given as a.d. 363. The one monastery founded by Awgin is credited with having sent out no less than seventy-two missionaries. We may regard him as the St. Columba of Syrian monasticism.
Two other monasteries are known to have been instituted in Mesopotamia before the end of the fourth century. Therefore by the time of Thomas this Eastern Syrian monasticism was already more than four hundred years old. Meanwhile it had been absorbed in the great Nestorian movement that had taken over the Church in Mesopotamia. So Thomas was a Nestorian and the monks about whom he wrote were Nestorians, although it would be difficult to discover the fact from his book, which is far removed from theological controversies.
Thomas tells us that he came to the monastery of Bêth ʿAbhê when a young man, in the year a.d. 832; and his book is concerned with the monks and chiefly the governors of this monastery. It has since disappeared and the exact site of it has not been recovered, though it is known to have been situated somewhere among the mountains not far from the Upper or Great Zab, on its right bank, in a bleak region where fruit trees could not be cultivated. According to Thomas, the monastery was founded by Rabban Jacob, originally a monk of Mount Izla (a.d. 595 or 596); but inasmuch as this man found some monks there, we must conclude that it was a more ancient centre for a group of ascetics' huts or caves. Under Jacob and his successors it grew into a very important monastery. It would seem that its inmates were men of high social position, and that they cultivated learning as well as asceticism. Many of them belonged to noble Persian and Arab families. The library contained a large collection of books, among which was Thomas's favourite work, the Paradise of Palladius, translated in the seventh century by Anan Isho, a monk of the great monastery of Izla, near Nisibis, who had made a pilgrimage to the Scetic desert, the home of ancient asceticism. The daily services were seven in number—just before sunset, at dusk, at midnight,
