Reassessing Antony of Tagrit : when did he actually live?

The present paper investigates the West Syrian monk Antony of Tagrit, known for authoring a famous treatise in five books on Syriac rhetoric. Despite the capital importance of his work, we have scanty information about his life. Moreover, there is an ongoing discussion about when he is supposed to have lived, even though the few scholars who engaged with the topic seem to agree on placing him around the 9th century. This paper discusses a number of features that shed some new light on the issue of the dating of Antony of Tagrit, moving from manuscript evidence to textual one. Particularly, the paper focuses on the evidence coming from the oldest manuscripts known to host some of Antony’s works, namely ms Add 17208 from the British Library and ms Syr 32 from the Egyptian monastery of Deir al-Surian, in Wadi Naṭrun – the two used to be a single manuscript, kept in the library of the Egyptian monastery, which was later split into two -, and from some of the contents of the Fifth Book on Rhetoric. The paper aims to organize the data we already possess on Antony, and to provide some new arguments about when he lived, filling a gap in the scholarly investigation, which focused almost exclusively on some of Antony’s works