Joshua the Stylite

Who is Joshua the Stylite?

Joshua the Stylite is the attributed author of a chronicle which narrates the history of the war between the Later Roman Empire and Persians between 502 and 506, and which is one of the earliest and best historical documents preserved in Syriac.

The work owes its preservation to having been incorporated in the third part of the Chronicle of Zuqnin, and may probably have had a place in the second part of the Ecclesiastical History of John of Ephesus, from whom Pseudo-Dionysius copied all or most of the matter contained in his third part. The chronicle in question is anonymous, and Nau has shown that the note of a copyist, which was thought to assign it to the monk Joshua of Zuqnin near Amida, more probably refers to the compiler of the whole work in which it was incorporated. In any case, the author was an eyewitness of many of the events which he describes, and must have been living at Edessa during the years when it suffered so severely during the Roman–Persian Wars. His view of events is everywhere characterized by his belief in overruling Providence; and as he eulogizes Flavian II, the Chalcedonian patriarch of Antioch, in warmer terms than those in which he praises his great Monophysite contemporaries, Jacob of Serugh and Philoxenus of Mabbog, he was probably an orthodox Catholic.