Narsai
399 CE–502 CE · Ain Dulba (Ma'alta)
Narsai (c. 399 – c. 502/507) was the preeminent theologian and poet of the Church of the East, honored with the titles "Harp of the Holy Spirit" and "Tongue of the East." Orphaned in childhood, he was raised at a monastery near Beth Zabdai before spending years at the celebrated School of Edessa, where he eventually became its director. Around 471 he was driven out — due to christological conflict with Miaphysite opponents, chiefly Bishop Cyrus II of Edessa — and resettled in Persian-controlled Nisibis, where, with Bishop Barsauma, he refounded the School of Nisibis as the intellectual heart of East Syrian Christianity. He composed some 360 mēmrē (verse homilies) according to the later writer Abdisho bar Berika, of which roughly eighty survive, covering creation, the sacraments, dominical feasts, and biblical narrative; they established the theological and liturgical vocabulary of the Church of the East for generations.
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Ain Dulba (Ma'alta)Iraq
What they did here
Born at Ain Dulba ('Plane Tree Spring') in the Ma'alta district of the Sasanian Empire, in what is now the Duhok Governorate of northern Iraq; orphaned early, he was taken in by his uncle, head of the monastery of Kfar Mari near Beth Zabdai.
About Ain Dulba (Ma'alta)
Ain Dulba (Ma'alta), a village in the region of Maalta near Nineveh in northern Iraq. It is given as the birthplace of the East-Syriac poet-theologian Narsai (c. 399).
In the same place & time
Sages whose lives overlapped with Narsai’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.
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The world in their lifetime
Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Narsai’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
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