In 1853, he made a second trip to the Syrian monastery but made no new discoveries.

When the monks Bar Sawma and Marcos (the future patriarch Yahballaha III) arrived in Mesopotamia from China in the late 1270s, they visited several East Syrian monasteries and churches:

During the reign of Donus, a colony of Nestorian monks was discovered in a Syrian monastery at Rome - the Monasterium Boetianum.

The manuscript was among a mass of manuscripts brought in 1842 from a Syrian monastery in the Wadi Natroun, Lower Egypt, as the result of a series of negotiations that had been under way for some time; it is conserved in the British Library.

In that case, the entire composition would represent a year in the life of an unidentified Syrian monastery.

While traveling the Middle East, for instance, I once met a Canadian woman who'd just traveled to a remote Syrian Catholic monastery in the gorgeous desert mountains outside of Damascus.

In the conformist confines of small-town Alberta, refusing to go to church might be a sign of liberation, but as the guest of an isolated Syrian monastery (one that you've taken great pains to visit, no less), refusing to go to church is not merely narrow-minded but rude.

The manuscripts found in the Syrian monastery inspired intense research on the Syriac language and culture, for until that time, many classical texts from Aristotle, Euclid, Archimedes, Hippocrates and Galen were known to Western scholars only in their thirteenth-century Latin translations.

Today, the Syrian monastery provides a great opportunity to study the development of Coptic wall painting.

The oversized book, originally produced in a Syrian monastery, includes the first dated pictorial representation of the Crucifixion.