The Copto-Arabic Synaxarion (Lives of the Saints for the Liturgical Year)

al-Sinaksār (Synaxarion, Copto-Arabic recension) · Anonymous compilers (Lower- and Upper-Egyptian recensions), final form 13th-14th century · collected from the early 13th century; final form 14th century · hagiography

Coptic · domain: copto-arabic · researched 2026-11-13

Why this is in the register

There is no English translation of the Synaxarion as a book. The CCE article on the Copto-Arabic Synaxarion (CE:2171b-2190a, René-Georges Coquin) lists the editions: Wüstenfeld's German version of the first half of the year (Gotha 1879), Basset's French 'Le Synaxaire arabe-jacobite' in Patrologia Orientalis (1904-1929), Forget's CSCO Latin (1905), and the Cairo Arabic edition of 1935-1937; the only English item in its bibliography is S. C. Malan, The Calendar of the Coptic Church (London 1873), which is a calendar, not the notices: https://ccdl.claremont.edu/digital/collection/cce/id/1792 . HOLLIS query 'Synaxarium' returns 31 records — German (1879, 1994), Latin CSCO, Arabic — and the one English book is De Lacy O'Leary, The Saints of Egypt (London 1937), a paraphrastic compilation rather than a translation: https://hollis.harvard.edu/discovery/search?query=any,contains,Synaxarium&tab=Everything&search_scope=MyInst_and_CI&vid=01HVD_INST:HVD2&offset=0 .

The liturgical book that preserves hundreds of Coptic saint-biographies, many of them epitomes of lost Coptic and Arabic lives; Coquin stresses that no edition is fully reliable and that the two recensions were often amalgamated by editors. English readers have only Malan's calendar and O'Leary's digest; a full English Synaxarion remains a desideratum.

Existing translations recorded

Electronic text

No open electronic text was verified for this work. The Greek/Coptic/Geʿez may exist only in a print or subscription edition (Migne, CSCO, TLG, CMCL).

Scanned witnesses

Scan search: open scan — 5 candidate(s). Four open copies plus one lending copy. The 1905 Beirut CSCO volume is the Arabic textus, the 1879 Wuestenfeld volume a German rendering of the first half of the year, the 1929 Basset fascicle the French translation with Arabic facing text, and the 1999 Cairo book a modern Arabic edition whose OCR is the only clean text layer found for this work. Manuscript witness noted but not linked: Basset's avertissement (read in the IA text derivative) states his base manuscripts were 'le ms. du Synaxaire no 256 de la Bibliotheque Nationale de Paris' and 'les ms. 4869-70 de la meme collection'; BnF SRU (query: Synaxaire + arabe) returns only the printed Basset fascicles, no manuscript record, and Gallica images are 403 from this host, so no verified URL could be attached to BnF Arabe 256. Forget's textus/versio split, the Cairo 1935-37 printing and the two recensions (Lower/Upper Egypt) mean a future ingestion run must pick a base text explicitly rather than assume any single scan is 'the' Synaxarion.

Harvard Hollis

Hollis query: The Copto-Arabic Synaxarion — 1 record(s); match basis author_title_unquoted.

Sources checked

• https://ccdl.claremont.edu/digital/collection/cce/id/1792
• HOLLIS search — Synaxarium

Cite: Tergwame, “The Copto-Arabic Synaxarion (Lives of the Saints for the Liturgical Year)” (coptic gap dossier), 2026. https://naxiai.com/christian/gaps/copto-arabic-synaxarion-copto-arabic