Patriarch Aphram Barsoum's al-Lu'lu' al Manthur (The Scattered Pearls) is the most extensive survey of Syriac literature ever compiled by an eastern scholar. Unlike its European counterparts,
it covers Syriac literature until the beginning of the twentieth century. The wealth of Barsoum's work lies in the fact that it draws upon hundreds of manuscripts which Barsoum personally
examined before the outbreak of World War I; many of these manuscripts are now unaccounted for.
Western scholarship has been deprived of this work for decades as it was available only in the original Arabic, and later in a Syriac translation by Dolabani (1967). Only parts of its contents,
particularly the later biographies, were made accessible indirectly through Rudolf Macuoh's Geschichte der spat- und neusyrischen Literatur (1976). Matti Moosa's translation fills a gap and
will be welcomed by scholars, students and general readers.
