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Dâdyeshu‘ as abbot.^[1] Their rules have been preserved.^[2] These are merely the old Egyptian rule slightly modified to suit Persia. Monks wore a tunic, belt, cloak, hood and sandals. They carried a cross and a stick. The Nestorian monks wore a tonsure formed like a cross, to distinguish them from those of the Jacobites.^[3] At first they met seven times a day for common prayer (the canonical hours). Later it was reduced to four times. They worked in the fields; those who could copied books. They abstained from fleshmeat always, ate one meal (of bread and vegetables) a day, at the sixth hour (mid-day). Then they all lay down and slept awhile. After three years of probation a monk could, with the abbot's leave, retire to absolute solitude as a hermit. After Abraham of Kashkar celibacy was, of course, enforced very strictly. Nestorian monks were always subject to the local bishop; all their property, for instance, was administered and controlled by him. Labourt counts this a characteristic note of Eastern monasticism, and notes how it strengthened the hands of the hierarchy.^[4]

An interesting picture of Nestorian monasticism is given by Thomas of Margâ in his Book of Governors (Ktâbâ drīshâne), otherwise called Historia monastica. Thomas was a monk at Beth ‘Abe (a dependency of Mount Izla) in the early 9th century. He became Bishop of Marga, and eventually Metropolitan of Beth Garmai, north of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, east of the Tigris. He wrote his book about 840. It is a collection of stories of monks, from Abraham of Kashkar down to his own time, like the Historia Lausiaca of Palladius.^[5]

Labourt thinks that the Nestorians, like the Jacobites, owe it to their monasteries that they were able to withstand the flood of Islam.^[6] They had flourishing monasteries, with many famous

1. Ib. chap. v. pp. 42–44.
2. Chabot: Regulæ monasticæ ab Abraham et Dadjesu conditæ (Rome, 1898); see also Wallis Budge's edition of Thomas of Margâ, vol. i. pp. cxxxiv–clvi, and Duval: Littérature syriaque, p. 180.
3. Book of Governors, ii. 40–41.
4. Le Christianisme dans l'empire perse, p. 324.
5. Dr. E. A. Wallis Budge has edited it, in Syriac and English, with an introduction about Persian monasticism and copious notes (The Book of Governors, 2 vols., Kegan Paul, 1893).
6. Op. cit. p. 324.