text · B0051
Seder Tannaim vaAmoraim סדר תנאים ואמוראים
The first written chronology of the transmission — the chain writing its own history, a full century before the Iggeret of Rav Sherira (Iggeret Rav Sherira Gaon). A book about this atlas's own subject: its dated list of who received from whom is the earliest surviving attempt at the very map drawn here, and its decision-rules are the earliest written answer to what the chain's disputes mean for practice.
I. Who
- Hebrew
- סדר תנאים ואמוראים
- Also known as
- STA, Seder Tannaim we-Amoraim
- Era
- geonim
II. When
- Traditional
- anonymous, self-dated to 4645 AM (884–885 CE)
- Academic
- c. 884–885 CE; manuscript variants place the internal date a year or two later
- Duration
- ≈2 years
- Precision
- approximate
IV. What
- Language
- Hebrew and Aramaic
- Redaction
- Anonymous, from the Babylonian orbit of the mid-9th century. The work carries its own date (884–885 CE) but no author's name, and it never circulated as an independent book: it survives embedded in medieval halakhic compilations (Machzor Vitry among them) in an unstable text whose two parts — chronology and decision-rules — may be distinct layers.
- Structure
- Two parts: first a dated chronology of the transmission — who received from whom, from Moshe through the zugot, tannaim, amoraim, and savoraim, with year-counts for the generations; then kelalei hora'ah, rules for deciding the law among the named disputants of the Mishnah and Talmud.
V. How do we know
| Claim | Evidence | Confidence | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|
| The work dates itself to 884–885 CE, making it the earliest surviving written chronology of the chain of transmission — the older sibling of the Iggeret of Rav Sherira (Iggeret Rav Sherira Gaon), which took up the same questions systematically a century later and became this atlas's deliberate stopping point.
The internal date is checkable in the editions; manuscripts vary by a year or two, and the author is unknown, so the confidence is held at 3.
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tradition reconstruction | ★★★☆☆ |
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| Its second part is the earliest written collection of kelalei psak — rules for deciding among the sages of the Mishnah and Talmud, including early formulations of the principle that the law follows the later authorities (hilkheta ke-vatra'ei) — the head of the genre the rishonim's klalei-haTalmud literature continues. | tradition | ★★★☆☆ |
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| The text has no independent early manuscript tradition: it survives quoted and embedded in medieval compilations, with recensions that diverge substantially, and scholarship treats the chronology and the rules as possibly separate compositions traveling together. | reconstruction | ★★★☆☆ |
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