Simeon of the Olives

[1][2] He first learned how to read and write at his village church and was then sent to the monastic school at the Qartmin Abbey at the age of ten.

[3] Simeon also lived as a stylite for some time in the Monastery of the Column in Sīrwān close to Nisibis and finally became abbot of the Qartmin Abbey.

[1] Around the year 707, he had a great church dedicated to Saint Theodosius the martyr built in Nisibis which he consecrated together with the patriarch Julian II the Roman.

[14][15] While the vita of Simeon was probably written within several decades after his death, all manuscripts containing it are dated to either the late nineteenth or twentieth century and some of the events described, especially those that clearly take place after 734, have been added by later hand.

[17] Jack Tannous argues that rather than reading the vita as a source for the Umayyad period, it reflects the changing situations of Christian communities in the Abbasid period and the anachronistic parts might have been written to justify the existence of newly built or renovated churches, something that was forbidden by Islamic law.