Dayro Al-Syrian 

Dayro Al-Syrian

This monastery was built in the name of the Virgin in the Scete desert in Egypt, perhaps in the fifth century. In the middle of the sixth century the Syriac merchant Marutha of Takrit bought it and dedicated it to the Syriac monks, whose number reached seventy in 1084 and it was inhabited by Syriac monks until the seventeenth century but it is presently inhabited by Coptic monks. This monastery, which became widely famous in the seventh century, harbored a library to which its abbot, Moses of Nisibin (907-944), added two hundred and fifty of the most valuable books and the rarest and oldest manuscripts after his trip from Egypt to Baghdad, which took six years and ended in 932. Among those who took care of the arrangements of this library and the binding of its books was the eminently learned monk Barsoum of Mar'ash, sometime after 1084. Barsoum was still living as a priest in 1122 (cf. British Museum MS. 323, Bibliothèque Nationale MS. 27). In some commentaries it's written that fifteen camel-loads of books were found in this monastery after the pillage of Edessa, Amid, Melitene, and other cities. In 1624, the priest Thomas of Mardin counted the books of this Monastery, which amounted to four hundred and three volumes (cf. British Museum MS. 374). 

This monastery was the most famous of all the Syrian libraries, as well as the most ancient of the libraries of the world. From the middle of the seventeenth century to the middle of the nineteenth, its books found their way into the libraries of the Vatican, Paris, Petersburg and especially London, which was enriched by these books and so vaunted its stock of Syriac manuscripts over that of the other libraries. Also, there was a library of Syriac books in the Monastery of Anba Bula, mentioned after the time when Constantine I was the abbot of Dayr al-Suryan in the eleventh century (cf. book of Isaac of Nineveh, British Museum MS. 695).