Persische Lyrik in syrischem Gewand: Vierzeiler aus dem Buch des Khamis bar Qardahe (Ende 13. Jahrhundert)

The Book of Khamis is a label term that covers a variety of ms. collections of poems the majority of which are attributed to Khamis bar Qardaḥe, East Syrian author active in the last decades of the 13th century, probably a representative member of the East-Syrian community at the court camp of the Il-Khans, and somehow connected with the town of Arbela. The first part of the Book, containing hymns by Khamis was frequently copied in liturgical collections, whereas the second part has been preserved by a few witnesses and contains two bilingual poems: a hymn On Divine Economy with alternating verses in Syriac and probably Azeri Turkish and three quatrains on love and wine that mix Syriac and Persian within the lines. They graphically represent the multicultural milieu in which the poems attributed to Khamis were composed and transmitted. The present paper will focus on the genre of the quatrains. A number of representative texts will be published, including the three quatrains written in Persian and Syriac. Wherever possible, a comparison will be proposed with the formal and literary models of this kind of epigrams, i.e. the Persian robāʽīyāt.