Copyright ©2011 by Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
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Professor of Near-Eastern languages at Lund University, Sweden, 1908–37, and
Vice Chancellor of the same university, 1926–36. In his research, Moberg
dedicated himself mainly to Syriac and Arabic. He started his career under
the mentorship of K. V. Zetterstéen at Uppsala University and submitted an
edition of an Arabic Mamluk text as his doctoral dissertation in 1902.
Throughout his career, Moberg continued to work on Arabic materials. He also
translated classical and popular Arabic literature into Swedish and was
known as a distinguished lecturer. His main scholarly contributions,
however, were in the field of Syriac. With his research on the Syriac
grammar of
One of Moberg’s main contributions was his study of the Syriac grammar of Bar ʿEbroyo. Between 1907 and 1913 he translated the text into German along with text-critical notes (2 vols.). In 1922, he expanded his studies in this field by producing a complete critical edition of the Syriac text based on a wide range of mss. Bar ʿEbroyo’s grammar is a pioneering work in which the author seeks to regenerate Syriac grammar by using the methods and the terminology of the classical Arabic grammarians.
In the spring of 1920, Moberg was asked to examine a Syriac ms. containing a
collection of well-known liturgies. More interesting were the fragments in
the boards of the volume that consisted of portions of much older mss.
Having taken out, cleaned, and treated the leaves in the boards of the ms.,
Moberg discovered that most of them belonged to a work on the Ḥimyarite
martyrs of