Bar Sawma of Seleucia-Ctesiphon
# Bar Sawma of Seleucia-Ctesiphon

Bar Sawma was Patriarch of the Church of the East from 1134 to 1136.

## Sources

Brief accounts of Bar Sawma's patriarchate are given in the Ecclesiastical Chronicle of the Jacobite writer Bar Hebraeus (fl. 1280) and in the ecclesiastical histories of the fourteenth-century Nestorian writers ʿAmr ibn Mattā and Ṣalībā ibn Yūḥannā.

## Bar Sawma's patriarchate

The following account of Bar Sawma's patriarchate is given by Bar Hebraeus (who erroneously placed him after the patriarch Makkikha I instead of Eliya II):

   Bar Sawma was consecrated catholicus of the Nestorians on Sunday, 4 ab [August] in the year 528 of the Arabs [AD 1134] in succession to Makkikha bar Shlemun. This Bar Sawma lived a life of bitterness, on account of the heavy burdens that were laid upon him, and was constantly praying for a quick and early death. His prayers were answered, for after fulfilling his office for only one year and five months, he died on the eleventh day of the former kanun [December] in the year 533 of the Arabs [AD 1136].
