SG: Well, I'm sure it would have changed it considerably, although, it's not just the Washington area that provides this networking. It still happens that people that I knew who were Fellows with me or at one point or another had been Fellows at D.O. – one meets them in various places around the world, and there's still that sort of connection that one enjoys with people whom one has known as a Fellow. It carries on as a relationship much beyond just the Washington area, although people in Washington are privileged to have a closer association perhaps, yeah.
JNSL: Were you aware, or was D.O.'s connection to Harvard something which was accentuated at that time in the '80s?
SG: I think we were very aware that it was part of Harvard. The fact that Giles Constable was a Harvard professor was evident and there was, in just the normal conversation, a lot of awareness of Harvard and of people there and the interaction, but I wouldn't say it was an overwhelming influence. I mean, I don't think that any of us felt that we were Harvard people just because we had been fellows at D.O., but we were aware of the Harvard connection, surely yeah.
JNSL: And just one final question. I wonder if – we're hoping to interview Dr. George Dennis eventually down the line – but could you just talk about him as a person a little bit and your experiences with him, and how you would describe him and his work?
SG: Well, George Dennis, in my experience, was a very personable, is a very personable, very approachable man, very down to earth, in many ways he defies the typical thought one may have of a scholar. He was interested in military history and for many of the years that I knew George he lived in a house with several other Jesuits here in Washington, on Jennifer St., I think was the street where the house was if I've got the name correct, and George was very interested in the youth of the neighborhood, he was a very outgoing person that way, he was always encouraging the young people and riding his bicycle with them and this sort of thing. I mean, he was a very outgoing guy like that, he was very serious about his scholarship and he served in many capacities here at D.O., including among the Senior Fellows. He would be the least pretentious Senior Fellow you could imagine, but I think had a very positive effect on younger scholars. He was very encouraging and he's up in years now and he lives in a Jesuit – not in an infirmary exactly, but a community for older and infirm people. He'd had some considerable health problems in recent years, but he's an extremely congenial man and with a very ordinary touch, very cheery and a scholar, I think. Yeah.
JNSL: And Dr. Meyendorff?
SG: Dr. Meyendorff, I had some interaction with Dr. Meyendorff before I was a Fellow here, and he did come around several times while I was a Fellow here. He, of course, was a lot more formal than George Dennis, but he was extremely open as well, and very helpful, and I often would encounter him in scholarly meetings, particularly in the American Academy of Religion and of course in the Byzantine Studies Conference, and so I had a good relationship with Dr. Meyendorff and I remember him very fondly, and he was also very encouraging to younger scholars and one of the results of my having been a Fellow here and having gotten to know a lot of people among the Byzantinists is that, for a period, I wound up being the president of the Byzantine Studies Conference some years ago and the way it came about is kind of funny because, as you may know, among Byzantinists a little differently, I think, than among the people in other areas of historical and cultural study there is a large group of art historians and a larger groups of text historians. And there's always a little – I wouldn't call it tension, but interesting interactions between the two groups, and I remember at this board meeting – somehow I had gotten onto the board – and the board would choose the president for the Byzantine Studies Conference, and there was tension between the text historians and the art historians and it was clear that nobody was going to agree on anyone from either one of the groups, and someone turned to me and said, "Sidney, you're not even a Byzantinist, but everybody will vote for you!" So for a period I was the president – I mean talk about an unlikely development! But that was how it happened between the – it wasn't, tension would be too strong a word, it's just an interesting...
JNSL: Like little factions.
SG: Yeah.
JNSL: Well, I'm so grateful for this opportunity to talk with you today. Did you have any other final anecdotes that you would like to share?
SG: Well, let me see.
JNSL: If not, then we'll wrap things up.
SG: I don't know if I can remember, I'm sure there were lots of things that were interesting that happened.
JNSL: Moments in the garden or special things?
SG: Well, there are interesting things that one wouldn't necessarily want to record having to do with the interactions among us and the friendships that developed during the year. I can remember very happy moments with, there was a woman who worked in the Byzantine collection called Carol Ann Moon, who had been a student at Bryn Mawr, I think, a Ph.D. student in art history, but she worked for the Byzantine Collection, and I struck up quite a friendship with her and it was very interesting over, you know, the course of that year and subsequent years for a little while, of course, you know one drifts in and out of these friendships with various people. There was also a woman who was the person in charge of the Pre-Columbian section at the time called Elizabeth Boone, who was a very interesting person, with whom I had a very interesting friendship and that was something that just lasted the course of that year, but I remember that very vividly. And, of course, I've kept up my friendship with Walter Kaegi, and then just the opportunity, I think, to meet these people and I've had a long and continuing relationship with Professor Shahid, who has always been here it seems, and is still here through various administrations and changes of focus and status and I don't know what all, but you know, he's done some wonderful things over all these years.
JNSL: Well, thank you so much for speaking with me today.
SG: You're certainly welcome. It was my privilege. One thing professors do very readily is talk. But I'm sorry I haven't kept up with, well I don't even know the current director.]]>
The last line of the Arabic inscription seems to read two letters, د/ذ و/ف/ق, or three letters, ب/ت/ث ب/ت/ث و/ف/ق. If it is the latter, it is possible that it reads بتق (b-t-q), a possible abbreviation for πατρίκιος.]]>
The last line of the Arabic inscription seems to read two letters, د/ذ و/ف/ق, or three letters, ب/ت/ث ب/ت/ث و/ف/ق. If it is the latter, it is possible that it reads بتق (b-t-q), a possible abbreviation for πατρίκιος.]]>
The name present on the reverse is uncertain; سيف seems the most likely reading of the first word of the second line, though بشر is also possible. The first word of the third line is partially effaced, and its reading needs revision, but is preceded by "Ibn".
The last line of the Arabic inscription seems to read two letters, د/ذ و/ف/ق, or three letters, ب/ت/ث ب/ت/ث و/ف/ق. If it is the latter, it is possible that it reads بتق (b-t-q), a possible abbreviation for πατρίκιος.]]>
The last line of the Arabic inscription seems to read two letters, د/ذ و/ف/ق, or three letters, ب/ت/ث ب/ت/ث و/ف/ق. If it is the latter, it is possible that it reads بتق (b-t-q), a possible abbreviation for πατρίκιος.]]>
It is possible that this actually reads, عليك الله وخالد ولله بن موب, translating to "(Peace) of God be upon you, God the immortal son of death" but it is more likely that instead of a slogan such as this, a name is present, perhaps خالد ابن مولد, though the repetition of الله is strange.]]>
It is possible that this actually reads, عليك الله وخالد ولله بن موب, translating to "(Peace) of God be upon you, God the immortal son of death" but it is more likely that instead of a slogan such as this, a name is present, perhaps خالد ابن مولد, though the repetition of الله is strange.]]>
It is possible that this actually reads, عليك الله وخالد ولله بن موب, translating to "(Peace) of God be upon you, God the immortal son of death" but it is more likely that instead of a slogan such as this, a name is present, perhaps خالد ابن مولد, though the repetition of الله is strange.]]>
IS: I'm glad you started by asking me about that, because I have been dealing with this theme for half a century. So, I will speak with some detail about it, because it throws light on my stay at Dumbarton Oaks and the various periods of the development of the institute. I conceived of my project, which is Byzantium and the Arabs, when I was a student at Oxford, reading Literae Humaniores, that is, classics and Greek and Roman history. My tutor was a distinguished historian, Nicholas Sherwin-White, and I used to go to the lectures and hear the famous Sir Ronald Syme. I chose as a special subject not the early Greek history, but the one which involved Alexander the Great, because he came to the Near East, where I was born. I was born in the Holy Land; I left in 1946, long before the Arab-Israeli conflict.
So, I took that and I decided to deal with the history of Byzantium and the Arabs; not with the Arabs as such, but to deal with them as a force in Roman history. In other words, the traditional view of the fall of the Roman Empire was to the German tribes in the west in the fifth century, but in the east the Arabs attacked in the seventh century. So, the fall of Rome has to take care of the two thrusts, the German and the Arab. Gibbon in his book put between two stiff covers the two peoples, but then they parted company. The descendants of the Germans, distinguished German scholars nowadays in Germany and in the nineteenth century and the twentieth, have dealt with the German problem. No one has really dealt with the Arabs as part of Roman history. They dealt with it as Arab history or as Islamic history, but not as a theme in the larger theme, the fall of the Roman Empire. This is what I decided to do. And I thought that that would be a worthy theme. It would be both Arab and classical and would do justice to my training.
Then I came to Princeton for my Ph.D., where I did Islamic and Arabic studies. The distinguished Islamic historian Philip Hitti was in his last days, and I added Persian and Turkish to my Arabic, to surround Arabic with a new family of Islamic languages which Islam created. They are unrelated structurally to each other: the one is a Semitic language, the other is an Indo-European language, Persian, and Turkish is a Turkic language, but they are Islamic, united by Islam.
Then I met there the famous distinguished scholar Amerigo Castro, the Spanish scholar who has written important works on the Arab factor in Spain and its importance, and he asked me to help him on the Arabic words in his book on the structure of Spanish history. The atmosphere there was no longer Mohammed and Alexander; it became how the Arabs split the Mediterranean. Everybody was talking about Henri Pirenne and Mohammed and Charlemagne and how the Arabs made Western Europe by the conquest of North Africa and Andalusia.
So, when I received my Ph.D., the department sent me to the Institute for Advanced Study. Ernst Kantorowicz, the famous medievalist, was there. He had just left Berkeley, having quarreled with the administration there about swearing an oath which he didn't want to. So, he said, "You know, it's better for you now at this stage of your development to start with the East rather than with the West – with Andalusia." I wanted to do Arab-Spanish history and try to answer Pirenne's question. I thought then, as I still do, that Pirenne raised the right question, Mohammed and Charlemagne – the Arabs contributed to the rise of Western Europe and Charlemagne – but he may have given the wrong answer. So, I wanted to give the right answer from Arab history, which briefly is that the Arab wall on the Ebro in Andalusia prevented the Carolingians from invading the Mediterranean, and so they stayed in the landmass of Western Europe, and this is how partly Western Europe was created.
So, he said, "Well, you should really apply to Dumbarton Oaks, because then you can deal with the Arabs and the Umayyads in the homeland before you come to the province," which was Spain, and so I came to Dumbarton Oaks. That was in 1954, as a Junior Fellow. 1954-1955. I thought I would stay for a few years there, and then I became so involved in it. I decided that this is the more difficult theme to do, much more difficult than the Arabs, Spain, and Charlemagne, because it was possible to do only by one who had the two sets of sources, the classical as well as the Oriental. In my case, by the accident of birth, I had the Arabic and Islamic, and then by training, I did the classical course. So, I thought, well, this should be done and that it is more difficult than the other one, because it involved dealing with inscriptions and with the various languages – Arabic, Syriac, and Greek and Latin – and it had to do with seals and coins, which is very time-consuming. So, I decided to stay in this field, but I didn't realize it would take that long. However, I'm glad I did.
So, this set what my project would be: Byzantium and the Arabs, especially in the seventh century, the rise of Islam and the Arab attack. And then I said, "Well, how can I deal with this without dealing with the centuries before the rise of Islam?" This had been a blank, only a few references here and there. The German scholar Nöldeke has done a classic on one Arab group, the Ghassanids. So, I decided to do the centuries before the rise of Islam on all the Arab groups involved with Byzantium.
My project became tripartite; so I divided it into: Rome and the Arabs from the settlement of Pompeii until Constantine, and then the middle period, Byzantium and the Arabs from Constantine to Heraclius, and then the third part, which is the climax, the rise of Islam and the Arab conquest. So, far I have finished one and two in six volumes, and volume seven is being now prepared for publication, which will bring to a close part two. Byzantion in Belgium has published three volumes collecting my articles, which are collateral with the six volumes, so we have now almost ten volumes on these three centuries. These have their own identity as contributions to late antiquity, but they are more importantly prolegomena for the rise of Islam and the Arab conquest, the climax of my work, which I hope to finish in the next few years. I have done most of the researches; it is a matter of reflecting on it and writing it; and if it has one virtue, it will be because I'll be the first historian to have filled the gap of all these centuries with my gaze fixed on the seventh to know exactly what happened and why it happened the way it did. My work will be facilitated by the two important works which have appeared by Fred Donner and Walter Kaegi on the Arab conquest, but I will treat problems which have not been done by them and which have been left out. In my hands, I think, there are the answers to the big questions of the Arab conquest: one of them is the incomprehensible victory of the Arabs over not only one empire, but two empires: Byzantium and Sassanid Persia, which they challenged and defeated, both within two years. So, it is an incomprehensible victory. This is part of my job to elucidate.
So, much for my work, which has been done here. It could have been done only at Dumbarton Oaks, because here is the major center for Byzantine studies. I keep telling Junior Fellows who come here when they are bored sometimes, "Now, look here. Napoleon said, 'Ask me for anything except time,' and scholarship is energy and time. One hour's work here is worth five hours' work elsewhere." And I give them an example: when I was in Oxford in 2001 for my sabbatical, I think one of my volumes – the last volume was printed in 2002 – was being done by the copy editor, and he asked me about a reference; I couldn't find it. I ran from my college, St. John's, to Balliol to the Ashmolean and to the Bodleian – couldn't find it. So, I called Glenn Ruby, in Publications at D.O., and I told him, "Glenn, please go to the third floor of the Main Building and look it up for me." So, he did it in five minutes, and then it was done. Working in Dumbarton Oaks is a great privilege, and it is a great economy in time.
Well, I think I have given you now how my work is related to Dumbarton Oaks and how Dumbarton Oaks has made it possible. Now, you want to see how the administration reacted to my work: when I came here, Dumbarton Oaks was in the hands of art historians, and it was natural, because it started as a museum. The director, Mr. Thacher, was an art historian too – although he was not an academic, but he had a degree in art, I think Spanish art – painting. And Miss Der Nersessian, who was then acting director in '54 after the death of A. Friend, was an art historian, Armenian. And then E. Kitzinger was a distinguished art historian; he became the director. So, there was little interest in my work, and the other scholars who were not art historians were not interested in it. Then I had some trouble.
When I came in 1954, Dumbarton Oaks had asked a distinguished French scholar, Marius Canard, who had worked on Byzantium and the Arabs. So, I felt at home with him, he was a very good man, and very helpful, and he came to look at the Nachlass of a distinguished Russian scholar, Vasiliev, who had worked on Byzantium and the Arabs, and unfortunately for me, he had died before I came. In other words, if he had been here when I came to D.O., the administration would have been more understanding of what I was doing.
Marius Canard understood my work, and I contracted a friendship with him until the end of his life, as I did with Speros Vryonis, who was with me as a Junior Fellow, and we still correspond. In the second semester I felt in a vacuum. I worked with Mr. Downey, Glanville Downey, who was a scholar here, but who had no interest in the Arabs. He was a very competent scholar, but a very difficult man. I understand he used to see a psychiatrist. If you made a mistake with him, he became angry. Let me give you an example: there was a Fellow, Byron Tsangadis, who came to work with him. He had an appointment with him, and he came three minutes late, so he kicked him out; he told him, "I cannot waste three minutes of my short life on earth waiting for you, so come tomorrow at the exact time." So, the poor man came two or three minutes before, so he kicked him out again. He told him, "Come exactly at the same time, at the time I wanted you to come."
In any case, he had also difficulty with the most distinguished man in Dumbarton Oaks, the leading Byzantinist of his generation, Cyril Mango. He picked him up from Turkey, because he noticed that he was precocious: he had written an article when he was, I think, twenty-one years old, and Downey said, "Well, we must bring him to Dumbarton Oaks." Then he had the same trouble with him – I get this from both Mango and from Julia Warner, who was the editor of Dumbarton Oaks Papers: Mango corrected him on the translation of, I think, the word teleosis, and Downey thought it meant "perfection" and Mango thought it meant "death," the "dormition of Virgin Mary." He became very unfriendly to him. Julia Warner told me that he used to sing his praises and then all of a sudden he said, "We cannot have him here, because his German is not very good, and you must read German to be a good Byzantinist." So, nobody, of course, listened to him: Miss Der Nersessian and everybody knew that Mango was a distinguished young scholar, precocious, and came to his support.
Well, I had the same problem with him; I forgot what was the problem, and he became rather unpleasant. And I presented him with an essay on Procopius. Procopius, as you may know, is the main historian of the reign of Justinian, and I discovered many mendacities he said about the Arabs in his work, so I collected them and wrote an essay. He was negative towards it; it was very strange, and I said, "Fine." Then I had an appointment to go to UCLA to teach. I sent the same article, but with footnotes and appendices, to the BZ, the Byzantinische Zeitschrift, the foremost Byzantine periodical, and F. Dölger loved it, but the article I gave Downey was without footnotes then, because I wanted him to know the substance of my argument. It has been described by some of my friends as one of the most influential articles I have written, the one which Downey had reported negatively on. However, Downey was a decent man; he became very friendly later and he gave me every support writing recommendations.
When I was teaching at UCLA, Sir Hamilton left Oxford; he gave up his Laudian Professorship of Arabic and accepted the Jewett Professorship of Arabic at Harvard and became a University Professor. He was a giant in every sense, physically and otherwise. So, my fortunes with the administration improved. Since he was an Arabicist/Islamist, he could understand and so appreciate what I was doing, and he asked me to participate in the first symposium of 1963, Byzantium and the Arabs. That was truly exciting. Mrs. Bliss herself wrote me a letter; she said, "This is the only lecture I enjoyed. Will you please send me your lecture?" So, I sent it to her and she sent me a letter, which I still have, in which she thanked me for the lecture. And so I contracted a friendship with her since then, until she died in the late '60s. Unfortunately Sir Hamilton disappeared; he had a stroke and went back to England.
In the '60s I was a little diverted (not entirely) from Byzantium and the Arabs. The Teubner Classical Series asked me to do a speech by Themistius which survived only in an Arabic translation, so I had to prepare it for the Teubner, and it appeared in 1974 in volume three of Themistii Orationes.
Something more important happened: when I came again as a Senior Fellow when Gibb was still at Harvard, I discovered in the library of Dumbarton Oaks a reference to a most precious manuscript, Syriac manuscript – which has been ignored by all the South Arabian scholars and by all the Syrologists – on the persecution of the Christians in South Arabia before the rise of Islam. I immediately wrote to the patriarch in Jerusalem and then we got the manuscript from there. It turned out to be a translation into Arabic of the original Syriac, and we wanted the original Syriac, so he traced it to Damascus to Istanbul to Mardin and finally we found it; it had returned to Damascus and finally we got it. I translated it with an extensive commentary.
The Bollandistes, the Société des Bollandistes, asked me to submit it to them, and they published it as number 49 in their Subsidia Hagiographica as The Martyrs of Najrân. It is a very important volume, because it opened the dossier on the importance of Najrân as the major Christian center in Pre-Islamic Arabia, which was radiating Christianity to all the Peninsula. So, those who talk about Koranic Christology and how the Arabs got to know about what Christians call unorthodox views of Christianity depend on Najrân; and so the Najrân problem is now open, and everybody's talking about Najrân and its Martyrium Arethae from different perspectives.
In the '70s I was still dealing with Byzantium and the Arabs on the side, but these two volumes had taken most of my time in the '60s. In the '70s Giles Constable became the director. Now here for the first time the Director was not an art historian. Before him was Loerke, who was an art historian, and Kitzinger, and Der Nersessian had been an art historian. Giles Constable was a medievalist, a historian who had worked with the Islamicist, J. Kritzeck, so he had a clear conception of the importance of Islam. He looked at my work and he saw my publications, the Teubner and the Bollandistes, and what the BZ had published, and so he appointed me as an Associate Fellow. But since I came to Washington from UCLA and Indiana in 1963 as a professor at Georgetown University, there was no need to apply for fellowships, because I am here, and it's only a ten minutes' walk from Georgetown. And this is the big bargain of being at Georgetown, because Dumbarton Oaks is close. I do my other work there, Arabic poetry and Koranic studies at Georgetown, and I do Byzantino-arabica at D.O.
Giles Constable made me an Associate Fellow because he thought of me as a historian who is dealing with a major theme, Byzantium and the Arabs. I reverted to working on my theme now for volumes, not for articles. So, since then and for the last twenty-five years or so, I have been able to publish these six volumes: Rome and the Arabs, which dealt with the first part of my trilogy, and the second part, the Byzantine one, from Constantine to Heraclius, the five volumes which have appeared, and the sixth will appear, hopefully next summer. This was made possible because of working conditions here at Dumbarton Oaks.
A propos of Constable and me: in addition to my representing the Orient, Christian as well as Islamic, Giles Constable also felt that I was a liaison between Dumbarton Oaks and Georgetown. Why? Because there was that program of joint appointments between Dumbarton Oaks and various universities, which is still going on. I spoke very strongly with the administration at Georgetown for having Frank Trombley, who was there for three years, to be there.
When my last book comes out, then I will work on the climax of my work in two volumes, one on the rise of Islam, the big questions which only the Byzantine sources can give. And I have collected all the references. And then the second one – the Arab conquest, the incomprehensible victory of the Arabs both in Syria and in Egypt, which split the Mediterranean. So, this is then my work here, and I need your prayers to finish them. Do I have them? Because I crossed the Rubicon of longevity recently, so I am an octogenarian now!!
Well, so much then for my work. You said you wanted to know something about the directors and what I think of them. As you know, I have seen Der Nersessian, Ernst Kitzinger, Ihor Ševčenko, Romilly Jenkins, William Loerke, Giles Constable, Robert Thomson, Angeliki Laiou, and then Edward Keenan, and then our current director, Professor Jan Ziolkowski. Now, of all these people – and all these were distinguished scholars – the one who really attended to the problems of Dumbarton Oaks, the first one to do so, was Giles Constable. Let me tell you what he has done.
First of all, this building in which we are sitting was a scandal. In other words, it had one bathroom here and most of the people had to come to this one, and it was not even closed. So he renovated the building, made of it eight self-contained apartments upstairs, and so it became a place where scholars would come and live here. That's one thing he did.
Then he started the idea of summer fellowships. You know, these are very, very valuable. Many scholars in Europe and elsewhere may not be able to come during the term, and so the summer provides them with the time to come to Dumbarton Oaks, do what they want. And, as you know, Dumbarton Oaks has become a pilgrimage center, when you come to Dumbarton Oaks, especially from Europe. So, the summer fellowships are very important.
And then he restructured the administration of Dumbarton Oaks. Dumbarton Oaks used to be ruled by the director, then he instituted the Senior Fellows Committee, which includes scholars from various parts of the world, who get together and discuss problems.
Then even the gardens: he said those who visit the gardens should pay at least a nominal fee in order to pay for the upkeep; so like all people of a powerful mind, he had interest in details too, not only in the general problems.
I think there's something else which is his achievement – let me see [looks at notes]. The lunches used to be formal; they used to be sit-down lunches. He thought that was good, but you know, a buffet is better, when people can come not only precisely at 12:00 or half past 12, say, but between 12 and 1, and then they can serve themselves. So, he's the one who started the buffet.
Because of the five things he did for D.O., it renders utterly untrue the charge that Constable wanted to move D.O. to Harvard.
Robert Thomson did something very good. Where the museum is now had been open: there was no roof. He roofed it, and he started what has become D.O.'s splendid museum. So, this is to his credit. And before he retired as director, he recommended that D.O. cannot be run by a director only: you need a director for the entire establishment, which is tripartite in structure – Byzantine, Landscape Architecture, and Pre-Columbian – and you need a director of studies for each of these three divisions.
By the way, Giles Constable also paid attention to Pre-Columbian Studies, which was the Cinderella of the three, and he gave it prominence, and I think the Pre-Columbian scholars appreciated that. Elizabeth Boone was then the main figure there, and so that speaks well for him. Although he is a medieval historian, yet he was genuinely interested in other periods of history. I keep telling our Pre-Columbian friends, "We are not so distant from each other, the Byzantine and the Pre-Columbian, because both of us chronologically are Pre-Columbian, because Byzantium existed before 1492!"
Angeliki's contribution was to buy the La Quercia. Before, visitors to Dumbarton Oaks used to be housed in an apartment house on Wisconsin Avenue. It was not good at all; I mean, the conditions were bad. So, she decided to buy the apartment building. La Quercia, as you know, in Italian relates with Dumbarton Oaks: the same as the word "oaks," La Quercia. The only thing about La Quercia, which I gather from those who live in it, is its distance; because I have a car, I used to drive many of the Fellows, especially the ladies, in winter at night to it. It takes a good ten minutes' walk to reach it from the Main Building. So, I thought that in the future maybe Dumbarton Oaks can sell it and buy something close. S Street should all be Dumbarton Oaks. There are houses which are in the market for selling on the corner. It will be difficult, but I think Professor Keenan did well to buy one house at S St., because it is not only the director's house, it is useful for other functions and also for visiting scholars.
Director Edward Keenan, as you know, was a Russian scholar.
ABF: Yes.
IS: He was also understanding of my project, because he had done some Arabic, and he was the dean or the director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies at Harvard. So, he was very supportive. And he, of course, did the major part in creating Dumbarton Oaks as it is. He realized there is a big endowment for Dumbarton Oaks, and money's function is to be used, so instead of having it in banks, let it be used. And everybody first did not take kindly to the renovation, but now they are reconciled. They know it was a great achievement. Some think it lost its intimacy and closeness, but you know this is a research institute. It has many redeeming virtues, and I think that this is a great plus for Ned, the reconstruction of Dumbarton Oaks. Now everybody comes and wonders at it.
The present director, Jan Ziolkowski, has inherited what Giles Constable had done in administration and what Edward Keenan had done in the physical plant. And he is the ideal one now, because he is not an art historian. I don't mean to speak pejoratively about art historians; I mean, his sympathies are wider. Jan Ziolkowski is a classicist to start with; Ned was not a classicist, I think. He's a classicist and he is a medievalist, and of course Byzantium is part of medieval history, especially its relations with the West, with Western European history. He's open-minded, he takes an active part in the life and work of the Fellows, and he lunches quite often with them. He also has done some Arabic, so he appreciates my work and I feel that for writing the climax of my work, he is the ideal director. Let me give you an example of how he is aware of what can be done now for Dumbarton Oaks, and he discusses this with members of his academic community.
I spoke with him about the most important things that Dumbarton Oaks, as far as research is concerned, can do as an institute. I told him the most important project which Dumbarton Oaks has done started with Giles Constable when, under the direction of Alexander Kazhdan, Dumbarton Oaks did the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. Although it's called the Oxford Dictionary, it's Dumbarton Oaks. These three volumes have done more for Byzantine history, for promoting Byzantine studies in the Anglo-Saxon world and elsewhere, than any other book. Better than the German Pauly-Wissowa, which is a great work, but you know it is so difficult to use it. There are many volumes, and the print is not so clear. But the ODB is so beautifully printed, clearly printed. I told him this was done in 1992, so it is utterly out of date. These are the most important three volumes which Dumbarton Oaks has done for the promotion of Byzantine studies. It needs a supplement, as even Pauly-Wissowa has a supplement, the new Pauly-Wissowa, even the smaller one is there. I told him what is needed is a supplement. Of the many fellowships you give, ten or whatever, give one or two to a scholar who will spend a year, either at home or doing it here, corresponding with all the authors who have written these articles asking them what new bibliographies have appeared, what new researches have been done. If they are dead, you can ask somebody else. Also, there are many mistakes in it. I have myself listed some of them, many of them. So, this is the first and the most important thing that should be done. I think the Senior Fellows Committee should attend to this.
Then I told him, "You know, Byzantine studies would not have prospered in this country had it not been for the Blisses." We made a joke about this. I told him, "Well, if Mrs. Bliss was more fertile and she had a child, maybe she would not have donated the estate to Harvard." We are not writing an essay in praise of sterility – no, no. We are very happy that this happened, so their memory should be perpetuated in a way which will keep their memory alive. You can have a bust for them in the entrance, you can have a picture of them in the Founders Room, but I suggest having a series called the Bliss Byzantine Library. Mr. Loeb – I think he was a banker or some such profession – endowed the publication of the famous Loeb Classical Series, and the Classics Department at Harvard operates it. And this has been a great success. I said, "The Bliss Byzantine Library would be the best 'thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Bliss, for what have you done,' because the people will use it all the time, and the word 'Bliss' will be very visible."
Now, of course the volumes which appeared in the Loeb Classical Library are more important in a sense than the Byzantine ones, more important in the sense that they have more popular appeal, but there is enough in Byzantine history to justify having a smaller number of books there, and the Loeb Classical Library has hijacked some of the works which belong to Byzantium. Let me give you an example. Ammianus Marcellinus is the first – his Res Gestae. He is Byzantine, he worked when Constantine and Constantius ruled. So, he should be re-done in the Byzantine Bliss series. Procopius: everybody would love Procopius! Everybody loves it: gossip – it's too human to be suppressed. So, the works of Procopius should be re-done, with so much scholarship now done on them, and published; there are other fragmentary historians. So you can have a perhaps smaller Byzantine Bliss Library.
Director Ziolkowski said a Medieval Bliss Library would be an alternative possibility, because in one of her inscriptions on the outer wall of D.O., Mrs. Bliss talks about the medieval humanities. She emphasized the word "medieval." So, he thought this one will perpetuate the memory of this couple who have given such an impetus – not only in America, but in the whole world – to Byzantine studies.
And then the third point I discussed with him concerned the symposia which are held. Sometimes these symposia deal with problems which may interest a member of the senior committee, but it should have a more universal appeal and a more important one. I gave him an example. There was a time when I think there was a symposium on Anatolia and Oriens. There is no relationship between the two of them – two dioceses. And then even Oriens, half of it was in the Byzantine period and half of it was in the Islamic. It was interesting, but the papers were not published, apparently, because it was not a successful symposium. Its conception was not a sound conception, as interesting as it was: either Oriens or Anatolia would have been much better. I said symposia should deal with major problems, and I gave him an example. I told him, to use that cliché, the mission civilisatrice of Byzantium, its civilizing mission, was the translation of the Bible to every new people that was converted to Christianity: the Slavs, Cyril and Methodios; the Goths, Ulfilas; the Armenians; the Georgians; the Copts; the Ethiopians. Whenever the Bible was translated (and Byzantium actively, positively, and aggressively favored the translation of the Bible), then a Christian literature exploded in all these literatures.
This is not unknown, but so much new research has been done on each of these translations that there is need for having a symposium on all of them to show the extent of the mission civilisatrice. When you bring them together, when you publish that in Dumbarton Oaks Papers, it would be a beautiful thing for an art historian to see the various scripts. You can take, for instance, a page from Genesis or a page from St. John in Old Slavonic, in Old Gothic, in Armenian, in Georgian, in Coptic, in Arabic, in Syriac, in Ethiopian, to display them. It is a theme which inspires so many areas of research. And then I told him, "What about Byzantium and Islam?" There are about eight centuries: four with the Arab-Byzantine conflict, from the seventh until the 11th, and then the Turkish one from the 11th until the 15th when Mohammed the Conqueror captured Constantinople in 1453. This is a theme which needs to be telescoped and to be freshly understood. This is not to say the themes which have been dealt with in previous symposia are not important; they are. But I feel that more attention should be paid to the Orient, because Byzantium is in the Pars Orientalis.
This, by the way, brings me also back to how Giles Constable, being a historian, understood my relevance here. He looked at me as representing the Orient. In other words, because of my knowledge of Arabic, Syriac, and Persian, I am here to write on this and also to help Fellows in their areas when they come. Invariably, whenever a Junior Fellow, or not only a Junior Fellow, scholars and Senior Fellows would come, they always have Arabic problems. Even last year I spent some time with one of the students of Angeliki Laiou, a Turkish gentleman, correcting his translations.
Perhaps you might like to hear how the outside world looks at Dumbarton Oaks as it used to be when you had about ten scholars and now after those have left.
CW: Yes.
IS: When I came here two or three times the first two decades, there was an impressive number of scholars who were working here. Cyril Mango was here, Ihor Ševčenko was here, Romilly Jenkins, Glanville Downey, Milton Anastos, Paul Underwood, and above all, there was Father Dvornik, the most colorful of all the scholars.
So, let me tell you something about Father Dvornik. Father Dvornik was a Czech ecclesiastical historian, and he used to live in this cottage here. It makes a lot of difference, especially for Junior Fellows, to come and be inspired by these people and talk to them. As far as Father Dvornik is concerned, he was at heart a peasant and remained a peasant until the end of his life here. Although he lived most of his life in an English-speaking country, he never mastered English. "Frankly say" – "frankly say," translating from French, was his favorite phrase. And then he was a great cook; he used to invite people for supper. And then he was fond of a whiskey, of a scotch, called VAT, and he used to say this was the telephone of the Vatican! And I told him once, "Father, someone called the other day and asked about you, but he thought your name was Father Dvořák," the composer. He laughed and said, "Well, fine, we are very proud of Dvořák." Many outsiders used to think that his name was Dvořák.
And then he used to tell us how surprised some of the saleswomen were. He had nieces in Czechoslovakia who would write to him to buy for them nylon stockings; the nylons had come into existence then. So, he would go to buy stockings, and then the girls would look at this priest who would buy stockings for women; it was very embarrassing for him.
However, we miss him; he used to go every year to Czechoslovakia, and he was lucky. The last time he went, he died in his village in his homeland in his bed. I think he had a heart attack. So this was Dumbarton Oaks as it used to be.
And then we used to have lunches here, sit-down lunches and dinners, served, and Miss Der Nersessian used to preside with a bell; she used to ring a bell and the waiters would come. And once I put a little piece of cloth in the bell and it didn't ring, so we all laughed at her. She had a sister called Araxie, and she was a good cook. And there were two Armenias: Armenia Maior and Armenia Minor, and we used to refer to Sirarpie as Armenia Maior and to Araxie as Armenia Minor, and we used to refer to Father Dvornik as Moravia – he was very fond of it. And he created a Slavic atmosphere in the house, especially when Father Meyendorff used to come here. And then, of course, when Alexander Kazhdan came, it was very Slavic, and we used to call the West Cottage the Slavic lodge, the Slavic cottage, because all the Slavs used to live here.
We must say something about Alexander Kazhdan a propos of resident senior scholars, when in the '70s it was decided to disband these scholars and spend the money on fellowships. This was justified up to a certain point, but as you see, the institute lost that scholarly weight it had by the concentration of talent. In any case, in my opinion, it did more good than harm, because when these scholars disappeared – for instance Downey to Indiana, Milton Anastos to UCLA, Cyril to Oxford – they created new centers for Byzantine studies in these universities. There wasn't anything in Indiana before Downey went there, there wasn't anything in UCLA before Anastos went, and Oxford was rather sleepy as far as Byzantine studies was concerned. Cyril's presence made the difference. So, I think that the dispersion of the scholars, and the diaspora – you could call it the diaspora of the scholars – was helpful in that sense.
When Alexander came in the '80s, he functioned more or less as a senior scholar with whom others could consult. And as I said, a most fruitful project was the dictionary, the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. The ODB is a product of both Constable's initiation and Kazhdan's writing most of its articles and acting as its editor.
You ask me about the Blisses. I am one of the people who remember the two Blisses, and as you know, she was the predominant partner as far as the Bliss visibility in Dumbarton Oaks was. She used to come to the teas and she used to talk to the Fellows.
By the way, there used to be teas, afternoon tea at 4:00, in the Founders' Room where the Study is. It was a very colorful room, and her formidable presence was felt; we enjoyed her conversation, she spoke perfect French, she was a highly cultured woman. And so she created a certain atmosphere, and it's interesting to see the books she used to read – old-fashioned now from our point of view – it will tell you what people of her age used to read so many years ago.
I must not forget to say that when William Tyler was here, he was of special interest to her, because his father, Royall Tyler, used to be Mrs. Bliss's boyfriend. And one saying has survived from Mr. Royall Tyler – I think it was his son William who told me. By the way, we got on very well, because he was a very talented linguist; he served as ambassador to Holland, and he went the length of learning Dutch. You know everyone in Holland speaks English, French, and German, but he decided to learn Dutch, which impressed the Dutch so much, who said, here is an American ambassador who learnt our language. His mother was an Italian contessa, so he was already bilingual. So, here is what his father said about marrying into money: "The bonds of love are never so strong as when the links are made of gold."
What else would you like to hear? Let's see whether I have left anything. I think we talked about the directors, the Blisses – oh yes! The Center for Hellenic Studies.
ABF: Yes.
IS: I have always been interested in curricular development. I don't like administration, I have no talent for numbers or the practical aspects of administration, but I like curricular development. So when I came here in '54, another family other than the Blisses wanted to do what the Blisses had done: they endowed some money for a center which was to be in Washington – I forgot the name of the family. So, what should the center be? I gave them, as my opinion, it should not be classical, it should not be Byzantine, it should be a Hellenistic center. If that became a Hellenistic center, then Harvard would have three centers which will take care of the entire Greek heritage: the pagan classical, the department in Cambridge; the Hellenistic, which came after the Hellenic, after the conquest of Alexander for three centuries of the Macedonian period and three centuries of the Roman until Constantine; and then Dumbarton Oaks, Byzantine. They will be complementary to one another.
And I said, "I do not know whether there is any Hellenistic center in the world just called 'Hellenistic'." It is usually lumped together with other periods of Greek history. And I remember none other than W. Jaeger, the distinguished refugee German scholar, who was interested in Arabic – I don't know why; I think because he taught Walzer, the Jewish refugee who went to Oxford and became the professor there of Arabic philosophy and who had been both a classical scholar and an Orientalist. So, he said to me, "You know, I agree with you, but Harvard doesn't seem to want this." However, it became a Hellenic center for the classical period. Not all its directors were distinguished. I think one of the most distinguished was – what was his name? the Yale man who wrote on Greek tragedy and who fought in the Guerra Civil in Spain; oh, what is his name? It's on the tip –
CW: Bernard Knox.
IS: Yes, yes, Bernard Knox. He was really a very good man, distinguished. But now it is also under another distinguished scholar, Gregory Nagy. Do you know why? – because he brings something new to the study of Greek poetry, because he is a trained linguist. I mean linguist in the strict sense of the science of linguistics, and he is abreast of all of the breakthroughs in the discipline of linguistics, so he's applying all this to the study of Greek classical poetry. And he's married to a lady who's an Iranist, Holly. She is also a very good scholar in Iranian studies; she wrote on the epic of the Persians, the Shāhnāmé.
So, Greg is a distinguished director, and I think he justifies that the center deals with classical Hellenism, although I hope that he will pay some attention to the Hellenistic period, because it is the child of classical Hellenism, after the torch of Hellenism was carried by Alexander.
As I told you, I have a great love for Alexander, because I did him as a special subject in Oxford, and I always read Arrian, his inspiring history of Alexander, in my study of Christian theology and its relations to the Koran. Few people realize that Alexander contributed one of the most important words for Christian theology, and no one I think has mentioned this: the word logos! You know, the word logos which appears in not the Synoptic Gospel, but the Gospel of St. John; we owe to Alexander. If Greek had not spread, the word logos would not have been at the disposal of Christian theologians for dealing with the mystery of the incarnation and the mystery of Christ's being the logos. When you translate it into English as "the word," it loses its meaning, it doesn't mean "the word," it means both "word" and "reason" only in Greek, and when you translate it into Arabic as kalimah, it spreads theological confusion.
CW: We should take a break, because the tape is about to run out.
IS: Yes, we are about finished now. I have been thinking of answering two problems about Alexander: the question of the brotherhood of man. I have no doubt that the old controversy between Professor Tarn and Professor Badian, our distinguished scholar, whether Alexander wanted the brotherhood to be between the Persians and the Greeks or whether he wanted a universal brotherhood. I had delivered a Mellon lecture called "Mohammed and Alexander" thinking that Badian was correct. Now after so many years, I have come to the conclusion that Tarn is correct and I will deliver a lecture on the brotherhood of man as conceived by Alexander by bringing several new points not mentioned before in this controversy.
The other problem is Alexander's sexual orientation. Many people have thought that Alexander was homosexual. I don't think so. I have now so many new points which have never been brought even by Mr. Cartledge, the Cambridge historian who wrote so well on Alexander; there are so many elements which I think support the view that his sexual orientation was heterosexual.
Well, thank you for having me, and I enjoyed it. I think that my six volumes, which will soon be seven, and my three volumes published by Byzantion, I owe to Dumbarton Oaks and to Mrs. Bliss and Mr. Bliss. Dumbarton Oaks's self-image has been "the most civilized square mile in America," and I truly believe in that. Thank you for having me reminiscing on it. "Poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility," as Wordsworth said.
CW: Thank you.
ABF: Thank you very much. You answered all our questions.]]>


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Tuesday marks one year since an EF5 tornado ravaged Moore, Okla., on May 20, 2013, killing 24 people -- including seven students at Plaza Towers Elementary school. Take a look back at images from the storm.
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State by state: 2012 presidential election results
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