François Coste

Gaëlle Garet

Agnès Groisillier

Jacques Nicolas
email: jacques.nicolas@inria.fr

Thierry Tonon

Automated Enzyme classification by Formal Concept Analysis

Keywords: bioinformatics, protein classification, FCA application

Enzymes are molecules with a catalytic activity that make them essential for any biochemical reaction. High throughput genomic technics give access to the protein sequence of new enzymes found in living organisms. Guessing the enzyme functional activity from its sequence is a crucial task that can be approached by comparing the new sequences with those of already known enzymes labeled by a family class. This task is difficult because the activity is based on a combination of small sequence patterns and sequences greatly evolved over time. This paper presents a classifier based on the identification of common subsequence blocks between known and new enzymes and the search of formal concepts built on the cross product of blocks and sequences for each class. Since new enzyme families may emerge, it is important to propose a first classification of enzymes that cannot be assigned to a known family. FCA offer a nice framework to set the task as an optimization problem on the set of concepts. The classifier has been tested with success on a particular set of enzymes present in a large variety of species, the haloacid dehalogenase superfamily.

Introduction: enzyme classification

Enzymes are molecules with a catalytic activity that make them essential for any biochemical reaction. Enzymes are mainly named and classified according to the reaction they catalyze. Thus a name does not refer to a single enzyme protein but to a group of proteins from different living organisms (e.g. bacterial, plant or animal species) with the same catalytic properties. Enzymes are classified according to the report of a Nomenclature Committee appointed by the International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology4 . Effectively, this committee assigns each enzyme a recommended name and a EC (Enzyme Commission) number representing four hierarchical levels to classify the enzyme. The first level (indicated by a number from 1 to 6) divides enzymes in six main groups (simply called classes), according to the type of chemical reaction catalyzed (e.g. 3 refers to hydrolases, which involve all hydrolytic reactions -cleavage of chemical bonds by the addition of water-and their reversal). The second and third levels provide increasing refinements on the mechanism of the reaction. The fourth level is a serial number that is assigned to inform on substrate specificity.

It is also possible to organize and classify proteins into families and superfamilies based on similarities between sequences and/or structure for more distant relationships between proteins. A number of studies have observed that, whilst relatives within enzyme super-families may perform different functions or transform substrates in a very different way, there is often conservation of some aspects of their chemistry/mechanisms of reactions between them. Thus, an important step when making hypotheses on the functional activity of an enzyme is to be able to determine its membership to a structural super-family and/ or family. Two classifications of protein three-dimensional structures have been developed to capture their evolutionary relationships, CATH [START_REF] Sillitoe | New functional families (funfams) in cath to improve the mapping of conserved functional sites to 3d structures[END_REF] and SCOPe [START_REF] Fox | SCOPe: Structural Classification of Proteins-extended, integrating SCOP and ASTRAL data and classification of new structures[END_REF]. Both of these classifications use elementary substructures called domains, with proteins featuring one or several domains organized in various ways, and often with different functions. There is a relatively small number of super-families with respect to the number of domains (e.g. the CATH database release v3.5 contains 2626 super-families for 175536 domains) and the issue of predicting the super-family of a protein from its sequence is relatively easy since it is associated to the presence of key domains with some characteristic motifs. In contrast, the family level remains hard to predict from sequences.

In this study, given a known super-family, we consider the issue of classifying a set of new enzyme sequences (the unlabeled set) at the family level with respect to a set of sequences that have already been classified (the labeled set).

Coding enzymes using multiple partial local alignment

Enzyme functions can be associated to particular positions in their sequences, corresponding to amino acids involved in molecular interactions that impose a spatial structure, participate in specific binding of a substrate, or are involved in the catalytic machinery. In practice, short common words extracted from sequences of enzymes sharing a same known activity -i.e. short lists of successive amino acids -can help to point out such active sites. However, important aspects have to be considered for this task: the level of biochemical knowledge on protein elements and the divergence within protein sequences through evolution, due to point mutations, large domain rearrangements and insertion/deletions.

When dealing with protein sequences, it is important, first, to take into account the similarities due to shared physico-chemical properties between letters in the alphabet of the 20 standard amino acids used in proteins: some amino acid replacements that might have occurred during evolution have no impact on the function or the structure of the protein while others have. To consider this knowledge, a standard approach in machine learning consists in directly recoding the proteins on a smaller property-based alphabet, such as the hydropathy index or the Dayhoff encoding ( [START_REF] Yokomori | Learning local languages and its application to protein α-chain identification[END_REF], [START_REF] Peris | Protein motif prediction by grammatical inference[END_REF] and [START_REF] Peris | Igtm: An algorithm to predict transmembrane domains and topology in proteins[END_REF]). These coding schemes suffer from being a priori fixed, while the properties of an amino acid involved at one position may differ from those involved for the same amino acid at another position. The work described in this manuscript is based on a more specific data-driven approach where coding is based on the detection of local conservations shared by labeled and unlabeled sequences. The second point concerns the identification of putative domains and active sites in the enzyme sequences that relies on the detection of local similarities in the labeled set.

These goals can be achieved by looking for optimal multiple alignment of sequences. In fact, an alignment does not only provides a recoding of sequences, it also keep track of the chaining of elements since the matching edges between elements in the alignment are constrained not to cross We have extended the standard alignment search by loosening the constraints on admissible alignments in two ways: the alignment is local (involving only substrings) and it is partial (involving only sequences subsets instead of the whole set of sequences as in classical alignment). Altogether, this leads to a partial local multiple alignment (PLMA) of the sequences. Each short strongly conserved region in the PLMA (also called block) will form one of the characters for recoding the sequences. At this stage, it is important to note that the new sequences to be assigned, the unlabeled sequences, need to be also encoded and are aligned together with the sequences of known class, the labeled sequences. The computation of PLMA has been introduced as the first step performed in Protomata-Learner ( [START_REF] Kerbellec | Apprentissage d'automates modélisant des familles de séquences protéiques[END_REF]), a grammatical inference program aiming at learning finite state automata for the characterization of protein family sequence sets. But whereas the choice of the alignment parameters is important in Protomata-Learner to tune the desired level of generalization, we have only used a basic default set of parameters in this study to represent each sequence by the sequence of blocks it is involved in.

3 Class assignment from formal concept analysis

Formalization of the classification problem

Once each protein sequence have been converted in a boolean sequence or vector of block presences, it remains to assign each unlabeled sequence to a class. This is either a known family class or a new class that has not been observed in the labeled set but gains some evidence from the concurrent presence of specific blocks in the unlabeled set.

A natural approach for such an assignment task is to build a classification of all sequences with respect to the binary attributes (block presence) and to decide the class of unlabeled sequences from their place among the labeled sequences in the labeled tree. This requires to define a similarity measure on the set of binary attributes, and to set a threshold to discriminate the meaningful clusters. Problems quickly arise when trying to follow this approach: the number of attributes may greatly vary from one superfamily to the other and from one sequence to the other within a same (super)family. A decision taken on statistical arguments is not fully satisfactory because it is hard to fix universal values for the necessary parameters and ultimately a biologist has to check the assignments on the basis of the argumentation logics, his own knowledge, and further biochemical characterization of the sequence(s) of interest.

We have thus decided to use a FCA approach to solve this issue. The proposition of formal concept analysis as a first step for a supervised classification task is a common application that can be found in the literature for various topics. The vast majority of related papers have used concept lattices built on a learning set of labeled objects to produce a classifier that is used in a second step to assign new objects with unknown class . The concept lattice provides a nice ordering for the search of rules. This search may be pruned by transforming the initial lattice (closed label lattice, [START_REF] Wang | Closed-label concept lattice based rule extraction approach[END_REF]). The most efficient way of generating the classifier is to derive the rules or decision nodes directly from selected concepts in the lattice. For instance, it is possible to build a decision tree from the lattice [START_REF] Kovacs | Generating decision tree from lattice for classification[END_REF]. A more complex procedure is possible via the computation of concept intersections in the lattice [START_REF] Sahami | Learning classification rules using lattices[END_REF]. In all these studies, the set of unlabeled objects is used only once the classifier is built. In contrast, the work of [START_REF] Ikeda | Classification by Selecting Plausible Formal Concepts in a Concept Lattice[END_REF] considers the lattice built on both the labeled and the unlabeled set to focus the search on links between known and unknown objects. Then scores are calculated on concepts to estimate the plausibility that a concept represent a set of neighbors (objects belonging to a same class). The class label of objects is thus taken into account through scoring. The method selects first the most discriminating concept for each unlabeled object and classify it with respect to the neighbors class.

In our study, the attributes are blocks and there are two kinds of objects, the labeled and unlabeled enzyme sequences. The idea is then to introduce the knowledge on the classes of labeled instances directly in the formal context. This can be solved simply by adding the class values as new objects. Each time a block b is observed in a sequence of class c, the pair (b, c) is added to the formal context. Including the classes in the context as objects allows to have the right semantics for the binary relation: it reflects the presence of each block in each enzyme and each class. In practice, it is only necessary to produce concepts having at least one unlabeled sequence in the object set, otherwise it it is not useful for sequence labeling. The size of the relation remains sufficiently small in this context to produce the whole lattice of formal concepts for this relation. The assignment procedure is based on the exploitation of the lattice.

In a general setting, let A be the attribute set, C the class set, L the labeled set of objects and U the unlabeled set of objects. Let I denote the binary relation over

(L + U + C) × A and B((L + U + C), A, I) the concept lattice.
The problem is to find a minimal extension N of C and an argumentation allowing to assign classes of N ∪ C to elements of U on the basis of B((L + U + C), A, I) .

For this purpose, we propose an iterative scheme where each unlabeled sequence is assigned in turn by looking for its compatible class assignments. A compatible class assignment is defined as a class that belongs to some concepts sharing a maximal set of blocks with the unlabeled sequence. Maximality is defined here with respect to set inclusion. Each class assignment may be associated to a concept that we call attribute-compatible concept (see definition 2).

Definition 1. (compatible class assignment) Given a concept lattice B = B((L + U + C), A, I) and an element u of U , a compatible class assignment is an element c ∈ C such that there exists a concept ({u, c} ∪ X, Y ) in B, X ⊂ L + U + C,
and no Y is larger among the possible concepts.

Supervised classification

Our method tries to maximize the specificity of the classification decisions and proposes several quality levels for a class assignment towards this end.

At level 1, it checks if some blocks that are specific of a class (i.e. they are present in sequences belonging to a single class) are also present in the current unlabeled sequence. These blocks are called characteristic blocks and are assigned the highest quality value since they do not lead to any ambiguity if present alone. It corresponds to build a characteristic partition that splits L in subsets L i , i = 1, m corresponding to a common class value for each subset and A in m + 1 possibly empty subsets A i , i = 0, m corresponding to attributes only present in elements of L i , with A 0 = A \ ∪ n i=1 A i . If there exists a single compatible class assignment c using only characteristic blocks, the sequence is classified at level 1, with label c.

If there are several compatible class assignment c using only characteristic blocks, the sequence has an ambiguous classification and if it cannot be classified at the next level, it is said ambiguous and all its possible classes are displayed.

For sequences that have not been classified at level 1, the method checks at level 2 if some concepts are attribute-compatible with respect to the current unlabeled sequence, irrespective of the specificity of its blocks.

If there exists a single compatible class assignment c, the sequence is classified, with label c.

If there are several compatible class assignment c , the sequence is said ambiguous and all its possible classes are displayed.

The remaining cases are when no concept is compatible with the unlabeled sequence. It means either that the sequence has no block in common with another sequence and it remains unclassified, or that it is a member of a new family never observed before that use blocks found only in unlabeled sequences.

For instance, figures 1(a),1(b) and 1(c) represent partial local multiple alignments and in each figure, colored sequences (e.g. s1 and s2) are labeled sequences while black sequences (e.g. s3) are unlabeled and waiting for class assignment. On figure 1(a) the unlabeled sequence s3 gets only one compatible class corresponding to the orange concept and can thus be unambiguously classified. However, on figure 1(b) there are two compatible concepts (orange and green), and the unlabeled sequence class assignment is ambiguous. Figure 1(c), provides an example of an unlabeled sequence, s3, that remains unclassified because the multiple alignment has found no common block with an other sequence.. On the same picture a new family is formed with a characteristic concept involving only unlabeled sequences : {s4, s5, s6} × {Block1, Block2, Block3}. The purpose of the next subsection is to detail the search of such new classes.

Unsupervised classification

In terms of FCA, a new family can be characterized like for other families by an associated concept that gathers the sequences of this family and the blocks that form a signature of this family. These blocks are characteristic of unlabeled sequences as is the case for level 1 classification, but this time it is an unsupervised task since the set of classes N is unknown.

This problem is related to biclustering [START_REF] Busygin | Biclustering in data mining[END_REF]. However, the goal of biclustering consists in simultaneous partitioning of the set of objects and attributes. In our case, it is not realistic to expect a partition of both sets. The objects (sequences) share numerous attributes (blocks) and frequently, it is the way they are combined which allow to distinguish different clusters. The issue of object clustering from a formal context is treated in paper [START_REF] Gaume | Clustering bipartite graphs in terms of approximate formal concepts and sub-contexts[END_REF]. Authors propose a two-step procedures where formal concepts are enlarged to approximate concepts during the first step and then merged in a second step when they overlap sufficiently. This approach draws on the concept lattice as we do in order to find clusters but it shares some common drawbacks with biclustering with respect to our application domain. A partition of objects is useful but not necessary in our case and furthermore, it is not easy to tune the parameters associated to the method to get meaningful approximate concepts. In [START_REF] Navarro | Clustering sets of objects using conceptsobjects bipartite graphs[END_REF], the idea of using the set of formal concepts is further elaborated and no need for thresholds is longer required. Instead of starting from the object×attributes concept lattice, the authors propose to consider the lattice built on the object×concepts context in order to build the object clusters. It seems an interesting idea that could be experimented on the protein classification task. However, the interpretation of clusters becomes more difficult and it is an important preoccupation for the biologist to master the decision process. Another related aspect of all these method is their heuristic nature. Concept analysis is an exact method and it seems somewhat unfortunate losing this property in the classification task.

We decided to keep on the idea of associating a concept to each class. We also looked for an exact search of the concepts without parameter tuning, a requirement that implies a neat specification of the target concepts. The issue of deciding the occurrence of new families in N is non trivial due to the conjunction of two difficulties that have to be taken into consideration:

-A given set of sequences participates to a number of concepts. A subset of concepts has to be extracted that covers the set of sequences; -The set of new families is not necessary a partition: although it should be avoided as much as possible, a given sequence that has evolved to get a bifunctional capacity could belong to two different families.

s1 T W A G S s2 T Y G G S s3 G R S S V s4 Q P S K M s5 S D E Q I s6 W E V I M Block1 Block4 Block2 Block3 (a) s3 is classified s1 T W A G S s2 T Y G G S s3 G R S S V s4 Q P S K M s5 S D E Q I s6 W E V I M Block1 Block4 Block2 Block3 (b) s3 is ambiguous s1 T W A G S s2 T Y G G S s3 G R S S V s4 Q P S K M s5 S D E Q I s6 W E V I M Block1 Block4 Block2 Block3 (
We have set this issue as the following optimization problem : find an optimal cover of the new family sequences by the set of concepts including characteristic new blocks -only present in unlabeled sequences-. Optimality depends on three criteria of decreasing priority:

1. minimize the number of ambiguous sequences in the concepts (i.e. get closer to a partition); 2. minimize the size of N (i.e. parsimonious hypothesis with a minimum number of necessary new families); 3. maximize globally the support of the new families in terms of number of characteristic blocks.

These criteria are coded within a set of logical constraints using Answer Set programming [START_REF] Brewka | Answer set programming at a glance[END_REF]. Optimal concepts are produced by a dedicated solver through a conflict-driven constrained enumeration of admissible solutions [START_REF] Gebser | Conflict-driven answer set solving: From theory to practice[END_REF]. This way, exact solutions can be produced. Another important aspect of the quality of a classification decision is its support with respect to existing labeled sequences. A compatible concept can be associated to each decision. This concept gets a support in terms of its number of blocks. Another measure is the support in terms of labeled sequences. However, the compatible concept is not the best one with respect to this measure. It may exist a concept in the lattice, called seq-compatible concept, with a larger sequence support:

Y max = max{Y ⊂ A : ({u, c} ∪ X, Y ) ∈ B, X ⊂ L + U + C} and X max = max{X ⊂ L + U + C : ({u, c} ∪ X, Y ) ∈ B, Y ⊂ A}.
This way, each class assignment may be scored by the number of blocks of its attribute-compatible concept and the number of sequences of its objectcompatible concept.

An experiment with the HaloAcid Dehalogenase enzyme superfamily (HAD)

The haloacid dehalogenase superfamily (HAD) is a large superfamily (120193 sequences reported; http://pfam.sanger.ac.uk/clan/CL0137) of ubiquitous enzymes present in all three superkingdoms of life. The numbers of sequences differ between organisms, from around twenty in the bacteria Escherichia coli [START_REF] Kuznetsova | Genome-wide Analysis of Substrate Specificities of the Escherichia coli Haloacid Dehalogenase-like Phosphatase Family[END_REF] to between 150-200 in the benchmark biological models Arabidopsis thaliana and Homo sapiens [START_REF] Seifried | Human HAD phosphatases: structure, mechanism, and roles in health and disease[END_REF]. HADs are involved in a variety of cellular processes and serve as the predominant catalysts of metabolic phosphate ester hydrolysis [START_REF] Koonin | Computer analysis of bacterial haloacid dehalogenases defines a large superfamily of hydrolases with diverse specificity: Application of an iterative approach to database search[END_REF]. Enzymes in this superfamily are related by their ability to form covalent enzyme-substrate intermediates via a conserved aspartic acid site. These enzymes catalyze enzymatic cleavage, by nucleophilic substitution, of carbonhalogen bonds (C-halogen), and also feature a variety of hydrolytic activities including phosphatase (CO-P), phosphonatase (C-P) and phosphoglucomutase (CO-P hydrolysis and intramolecular phosphoryl transfer) reactions. The figure 2 provides an example of HAD structure from a bacteria. All structurally characterized superfamily members share a conserved alpha/betacore domain, termed the "HAD-like" fold by SCOP. HAD superfamily enzymes usually function as homodimers (i.e., a complex made of two identical proteins).The core domain is similar to the 'Rossmann-fold' with a six stranded parallel β-sheet, flanked by five α-helices. The typical fold of HAD phosphatases contains three additional structural signatures that allow the enzyme to adopt distinct conformational states and that contribute to substrate specificity: the squiggle, flap, and cap domains. Effectively, most superfamily members have a cap domain, and its site of incorporation within the sequence is one of the parameter supporting the enzymatic diversity within the HAD superfamily [START_REF] Burroughs | Evolutionary Genomics of the HAD Superfamily: Understanding the Structural Adaptations and Catalytic Diversity in a Superfamily of Phosphoesterases and Allied Enzymes[END_REF].

Dehalogenases have received an increased interest in the last decade since they have the potential to be used in both industrial and pharmaceutical applications, in addition to bioremediation processes [START_REF] Janssen | Biocatalysis by dehalogenating enzymes[END_REF].

For this experiment, we have worked on the following datasets :

1. Sequences from various organisms extracted from the supplementary data of article [START_REF] Burroughs | Evolutionary Genomics of the HAD Superfamily: Understanding the Structural Adaptations and Catalytic Diversity in a Superfamily of Phosphoesterases and Allied Enzymes[END_REF]. 34 families, 3 sequences in each family (102 sequences); 2. Sequences from E. coli extracted from [START_REF] Kuznetsova | Genome-wide Analysis of Substrate Specificities of the Escherichia coli Haloacid Dehalogenase-like Phosphatase Family[END_REF] 23 sequences; 3. Sequences from H. sapiens extracted from [START_REF] Seifried | Human HAD phosphatases: structure, mechanism, and roles in health and disease[END_REF] 40 sequences ; 4. Sequences from A. thaliana extracted from the TAIR database by identifying proteins containing a HAD domain and sequences identified by bibliographic analysis [START_REF] Burroughs | Evolutionary Genomics of the HAD Superfamily: Understanding the Structural Adaptations and Catalytic Diversity in a Superfamily of Phosphoesterases and Allied Enzymes[END_REF] 153 sequences, including 23 unlabeled sequences.

In all the study, dataset 1 is used as the labeled set and contains sequences labeled with a family class. The three remaining datasets have been used as unlabeled sets, and the sequence family prediction made by FCA have been compared to the classification existing for some of the sequences contained in these datasets in order to assess the performance of our analysis. Indeed, many sequences from E. coli, Homo sapiens and Arabidopsis thaliana have been biochemically characterized and/or have been considered for in silico/in vivo structural analysis, and this provided experimental results on their classification.

Figure 3 shows the complete lattice obtained on the smallest context corresponding to the E. coli unlabeled dataset. This line diagram has been drawn using the software erca (Eclipse's Relational Concept Analysis 5 ) and a reduced labeling. The top concept 0 contains all blocks and no sequence or class. The bottom concept 4 contains all sequences and classes and no block. The edges going to concept 9 and others were slightly intertwined and we have used a blue color to better distinguish them. The concepts having at least one unlabeled sequence in the figure are colored in sea green. These concepts contain the set of blocks of the unlabeled sequences, a maximal subset of which has to be used for classification.

Assignment results are summarized in table 1. The row "Classified" refers to sequences with only one predicted compatible class. The row "Ambiguous" refers to sequences with several compatible classes. The classification is assumed to be correct (true) if one of these compatible classes is the good one. The percentage of correctly/wrongly assigned sequences is given.

These first results are encouraging. More than 50% of sequences are correctly classified into the 34 possible families, new families detected by the method are effective and sequences not belonging to the superfamily remain unclassified.

For a fraction of unlabeled sequences, their right classification is actually unknown (datasets H. sapiens and A. thaliana). Yet, it is possible to look for possible class assignments. Table 2 give the percentage of such sequences that could be classified by our method. It shows that most of these unknown sequences could be assigned to one or several classes. The percentages of sequences belonging to new families and of unclassified sequences are also given. Unclassified sequences are sequences that can neither been assigned to a known class nor be assigned to a new family cluster.

For the three datasets, E. coli, H. sapiens and A. thaliana, we find 0, 2 and 11 new subfamilies respectively.

In the case of the H. sapiens dataset, sequences predicted to belong to new families are described in the reference paper [START_REF] Seifried | Human HAD phosphatases: structure, mechanism, and roles in health and disease[END_REF]. As a matter of fact, these families are not present in the labeled set and are thus correctly predicted as new.

In the case of A. thaliana dataset, it is difficult to know if predicted new families are real because of the number of uncertain sequences. However, we have detected after some bibliographical study that 11 unclassified sequences seem to have been wrongly assigned to the HAD superfamily by the TAIR query.

The specificity of the detection of new families has been tested too. For each known family in the labeled set, a new labeled set has been built that contain all sequences from the initial labeled set except the sequences belonging to this family. The unlabeled set has been built with the E. coli dataset plus the sequences of the selected family (3 sequences). The goal was to retrieve all the family sequences in the unlabeled set family detected as a new family by our method. We have computed the percentage of retrieved sequences for all families. The results are shown in table 3. Note that some families are not present in E. coli and this is indicated by the column label "new family alone". For the others (column new family + E. coli), the number of E. coli sequences belonging to the family is given within brackets. On the 34 subfamilies present in the labeled set, the unlabeled has been convincing for 27 of them.

These already good results could be refined by finding a largest labeled subset retrieved as a new family. This could be a direct measure of the specificity of the method.

Conclusion

We have described a classification method based on a concept lattice including both a set of already classified objects and a set of objects to be classified. It has been applied to enzyme sequences, a group of key proteins involved in many biochemical processes and with a high potential for the discovery of new functional molecules. Our results are encouraging and show our classification method is sensitive and specific. More than half of the unlabeled sequences are correctly classified with respect to the current knowledge for 34 subfamilies and ambiguous sequences represent only one third of sequences, two thirds of them having the correct class assignment. Moreover, each classification decision may be clearly explained and related to known sequences or particular positions in the sequence corresponding to blocks. Ambiguity could be even reduced in practice by looking for sequences that are inherently ambiguous because they are made for instance of two fragments of two proteins of different class. Such potential proteins, which we call chimera, could be automatically extracted during classification.

Another aspect of this work is the unsupervised classification problem for objects with attributes that are characteristic of unlabeled objects. We have suggested a model for solving this problem as an optimization issue taking into account ambiguity, parsimony (number of needed new classes) and intent (number of attributes). To our knowledge, it is the first time that this issue is properly formalized in bioinformatics. We have implemented all the specifications in this paper in the framework of answer set programming, a form of declarative programming adapted to combinatorial problems [START_REF] Brewka | Answer set programming at a glance[END_REF]. Once all constraints are expressed as logical formulas, a grounder transform them in a (large) set of boolean formulas and a solver looks for possible models of this set (the answers), which give access to the solutions of the initial problem. We have used the solver Clasp developed in Potsdam University [START_REF] Gebser | Conflict-driven answer set solving: From theory to practice[END_REF].

The next step will consist in testing the robustness of the method on species that are very evolutionary distant compared to the other organisms for which test sets were considered. To this aim, we have selected the brown alga Ectocarpus siliculosus, for which the genome sequence has been recently published [START_REF] Mark Cock | The Ectocarpus genome and the independent evolution of multicellularity in brown algae[END_REF]. We will test if the best in silico assignment within classes correlates with potential substrate specificity. To this aim, a number of algal sequences will also be biochemically characterized.

Fig. 1 .

 1 Fig. 1. Examples of partial local multiple alignments with labeled (colored) and unlabeled (black) sequences

Definition 2 .

 2 (attribute-compatible and object-compatible concept) Given a concept lattice B = B((L + U + C), A, I), u ∈ U , and c ∈ C, the attributecompatible concept and object-compatible concept are concepts BC(u, c) = ({u, c}∪ X, Y max ) and BC(u, c) = ({u, c} ∪ X max , Y ) of B, where

Fig. 2 .

 2 Fig. 2. 3D structure of HAD hydrolase T0658 from Salmonella enterica

5Fig. 3 .

 3 Fig. 3. Hasse diagram from lattice blocks x sequences/classes obtained on experiment with E. coli as unlabeled dataset

Fig. 4 .

 4 Fig. 4. Different kinds of assignment decisions

Table 1 .

 1 Percentage by species of sequences correctly/wrongly assigned

			E. coli H. sapiens A. thaliana
	Classified (%)	True 61 False 9	65 3	56 6
	Ambiguous (%)	True 17 False 13	18 3	18 8
	Unclassified (%)	True False	0 0	8 3	8 5
	Total		100	100	100

Table 2 .

 2 Percentages of unknown sequences in datasets assigned to one, several or none of the classes

		H. sapiens A. thaliana
	Classified (%)	50	54
	Ambiguous (%)	50	21
	Unclassified (%)	0	25
	Total	100	100

Table 3 .

 3 Percentage of retrieved sequences within a new family

	new family alone % of retrieved sequences new family + E. coli % of retrieved sequences
	EYA	100	NagD (+1)	100
	SPSC	100	Cof (+6)	44
	ATPase	0	PSP (+1)	75
	PNKP	100	HisB (+2)	100
	deoxy	0	BPGM (+6)	67
	s38K	100	Sdt1p (+4)	43
	HerA	0	TPP (+1)	100
	PMM	100	KDO (+1)	100
	Yhr100c	100	MPGP (+1)	67
	CNI	67
	Enolase	100
	BCBF	100
	LPIN	100
	PseT	100
	P5N1	100
	AcidPhosphatase	100
	Phosphonatase	100
	VNG2608C	0
	SPP	100
	CNII	100
	MDP1	100
	dehr	0
	Zr25	100
	CTD	100

http://www.iubmb.org/1984


Maria Conterno

"Storytelling" and "History writing" in Seventh-Century Near East

Keywords: intercultural exchanges, historiography, oral transmission, Near East échanges interculturels, historiographie, transmission orale, Proche Orient

The present paper is a study on the circulation of historiographical material across linguistic, religious and political borders in the seventh-century Near East and Mediterranean. Contrary to other scholars, who have tried to explain the similarities among certain historical texts looking only for shared written sources, the author points out the importance that oral transmission must have had in the circulation of historical information, before and beside written production, and finds evidence for that in eight medieval chronicles written in Greek, Latin, Syriac and Arabic.

Les Working Papers et les Position Papers de la Fondation Maison des sciences de l'homme ont pour objectif la diffusion ouverte des travaux en train de se faire dans le cadre des diverses activités scientifiques de la Fondation : Le Collège d' études mondiales, Bourses Fernand Braudel-IFER, Programmes scientifiques, hébergement à la Maison Suger, Séminaires et Centres associés, Directeurs d'études associés... Les opinions exprimées dans cet article n' engagent que leur auteur et ne reflètent pas nécessairement les positions institutionnelles de la Fondation MSH.

The Working Papers and Position Papers of the FMSH are produced in the course of the scientific activities of the FMSH: the chairs of the Institute for Global Studies, Fernand Braudel-IFER grants, the Foundation's scientific programmes, or the scholars hosted at the Maison Suger or as associate research directors. Working Papers may also be produced in partnership with affiliated institutions.

The views expressed in this paper are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect institutional positions from the Foundation MSH.

Fondation Maison des sciences de l'homme -190 avenue de France -75013 Paris -France http://www.fmsh.fr -FMSH-WP-2014-80 T he expression "circuit de Théophile d'Édesse" has been coined by Antoine Borrut (Borrut A., 2005; Borrut A., 2011) with reference to the theory proposed by Lawrence Conrad to explain the presence of shared material in Theophanes Confessor's Chronographia, Michael the Syrian's chronicle, the anonymous Chronicle of 1234 and Agapius of Mabbug's Kitāb al-'unwān. According to this theory, these four texts rely on Theophilus of Edessa's lost History for large part of the events of the 7th century and the first half of the 8th century, Agapius directly, Theophanes through a Greek translation-continuation of it, Michael the Syrian and the anonymous chronicler of 1234 via the lost work of Dionysius of Tell Maḥre (Conrad L.I., 1988; Conrad L.I., 1992; Hoyland R.G., 1991; Hoyland R.G., 1997; Hoyland R.G., 2011). This "circuit" of intercultural transmission involves, according to Robert Hoyland, three more sources, which show fewer but seemingly significant correspondences with the so-called "Theophilus' dependants", namely the Chronicle of Seert (an East-Syrian chronicle written in Arabic in the 10th or early 11th century) and two Latin chronicles written in Spain in the 8th century, the Chronicle of 741 (also called Byzantine-Arab Chronicle of 741) and the Chronicle of 754 (also called Hispanic Chronicle of 754). 1 In this paper I will focus precisely on the last three texts, on the information they share with the previously mentioned ones and on the supposed reliance of all of them on the same written source.

The resemblances between the two Latin chronicles and Theophanes' Chronographia had already been observed by their first editor, Theodor Mommsen, who hypothesized the derivation of the shared accounts of Oriental events from an Arabic source. 2 In the Epimetrum following the two texts, Theodor Nöldeke proposed a different hypothesis, suggesting that the material shared by the Latin chronicles and Theophanes 1. Cf. Hoyland R.G., 2011: 15-19; Borrut A., 2011: 150-151, 252-232. Out of brevity, when referring to both the texts together I will call them "Hispanic chronicles" or "Latin chronicles".

2. "Tenemus igitur chronicorum Arabum scriptorum saeculo octavo medio epitomen contaminatam et cum historiis Isidorianis et cum laterculo imperatoris Orientis. Ex iisdem chronicis conferenti patet Byzantios scriptores saeculi octavi et noni Nicephorum et Theophanes eas sumpsisse, quae de rebus gestis Arabum adferunt" (Hispanic Chronicles: 324). Cf. also the second critical edition of the two texts (Gil J.,1973: xxxv-xl). came rather from the work of a Syrian miaphysite author, writing most likely in Greek. 3 Although the close parallels are admittedly few, Hoyland includes the two Hispanic chronicles in the "circuit de Théophile d'Édesse", supposing that they depended on the same Greek translation of Theophilus' work used by Theophanes. His reconstruction is followed by other scholars, as Borrut and Stephen Shoemaker (Shoemaker S., 2012: 40-42). Contrariwise, according to Wolfram Brandes, the Oriental material to be found in the two Latin chronicles is older than the "Syriac Common Source" shared by Theophanes and the Syriac chronicles, but it comes nonetheless from an Eastern written source on which they all ultimately depend. 4 A different view has been expressed by James Howard-Johnston, according to whom the reason of the resemblances between the two Hispanic chronicles and Theophilus of Edessa's dependants "is probably to be sought in a common ultimate rooting in reality or the management of news about reality, rather than use of a common written source" (Howard-Johnston J., 2010: 433).

These two chronicles show extensive textual parallels with one another. Mommsen deemed them both continuations of Isidore of Seville's history, accordingly he named them Continuatio Isidoriana Byzantia-Arabica et Hispana and printed their texts in two parallel columns in order to highlight the shared parts. 5 In particular, the two texts are very close in the sections containing correspondences with the other sources, and this is 3. "Quae in Continuatione Byzantia Arabica de rebus Orientis narrantur, non dubito, quin in Syria scripta sint. [...] Quo verisimile fit, cum heterodoxum fuisse, fortasse Monophysitam ut erant fere omnes terrarum Syrarum Christiani, excepta Palestina; [...] Qui haec in Syria conscripsit aut lingua Syriaca aut Graeca sit oportet. Et cum Syrorum lingua hominibus Latine loquentibus non magis nota esset quam lingua Latina Syriam habitantibus, haec e Graecis Latina facta esse certum videtur. Neque causa est cur coniciamus, textum Graecus e Syriaco versum esse" (Hispanic Chronicles: 368-369). See also Proudfoot A.S., 1974: 406; Rochow I.,1991: 46-48. 4. "Auf welchen Wege dieses orientalische Quellenmaterial nach Spanien kam, kann hier nicht behandelt werden. Auf jeden Fall scheint es eine Quelle zu rapräsentieren, die vor die von Mango, Conrad u.a. angenommene Chronik ca. 750 -neuerdings meist Theophil von Edessa zugeschreiben -zu datieren ist" (Brandes W., 1998: 555). 5. For this practical reason I will refer to Mommsen's edition rather than to the more recent one produced by Juan Gil (Gil J., 1973), where the two texts are printed separately. On these two texts see also Burgess R.W. -Kulikowski M., 2013: 201-203. why Hoyland took into account just the Chronicle of 741, giving for granted that the matching passages in the Chronicle of 754 derive from the same Syrian source (Hoyland R.G., 2011: 16-19; Collins R., 1989: 52-63).

The pieces of information that the two Latin chronicles share with Theophanes and the other texts are the following:

• Heraclius' and Nicetas' twofold expedition to overthrow Phocas;

• the defeat of the Byzantine general Theodore at Gabitha against the Arabs;

• 'Umar I's murder;

• a peace treaty between Marwān and Constantine;

• a positive remark on 'Umar II;

• Yazīd ibn al-Muhallab's rebellion against Yazīd II.

As regards the Chronicle of Seert, the parallels between it and the other texts have been highlighted by Hoyland in his recent volume containing, in English translation, all the material potentially coming from Theophilus of Edessa's work (Hoyland R.G., 2011). The manuscript preserving the chronicle is defective and stops abruptly in 650. Hoyland observes that the overlap with the other sources supposedly involved in the "circuit de Théophile d'Édesse" is limited, nevertheless he counts the chronicle among Theophilus' dependants and reports in the volume the few matching passages:

• Heraclius' and Nicetas' twofold expedition to overthrow Phocas;

• the desertion of the Persian general Šahrbaraz;

• the defeat of the Persian army on the river Zab;

• a sign in the sky foreshadowing the Arab invasion;

• Heraclius' withdrawal from Syria;

• the building of a mosque on the Temple site at Jerusalem.

According to Hoyland, the first three items could derive as well from some other source shared by Agapius and Dionysius rather than from Theophilus' chronicle, and the notice concerning the sign in the sky was "likely to travel easily between chronicles", therefore he regards only the last item as coming for certain from Theophilus' work.

Another text will be taken into account in this study, namely Patriarch Nicephorus' Breviarium.

The presence of material of Oriental origin in the Braviarium is a debated question. Cyril Mango, and Ann Proudfoot before him, denied any connection with non-Byzantine sources. 6 Mommsen, though, thought that both Theophanes and Nicephorus had drawn information on Oriental facts from a source of Arabic origin. 7 David Olster spotted some parallels between Nicephorus and Michael the Syrian in the accounts on the 7th century, 8 and Wolfram Brandes pointed out the presence in the Breviarium of apocalyptic material of Syriac origin (Brandes W., 1987; Brandes W., 1993/1994). Therefore, it is worth including it in this analysis, since the resemblances it shows with the other texts, even if minimal, may be very telling and suggest a different perspective on this "circuit" of intercultural transmission. The following items will be considered:

• a comment on the fact that while the Persians were devastating the land outside Constantinople, Phocas was inflicting even heavier damages to the people inside it;

• Heraclius' and Nicetas' twofold expedition to overthrow Phocas;

• the fall into disgrace of Priscus, Phocas' sonin-law, and Heraclius' dismissal words to him;

• an episode concerning the Persian general Šahrbaraz and a letter of Khosrau's counterfeited by Heraclius;

Shared material concerning Heraclius' reign

The only item shared by all the sources is the anecdote of Heraclius' and Nicetas' expedition against Phocas. 9 The eight texts say that the two 6. "Theophanes is unique among Byzantine chroniclers in his direct use of a foreign source" (Mango C. -Scott R., 1997: lxxxii). "...it must be stated that Nicephorus had no links with Syriac sources" (Proudfoot A.S., 1974: 415).

7. Cf. n. 4.

8. "These two scholars [i.e. E.W. Brooks and N.V. Pigulevskaja] confined their analyses to the eighth century, but abundant parallels between Greek and Syriac sources exist in the seventh century materials, not only between Theophanes and Michael the Syrian, but also between Nicephorus and Michael the Syrian" (Olster D., 1993: 11 young men were sent by their fathers, Heraclius the elder and Gregory, 10 and that Heraclius went by sea, whereas Nicetas by land, with the mutual agreement that the one who would reach Constantinople first would be king. Heraclius arrived first, thanks to calm sea and favourable winds, 11 and he ascended to the throne after killing the tyrant Phocas. This narrative, although contaning some elements that match the historical truth, is most likely fictional (Kaegi W.E., 2003: 43; Howard-Johnston J., 2011: 203.). chronicle itself (Wood P., 2013: 180-181, 211-214, 216-219). Be it real or fictional, such a detail probably veils an actual friction between the Persian general and the members of the influential Christian family.

The anecdote is not reported by the Latin chronicles nor by Patriarch Nicephorus, but the Breviarium contains an account that remarkably echoes some elements of this story. 15 , 2008: 107). According to Howard-Johnston, instead, the account of Theophanes and the Syriac chronicles is very early as well, being "an elaborate piece of disinformation manufactured and disseminated by the Roman authorities soon after the completion of the Persian withdrawal, with the twin objects of souring relations between the shahanshah and the greatest of his generals and of encouraging dissident activity among provincials in the occupied territories" (Howard-Johnston J., 2011: 204). the order writing to him three times, and at the third refusal he writes to Šahrbaraz ordering him to kill the other general. Šahrbaraz summons the general to fulfill the order, but is shown Khusrau's three letters by the other and they both decide to desert their king and go over to Heraclius, whom they contact and secretly meet. The plot of 'Ikrima's account is almost the same, with the only difference that Šahrbaraz is the one who refuses three times to execute the other general, which is said to be his brother and is named Farrukhān. 18 The elements that the two Muslim accounts share with Theophanes and the Syriac chronicles are Khusrau's anger towards Šahrbaraz, his sending a letter containing the order to kill him and Šahrbaraz's meeting with Heraclius, ending with an alliance between them. The only element shared also by Nicephorus' account is the presence of a letter written by Khusrau to his general.

The resemblances among all the accounts are best and most simply explained by the oral circulation, development, and reshaping of an original narrative reflecting a core of historical truth. As said above, Nicephorus is likely to preserve the version that is closest to the real event, whereas the four so-called Theophilus' dependants on one side, and the Chronicle of Seert on the other, testify to the independent written registration of two further stages of reworking. confirms them as testimonies of the multifarious oral evolution of the same original account, or even of the different accounts originated from the same event. 19 Nicephorus offers another piece of evidence pointing to the independent record of spoken words in written sources. He shares in fact with Theophanes, Michael the Syrian and the Chronicle of 1234 a comment on how Phocas was doing worse damages within Constantinople than the Persian army outside of it. 20 The identical wording and the identical postition (after the description of the Persians' advance in Anatolia) in Theophanes and in the two Syriac chronicles point to the derivation of the remark from the same written source:

Theophanes: "They took Galatia and Paphlagonia and advanced as far as Chalcedon, killing indiscriminately people of every age. And while the Persians were oppressing the Romans outside the city, Phocas was committing worse crimes inside by murdering and imprisoning people".

Michael the Syrian: "The Persians crossed to the west side of the Euphrates and captured Mabbug, Qenneshre, Aleppo, and Antioch.

And while the Persians were doing these things, Phocas was killing the leaders from within, and many other people, until almost all the free men and those capable of fighting were done away with".

Chronicle of 1234: "Thus he [i.e. Šahrbaraz] passed through the regions of Cappadocia and Galatia and reached the vicinity of Constantinople. There was no region that rose up against him which he did not devastate and destroy, killing its men and enslaving its populace. And while the Persians were thus ruining the Roman territory, Phocas was outdoing them from within by his lack of clemency, killing the leaders of the Romans until his kingdom was bereft of powerful men".

Nicephorus presents the same remark in a slightly different context, adding a telling detail:

19. The presence of a core of historical truth within the Christian accounts had been already assumed by Cyril Mango, who did not deem the Chronicle of Seert a dependant of Theophilus of Edessa's. Mango observed that both the Chronicle of Seert and Theophanes mention Galatia as the place where the letter was intercepted, and saw this as a sign that the two accounts are ultimately grounded on historical facts (Mango C., 1985). The correspondences analysed so far urge us to stop hunting a supposed written "Urquell" shared by all the chronicles and to take seriously into account the idea that this material was simply being circulated orally. Indeed, some of the features highlighted in the shared accounts suggest that they originally belonged to a sort of epic narrative centred on the figure of Emperor Heraclius. The recurring of the same key details in modified contexts leads to argue that such a narrative was transmitted orally and was subject to the typical metamorphosis of oral epos. To say how this corpus of heroic tales actually originated, how far it spread and by whom it was passed around, a broader investigation would be required, involving a larger range of sources. 24 What can be said so far is that it was in part grounded on some real events and, although 22. A passage unparalleled in the Chronicle of 741.

23. The association between Heraclius and David was one of the main themes of imperial propaganda after the Persian war (Spain Alexander S., 1977), and is attested also by the famous David Plates (see. Spain Alexander S., 1977: 235, on the possible interpretations of the plate representing the victory over Goliath).

24. I was encouraged to delve into this hypothesis by the stimulating conversations I had with Constantin Zuckerman. I am grateful to Prof. Zuckermann for discussing with me this matter and sharing his views and ideas on it, which I hope he will decide to publish.

produced within the Byzantine Empire, it crossed linguistic, religious and political borders.

It would be tempting to infer that it was a product of Heraclian propaganda, in which case we would expect it to contain only successful episodes, mainly pertaining to the Persian wars. But we find correspondences among our sources also in pieces of information concerning the loss of the Oriental provinces to the Arabs. Particularly telling is the case of Heraclius' withdrawal from Syria. 25 Michael the Syrian and the Chronicle of 1234 report the anecdote of the emperor saying farewell to the region, then they both say that he allowed his troops to lay waste the land as if it already belonged to the enemy, and he sent order to the people in Mesopotamia, Egypt and Armenia not to put up resistance to the Arabs anymore and just hold on to their places. Theophanes, very briefly, says only that Heraclius abandoned the region in despair, taking with him the relic of the Holy Cross. Agapius says that Heraclius retired from Mabbug to Antioch because he had already despaired of saving the region, and later on, after knowing about the defeat of the Persians by the Arabs, he wrote to Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia and Armenia ordering not to oppose the will of God and not to engage in battle against the Arabs anymore. The Chronicle of Seert, as well, says that Heraclius ordered to his men that they should not oppose to the will of God and not fight the Arabs anymore, but just hold on to their places, and that he left Syria despairing of keeping it. It seems like behind all these versions there was an account containig the following items: Heraclius' despair of saving the region, his salute to the region, his order to devastate the land as if it already belonged to the enemy, his order not to fight the Arabs anymore, not to oppose God's will but just to hold on. Here as well, there is no need to think that our sources drew different pieces of information from the same written text containing a fuller version, because all these could simply be the details the event got embroidered with as the story was told and retold. This is confirmed by the presence of Heraclius' desperate farewell to Syria in sources unrelated to the "Theophilus' circuit In the two Hispanic chronicles we find instead the account of Theodore's defeat and death at Gabitha. 27 It does not actually show any literal correspondence with the ones to be found in Theophanes and the Syriac chronicles. The latter, by the way, are quite dissimilar from one another as well, because Agapius and the anonymous chronicler of 1234 add, independently, information of Arabic origin. Both the Chronicle of 741 and the Chronicle of 754 mistake the Theodore that was killed at Gabitha for Heraclius' brother, whereas he was actually the emperor's Sacellarius, who bore the same name. According to Theophanes, Heraclius' brother had been defeated at Gabitha as well, earlier, but he had survived the battle. 28 Theophanes is also the only one to say explicitly that the Sacellarius' name was Theodore, whereas the others call him just "the Sacellarius", and this could suggest that the Latin chronicles present a garbled version of what was in Theophanes' source. But it could also simply mean that they have merged into a single event the accounts that were circulating about the defeat of Heraclius' brother and about the defeat of the Sacellarius. This is confirmed by the detail that the Romans got into panic in front of the Arabs, which echoes Agapius' assertion about Heraclius' brother, who is said to have been scared of the Arabs when sent against them. Therefore, although the presence of this piece of information in the Latin chronicles seemingly links them to the so-called Theophilus' dependants, nothing really proves its provenance from the same written source. Once again, the only link among these text is rather their drawing from the same pool of orally transmitted information.

The last two items suggest that the oral accounts concerning Heraclius did not deal exclusively with his military successes and with the most glorious part of his reign. Therefore, either Heraclius' epos covered his whole life, or the heroic tales centred on Heraclius' figure were just a subset of the historical material that was being circulated orally in the 7th century. To assess which is the case, the other items that the two Latin chronicles and the Chronicle of Seert share with Theophanes and the Syriac chronicles shall be examined.

Other shared items in the Latin chronicles

The other passages of the two Latin chronicles that have been signalled by Hoyland as coming from Theophilus' chronicle concern the caliphate and derive ultimately from the Islamic tradition: 'Umar I's murder; a peace treaty between the Arabs and the Romans; a positive remark on 'Umar II; Yazīd ibn al-Muhallab's rebellion against Yazīd II.

The notice of 'Umar I's death 29 is extremely concise, but it shares three details with the other four sources, namely the fact that the caliph was murdered a) while he was praying, b) by a slave, c) with a sword. But once again, the independent registration of the same account is an easier explanation than such an intertwining of unknown written sources, even more so since the account originated within the Islamic oral tradition.

There is no need to dwell on the prominence of oral tradition before and beside written transmission at the beginnings of Islamic culture. Although the time of the first put into writing of historiographical material in the Islamic tradition is a debated question (Donner F.M., 1998: 13-19, 205-206;Borrut A., 2011: 175-176 32 ), there is no doubt that many of the narratives reported in the first written sources derived from the practice of storytelling, as in the case of the so-called akhbār (pl. of khabar, lit. "notice, account") (Hoyland R.G., 1991: 13-219; Leder S., 1992). In his examination of the Islamic tradition on 'Umar I's murder, Anthony makes reference to precise authors and written sources, either lost or preserved, and he points out that "most of our information derives from second/eighth century accounts redacted and compiled together in works mostly dating from the third/ninth century onwards" (Anthony S., 2010: 214). But the eighthcentury accounts were based on stories that were being told, and that most likely kept on circulating and evolving orally beside their written versions. Nothing forbids to think that such stories had spread also across the linguistic and religious borders, and were received in oral form by Christians as well.

The same observations can be applied to the other items. The peace treaty between the Arabs and the Romans 33 was signed, according to the Chron-32. Borrut supports the view of an early written production, but he also argues in favour of the cohexistence of orality and literacy, saying that they should not necessarily be considered as opposing cultural features.

33. Theophanes: 361, 363; Agapius: 497; Michael the Syr-icle of 741, by Marwān and Constantine IV, and the Arabs were to release all the captives and the deserters found in their lands and to pay to the Romans a daily tribute of 1000 golden coins, one girl, one Arab mule and a silk garment for nine years. Michael the Syrian and the Chronicle of 1234 report instead a peace treaty of ten years between ' Abd al-Malik and Justinian, according to which the latter would remove the Mardaites from Lebanon and withdraw his troops from Arab territory and the former would pay a daily tribute of 1000 gold coins, one horse and one slave; the anonymous chronicler adds that the Arabs were also supposed to share with the Romans the tax revenue of Cyprus. Agapius has the same account as the Chronicle of 1234. Theophanes says that a first agreement was proposed to Constantine IV by ' Abd al-Malik, with the same conditions of a previous peace treaty signed under Mu'āwiya, namely 365.000 gold pieces, 365 slaves and 365 horses per year; after Constantine's death ' Abd al-Malik sent emissaries to Justinian to ratify the peace, he asked him to remove the Mardaites from Lebanon and promised in return 1000 gold pieces, one horse and one slave per day, and half of the revenue of Cyprus, Armenia and Iberia. In neither case Theophanes mentions the duration of the treaty.

In the Chronicle of 741, the reference to the Roman captives and deserters to be released by the Arabs is very likely a misunderstandig of the request made by the Arabs themselves to remove the Mardaites that were devastating Lebanon. The Mardaites were Romans who had settled in the region of Lebanon under the reign of Constantine IV. 34 The name means "rebels" in Syriac (marīdoyē), but in the passage concerning their arrival in Lebanon, Michael the Syrian tells us that they were also called Līpūrē, a word unknown in Syriac, probably of Greek origin and meaning "plunderers" (from laphyra) or "deserters" (from leipo). 35 If the second conjecture is correct, this detail would strengthen the hypothesis that the reference to captives and deserters in the Latin chronicle is an echo of the Mardaites affair. But this, far from pointing out the provenance of the notice from the same written source shared by the other four chronicles, confirms rather that the Latin chronicler (or his source) just registered a twisted version of the facts that was passed around 36 and got more approximate on one hand (ascribing for instance the treaty to Marwān and not to ' Abd al-Malik, and changing its duration from ten to nine years), and rich in additional details on the other (as in the list of the items to be paid by the Arabs, where the slave became a girl, the horse a "mula Arabica villosa", and a silk garment was added). Another independent record is offered by Elias of Nisibis, who says that 'Abd al-Malik made a peace treaty with the king of the Romans (without specifying the name) and promised to pay 1000 dinars per week (Elias of Nisibis: 150).

The positive remark on the Caliph 'Umar II in our sources has been examined by Borrut among the testimonies of the origins of the caliph's idealized figure. 37 Following the "Theophilus theory", Borrut ascribes the core of the description to Theophilus, and, from its presence in the Chronicle of 819 and in the Chronicle of 846, he gathers that Theophilus must have found it in the chronology of Qartamin, the source he shared with the two anonymous chroniclers. Accordingly, he points out the resemblances in wording among the Chronicle of 819, the Chronicle of 1234 and the Chronicle of 741 (Borrut A., 2011: 303-304). It seems to me, though, that such resemblances look significant only if one gives a priori for granted a textual connection among the chronicles: 38 36. None of the two Latin chronicles says anything about the arrival of the Mardaites in Lebanon or about any other devastation of the region at the hand of the Romans, therefore a very complicated reconstruction would be required to see a textual connection between the word Līpūrē in Michael the Syrian and the word transfugas in the Chronicle of 741.

Assuming that behind the term Līpūrē there really were a word meaning "deserters" (which remains a pure conjecture), the easiest explanation would be that the general talking about the withdrawal of the Mardaites/Līpūrē from Lebanon entailed by the peace treaty was turned upside-down into the release of any prisoner and deserter to be found in the territories under Arab control. Chronicle of 741: "In military matters 'Umar achieved no great success nor anything avers, but he was of such great kindness and compassion that to his day as much honour and praise is bestowed on him by all, even foreigners, as ever has been offered to anyone in his lifetime holding the reins of power".

Theophanes

The passage is defective in both the Chronicle of 819 and the Chronicle of 846. In particular, the words in square brackets in the Chronicle of 819 mark a lacuna that has been filled in by the editor from the Chronicle of 846. But the words "a good man" are actually missing even in the latter and they are a conjecture by the editor, most likely based on the text of the Chronicle of 1234. 39 Furthermore, the translation may be misleading, since the Syriac word that Hoyland translates as "compassionate" (mraḥmonō) is built on the root rḥm ("to love, to have pity upon") and means literally "merciful", whereas the Latin word that he translates as "compassion" is patientia, meaning rather "patience, tolerance". The difference is of course slight, but such a translation may suggest a close literal correspondence that is not there. The comparison with the previous kings is a rhetorical feature that does not necessarily point out the dependence on the same written source more than the dependence on the same cliché, and it should be noted that it is shaped in three different ways (more compassionate that all the kings before, opposed to Christians more than all the 39. In the edition of the Chronicle of 819 the words "a good man" are in round brackets, whereas in the edition of the Chronicle of 846 a blank space was left.

"Storytelling" and "History writing" in Seventh-Century Near East 13/21

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kings before, and more honoured and praised than all the kings before). Borrut himself suggests that such an image of piety and benevolence might go back to the very time of the caliph and have been built and spread by his own propaganda. In any case, it must have circulated at least as early as the 730s. If the resemblances among the Syriac passages allow speculations on their ultimate derivation from the same written source, no compelling signs of a connection with such a source are to be found in the two Latin chronicles.

Finally, in the case of Yazīd ibn al-Muhallab's rebellion against Yazīd II, 40 not only is any literal correspondence between the Latin chronicles and the other sources missing, but the former also contain some details that are not in the latter: they say, in fact, that it was a military rebellion started by the troops that were defending the Persian territories; they specify the place of the final battle, namely in the Babylonian plain above the Tigris; 41 the Chronicle of says that Maslama, the general sent by Yazīd II against the rebel, was his half-brother, born of a different mother. 42

Other shared items in the Chronicle of Seert

Beside the passages concerning Heraclius, the Chronicle of Seert shares only two more significant items with the other four chronicles: the appearance of a sign in the sky and the building of a mosque on the Temple site at Jerusalem.

The first piece of information is recorded by Theophanes, Michael the Syrian and Agapius, and they all link the phenomenon to an earthquake, which is not mentioned in the Chronicle of Seert. 43 Theophanes and Michael the Syrian describe the sign as resembling a sword, in Agapius it is a column of fire, the Chronicle of Seert says it looked like a lance. Theophanes says that it appeared 41. Michael the Syrian is the only one to name the place, but he says more vaguely "near Babylon".

42. The text in the critical edition reads as follow: "fratre dudum memorato Mazlema nomine non dissimili matre progenito". The apparatus, though, records the variant "non de simili matre", which matches the historical truth and is therefore adopted by Hoyland in his translation. in the direction of the South and moved from South to North for 30 days, in Michael the Syrian as well it stretched out from South to North for 30 days, Agapius instead says that it moved from East to West and from North to South, in the Chronicle of Seert we read that it was oriented from South to North and then it extended from East to West, remaining for 35 nights. Theophanes, Michael the Syrian and the Chronicle of Seert share also the final remark on the fact that the sign was commonly interpreted as a presage of the Arab invasions. One could be tempted to see in this additional detail a proof of the provenance of this piece of information from a shared written source, but we find just the same remark associated to a very similar astronomical phenomenon in the Zuqnin Chronicle, which is not supposed to be linked to the "circuit de Théophile d'Édesse": "In the year 937 the stars of the sky fell and they all would throw like arrows toward the North, giving a terrible omen of the defeat of the Romans and the invasion of their lands by the Arabs, which actually happened to them after a short time, without delay" (Zuqnin Chronicle: 150). As already said, Hoyland observes that this kind of notice was likely to travel easily between chronicles. I rather think that here, as in the case of the remark on Phokas' bloodthirsty policy, we have to do with independent recordings of an event that had been largely commented upon and turned, in the collective memory, into a ex eventu prophecy.

The second item is to be found in Theophanes, Michael the Syrian and the Chronicle of 1234. 44 According to Hoyland, it is actually the only account in the Chronicle of Seert that can be confidently ascribed to Theophilus of Edessa, and he therefore admits that "as a single notice it does not give us a sufficient basis for assessing how much and in what way the Chronicle of Siirt used Theophilus" (Hoyland R.G., 2011: 16.) unless they remove the cross that is on top of the Mount of Olives; the cross is removed and the construction stands firm. There are, though, some small differences that it is worth remarking. The Chronicle of Seert says that the Arabs try to build a mosque and also a palace (or a citadel, qaṣr), and Hoyland observes that the latter probably refers to the complex lying immediately south of the Aqṣa mosque. If Hoyland's conjecture is correct, this precise piece of information betrays a certain knowledge of early Islamic building activity in Jerusalem. Curiously enough, the anonymous chronicler mentions the place as the site of the tomb of Solomon and not of his Temple, a detail that betrays, instead, a hazy knowledge of Christian Jerusalem. Another detail added by the anonymous chronicler is that 'Umar left Jerusalem ten days after its conquest and appointed Mu'āwiya ibn Abī Sufyān governor of Syria, which is a correct piece of information (Mu'āwiya was actually appointed third governor of Syria by 'Umar I) but placed in a quite odd context, as is odd the mention of Syria as geographical reference point to state the position of the cross on the Mount of Olives ("the cross placed on top of the Mount of Olives, opposite Syria"). Finally, whereas Theophanes and Michael the Syrian conclude with an anti-Islamic and anti-Judaic note, saying that in consequence of this episode the Arabs became enemies of the Christians and removed many crosses, the Chronicle of Seert says just that 'Umar, informed by letter, was astonished by the fact.

The anti-Judaic and anti-Islamic bias point to a Christian origin of the anecdote, but in the Chronicle of Seert the anti-Islamic bias has vanished. Indeed, the differences and additional details listed above suggest that the narrative might have been received and passed about also in the early Syrian Islamic tradition, and that it reached the Chronicle of Seert through this go-between. The fact that the episode is not recorded in Islamic sources is not a valid argument against such a hypothesis, since it is by now commonly aknowledged that Christian sources preserve pieces of lost early Islamic traditions and, as the episode of Šahrbaraz's desertion shows, early Islamic tradition in turn took over items coming from the Christian side as well. Of course, it is just a hypothesis but it is a thought-provoking one, and it will seem less far-fetched as soon as we stop approaching these examples of intercultural transmission in terms of pure "Quellenforschung" and we start considering the idea that the cultural barriers were much more fluid than we think, thanks also to oral transmission.

An example of how misleading it can be to trace all the similarities back to a shared written source is provided by , 2012: 47-52). But the correspondence is really too feeble to prove the provenance from the same written source. 45 Misled by the "Theophilus theory", Shoemaker fails to realise that the Chronicle of Seert is indeed one more independent witness to the lost early tradition whose traces he is looking for, therefore one more piece of evidence supporting his argument.

Conclusions

James Howard-Johnston, although embracing the "Theophilus theory", did not include the two Latin chronicles and the Chronicle of Seert among the supposed Theophilus' dependants. As said at the outset, he explained the presence of similar accounts in the two Hispanic chronicles 45. Hoyland himself does not include the passage in his volume.

and in Theophilus' dependants with a common ultimate rooting in reality (or the management of news based on real events). As regards the Chronicle of Seert, while noticing the presence in it of episodes covered by Theophilus, he did not go so far as to link the chronicle to Theophilus' circuit, saying just that the anonymous chronicler (or his source) probably made use of a West Syrian source (Howard-Johnston J., 2010: 325-326, 433). The examination of the sources proposed in this paper confirms Howard-Johnston's view and allows us to define it even better. The resemblances among these sources are explained by common rooting in what was being reported as reality, that is rooting in the same branches of shared memory. The two Latin chronicles and the Chronicle of Seert do not depend on the same written source attested by the other four texts, but they depend on the same accounts that were produced and first spread orally, accounts that might have been immediately, or ultimately, or even not at all based on reality. Therefore, if we look at them from a "Quellenforschung" perspective, they are to be considered independent sources. But if we look at them from the point of view of "intercultural transmission" they actually share the same material, although not via a straighforward written transmission.

In the case of the supposed Theophilus' dependants, the conspicuous amount of shared items, some extensive passages showing word for word correspondence and some identical sequences of events displayed in the four texts prevent us from denying the provenance of the shared material from one or more written sources. Whether Theophanes' Chronographia, Michael the Syrian's chronicle, the Chronicle of 1234 and Agapius' Kitāb al-'unwān share just one written source, whether this source was Theophilus of Edessa's lost History, and which items actually derive from it, is still open to debate (Conterno M., 2011; Conterno M., 2014; Conterno M., forthcoming; Debié M., forthcoming), but the evidence in these four texts is such that it proves a written connection among them. The same does not hold true for the two Latin chronicles and the Chronicle of Seert, where the shared items are rather isolated narratives and their resemblances with the matching passages in the other four texts are never so extensive and so literal to imply necessarily a written connection. Besides, as the comparison with Nicephorus' Breviarium has shown, brief identical sentences can be found also where no shared written source can be realistically postulated. Introducing Theophilus' dependants in his volume, Hoyland stresses that by using the term "dependants" he does not ascribe to them a slavish use of their shared source, since they all "felt free to creatively revise and reshape it, to abbreviate and reword it, and to supplement it with material from other sources" (Hoyland R.G., 2011: 7). In particular, regarding the Chronicle of 741 he says that the presence of only few textual parallels could be due to the fact that Latin chronicler heavily abbreviated his Syrian source, and regarding the Chronicle of Seert he admits that most of the shared items could just as well come from other sources. The "Theophilus theory", which is supposed to explain in the most simple way all this evidence of intercultural transmission, seems rather to complicate the picture in this case. The simplest explanation, as far the as the two Latin chronicles and the Chronicle of Seert are concerned, is that there is no written source linking them to the other four texts, and that the oral transmission of historical information played a more important role than has been aknowledged so far.

Seen the extensive textual parallels between them, there is no doubt that the Chronicle of 741 and the Chronicle of 754 are both based on the same written source, which contained the items examined above and all the other pieces of information of Oriental origin shared by the two texts.

As observed by Collins and Hoyland (Collins R., 1989: 56; Hoyland R.G., 2011: 17. Cf. also Constable O.R., 2010: 109-115), the positive presentation of Umayyads caliphs, together with the total absence of any mention of ' Alī and the reference to Mu'āwiya II as legitimate ruler, suggest that such Oriental material originated from Syria. But this is as far as we can go in the "Quellenforschung", since there is no way to assess when and where such material was translated into Latin, when and where it was put into writing, how it actually got from Syria to Spain. The hypothesis of a Greek source written in Syria, brought to Spain and there translated into Latin is not more plausible than the hypthesis of an author writing down directly in Latin accounts that he got from Oriental informants. Also, there is no reason to suppose that all the Oriental items made their way from the East to Spain in a single lot. The epic stories concerning Heraclius' deeds may have spread around the Mediterranean and they were possibly being told also in Latin by the time of composition of the two Hispanic chronicles. On the other side, there is no reason to exclude that the accounts produced by early Islamic historiography in Syria were circulating all over the caliphate, and since all of Northern Africa was under Muslim control by the beginning of the 7th century, the pieces of information of Islamic origin may have found written form anywhere between Syria and Gibraltar. 46 It is likewise impossible to say when the above examined passages of the Chronicle of Seert found their current written form. Of course, by stressing the importance of oral transmission I do not imply that the anonymous chronicler himself got all of them from oral sources in the late 10th century. He must have found them in the sources he used, but the analysis of the passages shows that there is no way to demonstrate, and most of all no need to think, that he used Theophilus of Edessa, or that one of his sources did. Neither can we prove that he found all the items in the same source, nor that they reached him only through Christian intermediaries.

The scarcity of preserved contemporary sources makes the study of the circulation of historical knowledge in the Near East between the 7th and the 8th centuries a most delicate task. A balance should be kept, between postulating many different unknown sources and connecting everything to the few lost sources of whose existence we know, since both tendencies can lead to a misrepresentation of what was really going on. An aspect that so far has not been paid real attention is the role played by orality in the production, circulation and alteration of historical information beside written transmission. The material analysed in the present study urges scholars to take into more serious consideration the interaction between oral and written tradition, and leads to the conclusion that the evidence provided by the preserved sources cannot be explained only by mapping the circulation of written texts.

Also, it invites scholars to consider as more fluid the religious, linguistic and cultural borders that historical knowledge was to cross. Studying the circulation of historical information in 46. Collins in fact hypothesized two different sources for the legendary stories related to Heraclius (supposedly coming from a source shared by Theophanes as well) and for the information on the Arab rulers (supposedly coming from some sort of Historia Araborum arranged on the basis of regnal years and written in Spain or in Northern Africa), cf. Collins R., 1989: 56-57. this period in terms of "intercultural transmission" was a pioneering and fruitful idea, 47 but the potential of such an approach has been diminished by its application to written sources only. This was understandably due to the fact that written sources are all we have, and paths of written transmissions are the only ones we can hope to reconstruct, whereas what happened at an oral level shall always remain much more difficult (if not impossible) to assess and to prove. But consequence of this was that, while showing that historical knowledge actually crossed linguistic and religious borders in the seventh-century Near East, the studies produced so far have also given the wrong impression that it did that in a quite rigid and controlled way, only through chains of written sources, that were copied, quoted, translated, expanded. This prevented from taking into account the idea that written narratives, or certain elements whithin written narratives, might have passed orally from a language to another, and from a religious-cultural context to another, before being put into writing in the form we read them.

Of course, a balance shall be kept here as well, lest we make the opposite mistake of overstating the weight of oral transmission and denying any possibility of reconstructing the connections between written sources. However, paying due attention to the possible traces of oral transmission cannot but lead to a profitable development of the studies on "intercultural transmission" in the seventh-century Near East.

Sources

Al-Balādhuri = Khūri Ḥitti Philip (1916-1924),

The Origins of the Islamic State, 2 vols., New York-London, Longman Greens & co.

Al-Ṭabari = AA. VV. (1988-2007)

"

  Storytelling" and "History writing" in Seventh-Century Near East 5/21 Fondation Maison des sciences de l'homme -190 avenue de France -75013 Paris -France http://www.fmsh.fr -FMSH-WP-2014-80

  40. Theophanes: 401; Agapius: 504; Michael the Syrian: 489; Chronicle of1234: 308; Hispanic Chronicles: 357-358. Cf. Hoyland R.G., 2011: 218-220.

  43. Theophanes: 336; Agapius: 454; Michael the Syrian: 414; Chronicle ofSeert: 580. Cf. Hoyland R.G., 2011: 94-95.

  Muslim sources, as Walter Kaegi and Paul Cobb have first remarked. There are two versions of it, one ascribed to al-Zuhrī (d.730 ca) and reported in Ibn ' Abd al-Ḥakam's Futūḥ Miṣr, and the other going back to 'Ikrima (d. 724) and preserved by al-Ṭabarī in his Ta'rīkh. 17 In al-Zuhrī's version, Khusrau is angry at Šahrbaraz because of his lingering in Anatolia instead of besieging Constantinople, and he writes to one of the generals that are with him to kill him. The latter, who remains unnamed, refuses and tries to convince Khusrau that he cannot do without Šahrbaraz because he is a most skilled commander. But Khusrau repeats

  Philippicus too, recalling that he as well had been tonsured: a possible clue that the two characters were somehow associated.Another topos of heroic tales is to be found in the Chronicle of 754 (Hispanic Chronicles: 335-336).22 Heraclius and Khusrau decide to have a duel between two warriors, chosen within the respective armies. Cunningly, Khusrau chooses a soldier almost as huge as the giant Goliath and no one among the Romans dares to face him. Therefore the emperor in person takes the field and, as a new David, defeats the opponent with one single blow. Beside the clear biblical echoes, 23 this episode finds partial matches in two different passages of the Chronographia and the Breviarium. In the latter we read that the Persian general Razates delivers to the Roman camp a challenge to a duel but no one voluteers, therefore Heraclius himself goes forth and fights against Razates in a single combat

	"After the murder of Emperor Maurice, Pho-kas, who had committed this [deed], seized the imperial office. When he had assumed power the situation of the Christians came to such a pitch of misfortune that it was com-monly said that, while the Persian were inju-ring the Romans State from without, Phokas was doing worse [damage] within".
	Noticing the presence of the same comment in the four texts, Hoyland suggests that it, too, might derive ultimately from the continuation of John of Antioch (Hoyland R.G., 2011: 57 n. 59; Mango C. -Scott R., 1997: 425 n. 4). But here as well there is no reason to suppose a unique written source linking the Breviarium to the other three texts, since Nicephorus himself tells us that he (or rather his source) is simply reporting what had actually become a common saying among people, which could just as well have been recorded by different sources independently. Indeed, such a common saying might even have been embodied into larger oral accounts centred on Heraclius'
	Some other odd coincidences point to an oral circulation of accounts concerning Heraclius' reign. For instance, in Michael the Syrian and in Nicephorus we find the same words of dismissal attributed to Phocas (at Philippicus, Maurice's brother-in-law; Michael the Syrian: 379) and to Heraclius (at "Crispus", i.e. Priscus, Phocas' son-in-law; Nicephorus: 39-41) respectively. The two scenarios are very similar, since in both cases a relative-in-law of the deposed emperor tries to ingratiate himself with the new ruler and is warded off with the following reproach: "Since you have not been a good relative, how will you make a good friend?". After that, both Philippi-cus and Priscus get tonsured and retire to a mon-astry. Of course, such a remark on loyalty is a topos, but topoi are precisely among the main fea-tures of oral accounts, as role reversal and words/ deeds transfer typically occur in oral transmis-sion. In this case, the shift of the cue from one emperor to the other may have been facilitated by the fact that the same word (meaning generically

20. Theophanes: 296; Michael the Syrian: 391; Chronicle of

1234: 224; Nicephorus: 34. Cf. Hoyland R.G., 2011: 57-58

. figure, to mark the spannung, the peak of distress caused by the tyrant and brought to an end by the saving intervention of the future emperor. "male relative-in-law" 21 ) designates, in Greek and in Syriac as well, both the brother-in-law and the son-in-law. Furthermore, shortly after reporting Priscus' death in the monastery, Nicephorus men-21. Namely gambros in Greek and ḥatnō in Syriac. "Storytelling" and "History writing" in Seventh-Century Near East 9/21 Fondation Maison des sciences de l'homme -190 avenue de France -75013 Paris -France http://www.fmsh.fr -FMSH-WP-2014-80 tions (Nicephorus: 61). Theophanes, instead, says that Heraclius, during the battle on the river Saros, is attacked by a giant man from the Persian army and he confronts him alone, strikes him and throws him in the river (Theophanes: 314).

  Chronicle of 819: "'Umar son of ' Abd al-' Azīz [son of Marwān became king for two years and seven months, he was {a good man} and a more compassionate king than all the kings] before him".

	Chronicle of 846: "'[Umar son of ' Abd al-' Azīz] son of Marwān was king for two years and se-ven months, he was {a good man} and a more compassionate king than [all the kings] before him".
	Chronicle of 1234: "This man, 'Umar son of ' Abd al-' Azīz son of Marwān, began to reign in the year 99 of the Arabs. He was a good and compassionate man, truth-loving and just, and he was averse to evil. However, he was very opposed to Christians, more than the kings before him".
	: 399; Agapius: 242-243; Michael the Syr-ian: 455-456; Chronicle of 1234: 307-308; Hispanic Chroni-cles: 357; Chronicle of 819: 15; Chronicle of 846: 234. It should

be noted that Theophanes' notice on 'Umar II' reign shares some details with Agapius and Michael the Syrian, but does not contain any reference to the caliph's positive fame

(cf. Hoyland R.G., 2011: 215-217)

.

38. I am giving Hoyland's translation of the passages (Hoyland R.G., 2011: 217).

  Stephen Shoemaker's book The Death of a Prophet. Shoemaker spots, both in Christian and Islamic sources, passages hinting at Muḥammad's presence during the first Arab raids in Roman territory. Such a detail is at odds with the traditional account, according to which the Islamic expansion began only after the Prophet's death. With his careful analysis of the sources, Shoemaker shows that so many unrelated testimonies of the same alternative version cannot but prove that the early Islamic tradition had initially produced two different narratives of the first conquests, both of which circulated widely and were recorded also in Christian sources, and that in the end one of the two became mainstream and overshadowed the other. Shoemaker relies on the "Theophilus theory" and follows Hoyland in reckoning the Chronicle of Seert one of Theophilus' dependants. Both Michael the Syrian and the Chronicle of 1234 say explicitly that at first Muḥammad led in person the incursions into Palestine and later on he sent forth his men without him. The same piece of information, expressed more concisely, is to be found also in the Chronicle of Seert, and even though it is actually the only item this text shares with the other two in the account about Muḥammad's life, Shoemaker sees in this only match the prove that Dionysius of Tell Maḥre drew his account on the rising of Islam from Theophilus (Shoemaker S.

  , The History of al-Ṭabari, 40 vols., Albany, SUNY Press. Chronicon ad annum Christi 1234 pertinens I, Paris, Gabalda -Bibliopola 47. The expression "Intercultural Transmission" has been first applied to this context by Lawrence Conrad (Conrad L.I., 1990). The Organizational Gift and Sociological Approaches to Exchange, FMSH-WP-2014-63, GeWoP-6, february 2014. Françoise Bourdarias, Jean-Pierre Dozon & Frédéric Obringer, La médecine chinoise au Mali. Les économies d'un patrimoine culturel, FMSH-WP-2014-64, février 2014. Le combat pour les droits des femmes dans le monde arabe, FMSH-WP-2014-70, juin 2014.

	Agapius = Vasiliev Alexandre (1906-1916), Kitab al-'Unvan. Histoire universelle écrite par Aga-pius (Mahboub) de Menbidj, Paris, Firmin-Didot (Patrologia Orientalis V.4, VII.4, VIII.3, XI.1). Chronicle of 819 = Barsaum Aphram (1920), Chro-nicon anonymum ad A.D. 819 pertinens, in Jean-historique et devenir de l'Afrique : revisiter l'historiographie diopienne, FMSH-WP-2014-60, january 2014. Pierre Salama, Les classes moyennes peuvent-elles dynamiser la croissance du PIB dans les économies émer-gentes?, FMSH-WP-2014-61, février 2014. Marta Craveri & Anne-Marie Losonczy, Growing up in the Gulag: later accounts of deportation to the USSR, FMSH-WP-2014-62, february 2014. Philippe Steiner, Ilan Bizberg, The welfare state and globalization in North America, FMSH-WP-2014-65, may 2014. Philippe Steiner, Cartographie des échanges, FMSH-WP-2014-66, GeWoP-7, mai 2014. Olga Stepanova, Le roman, la pièce de théâtre et le film : traits com-muns et particularités, FMSH-WP-2014-67, mai 2014. Flavia Buzzetta, Adaptations de thèmes magico-cabalistiques juifs médiévaux par le Quattrocento italien, FMSH-WP-2014-68, mai 2014. Frédéric Landy, Quelle sécurité ali-mentaire en Inde ? Dilemmes éco-nomiques, socio-politiques et envi-ronnementaux. Une mise en miroir francilienne, FMSH-WP-2014-69, juin 2014. Baptiste Chabot, Anatole Fogou, Histoire, conscience Hafidha Chekir, Géraldine Thiry, Philippe Roman, The Inclusive Wealth Index. A

"Storytelling" and "History writing" in Seventh-Century Near East

United States (Princeton, Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies), and in Paris