It took me over a year - 31 hours if you trust MS Word - but here is Fiey's biography of Isho'yahb III sort-of teased right here.
These sixty pages took longer than I wished. Like, a lot longer.
Much of that was due to the OCR on the original PDF which was ... terrible, leaving landmines like "fan" for l'an (just caught today!), "lame" for l'âme, and other such nonsense. The footnotes being smaller-font and rife with various cross-references proved even worse; and through it all was Fiey's own florid prose (which he'd contracted from his ever-prolix subject). Also in the content were references to stuff that I had to go back through mine own blog February-March last "fan", to figure out the context. And sometimes I personally dispute Fiey so I had to ensure I was doing justice to his commentary. Like over Fiey's orthography which sometimes follows the Syriac and sometimes Frenchifies things.
Not helping in the least was this laptop, USB 3.1 so not fit for multiple screens; which laptop also just plain died twice, in July and then last winter. then came the bluescreens when the browser was up, although here I'm blaming more the GPU.
But anyway: it's at a point now where my Casanova was, at least not likely to make readers collapse in fits of hilarity. I'll accept that some smiles and even mild sneers might be coming my way tho'; I'll brace myself for those. My grade in French was B-class in GCSE and will likely stay there.
As for that French, I chose "Persia" for "Perse" and "Persis" for "Perside". "Cyriaqos" became "Cyriaque" for Fiey so "Cyriac" for me; "Nisibe" is "Nisibis". For Syriac I refuse "-yaw"; this should be "-yahb". Otherwise I kept the longvowels and the diacritics, and given the Nestorian topics I agreed to keep their vocalisation over the "canaanite" shifting we see in the west.
As for why I expended all this time, Isho'yahb had a front-row seat in the now-Kurdish highlands for the collapse of Sasanian authority and its replacement with, it seems, Church authority. This authority was divided, and incompetent to handle most saecular affairs, and even - over in Nisibin - kleptic. The Tayaye, as our author calls them, imposed an impartial law upon all the Christians and "heretics". This generally went well but under their cover, of course the Church couldn't control those heretics anymore.
So we need to sort out what happened where and when. You know, like in Africa. Fiey's project was to arrange Isho'yahb's letters into some order, as has been done for Maximus. I don't think Fiey was always right, as I noted, but we all must start somewhere, and "somewhere" - I think - starts with making Fiey more widely available, beyond Francophones and random reviewers selectively google-translating Duval's Latin.
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