Category: Manuscripts

Ordering from the Vatican library

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve never ordered anything from the Vatican library, so this note is for those who have thought about it but never got around to it.

Today I’ve downloaded the PDF order form from here and posted it off, with an order for PDF’s of microfilms (! — all I can afford) of two Vatican mss. of the unpublished history of the Arabic Christian writer Al-Makin.

I’ve ordered a copy of Ms. Vatican Arab 169 (which I mentioned here when discussing complete copies), and, for good measure, a copy of Ms. Vatican Arab 168 (which from this post contains the first half).  I am nervous, tho, that the description in Graf says that the former is folios 1-194r; i.e. around 400 pages, which doesn’t look long enough to me to contain the complete work.  Let’s hope I’m wrong.

The order form is simple and obvious — one of the better examples I’ve seen — and in English.  They intend to do it online, which they indeed should, but the website isn’t quite ready. 

Prices are listed on the form, and are 50 euros for 100 pages, then 20 euros for each chunk of 100 pages thereafter.   Payment is on delivery, apparently; I hope they take credit cards!

I will keep you posted on how this goes, and how easy they are to deal with.

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Manuscript digitization in the Wall Street Journal

Posted on by Roger Pearse

From the WSJ, some excerpts of a fascinating article by Alexandra Alter.  Note the reference to the manuscript of Michael the Syrian coming online!

One of the most ambitious digital preservation projects is being led, fittingly, by a Benedictine monk. Father Columba Stewart, executive director of the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library at St. John’s Abbey and University in Minnesota, cites his monastic order’s long tradition of copying texts to ensure their survival as inspiration.

His mission: digitizing some 30,000 endangered manuscripts within the Eastern Christian traditions, a canon that includes liturgical texts, Biblical commentaries and historical accounts in half a dozen languages, including Arabic, Coptic and Syriac, the written form of Aramaic. Rev. Stewart has expanded the library’s work to 23 sites, including collections in Syria, Lebanon and Turkey, up from two in 2003. He has overseen the digital preservation of some 16,500 manuscripts, some of which date to the 10th and 11th centuries. Some works photographed by the monastery have since turned up on the black market or eBay, he says.

Among the treasures that Rev. Stewart has digitally captured: a unique Syriac manuscript of a 12th-century account of the Crusades, written by Syrian Christian patriarch Michael the Great. The text, a composite of historical accounts and fables, was last studied in the 1890s by a French scholar who made an incomplete handwritten copy. Western scholars have never studied the complete original, which was locked in a church vault in Aleppo, Syria. Rev. Stewart and his crew persuaded church leaders to let them photograph it last summer. A reproduction will be published this summer, and a digital version will be available through the library’s Web site.

In February, Rev. Stewart traveled to Assyrian and Chaldean Christian communities in Kurdish villages in northern Iraq, where he hopes to soon begin work on collections in ancient monastic libraries. “You have these ancient Christian communities, there since the beginning of Christianity, which are evaporating,” he says He’s now seeking access to manuscript collections in Iran and Georgia.

With his black monk’s habit, trimmed gray beard and deferential manner, Rev. Stewart has been able to make inroads into closed communities that are often suspicious of Western scholars and fiercely protective of their texts. Armed with 23-megapixel cameras and scanning cradles, he sets up imaging labs on site in monasteries and churches, and trains local people to scan the manuscripts.

…

For now, curators and conservationists say capturing endangered manuscripts should be a top priority. 

“This could be our only chance,” says Daniel Wallace, executive director of the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts, the Texas-based center that is attempting to digitally photograph 2.6 million pages of Greek New Testament manuscripts scattered in monasteries and libraries around the world. The group has discovered 75 New Testament manuscripts, many with unique commentaries, that were unknown to scholars. Mr. Wallace says one of the rare, 10th century manuscripts they photographed was in a private collection and was later sold, page by page, for $1,000 a piece. Others are simply disintegrating, eaten away by rats and worms, or rotting.

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2,000 year old papyrus roll found in Israel

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The Israeli Antiquities Authority have put out a press release here that they have seized a 2,000 year old papyrus roll, containing a text written in ancient Hebrew, in “an operation.”

A document thought to be an ancient text written on papyrus was seized yesterday (Tuesday) in an operation led by the Intelligence Office of the Zion Region and the Undercover Unit of the Border Police in Jerusalem, in cooperation with the Unit for the Prevention of Antiquities Robbery and the Archaeological Staff Officer in the Civil Administration.

The document is written in ancient Hebrew script, which is characteristic of the Second Temple period and the first and second centuries CE. This style of the writing is primarily known from the Dead Sea scrolls and various inscriptions that occur on ossuaries and coffins.

The document itself is written on papyrus. The papyrus is incomplete and was in all likelihood rolled up. It is apparent that pieces of it crumbled mainly along its bottom part. The holes along the left part of the document probably attest to the damage that was caused to it over time. The document measures 15 x 15 centimeters.

Fifteen lines of Hebrew text, written from right to left and one below the other, can be discerned in the document. In the upper line of the text one can clearly read the sentence “Year 4 to the destruction of Israel”. This is likely to be the year 74 CE – in the event the author of the document is referring to the year when the Second Temple was destroyed during the Great Revolt. Another possibility is the year 139 CE – in the event the author is referring to the time when the rural settlement in Judah was devastated at the end of the Bar Kokhba Revolt.

The name of a woman, “Miriam Barat Ya‘aqov”, is also legible …Also mentioned in … legal wording which deals with the property of a widow and her relinquishment of it. …

For downloading a high resolution image – click here

The genuineness of the document has yet to be established, they add, cautiously. 

This highlights that the desert regions of the Middle East still contain considerable numbers of books and documents, lying around, awaiting discovery.  Yet what efforts are being made to discover them?  Almost all the discoveries of books are accidental, made by fellahin in Egypt and promptly sold to dealers, or by bedouin in Israel and sold to dealers there.  Are any systematic searches being done?  If not, why not?

Note also how the finds always come from the two countries where an art-market exists.  What about the Jordanian desert?  The conditions for preservation are at least as good as those two countries.  Why aren’t we seeing mss from there?  Can’t someone persuade king Abdullah to do something?

I am reminded of a letter of the 9th century Nestorian Patriarch Timothy I, who records a find of Psalms in a manuscript in this region, in just the same manner as today.  The books are out there.

Thanks to Evangelical Textual Criticism and Paleojudaica for the info.  The Israeli link is apparently temporary, but the full text is at Paleojudaica.

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The 1941 discovery of works by Origen and Didymus at Toura in Egypt

Posted on by Roger Pearse

At the beginning of August 1941, a group of Egyptian labourers employed by British forces in Egypt were labouring to clear some of the ancient quarries of Tura, some 10km from Cairo, so that they could be used to store munitions.  The quarries are pierced with galleries constructed by the ancient Egyptians in order to obtain stone to build the monuments of Memphis, and open into the flank of the mountain, where they fan out from a vast rotunda inside.

In one of the three galleries of quarry 35, around 20-25 metres from the rotunda, a worker placed his hand by chance on a considerable pile of papyrus.  This pile lay on the floor of the gallery, without anything to protect it or hide it, and covered only by the dust and chippings that had fallen on to it little by little during the centuries.  This formed a small mound about a metre high on one side of the gallery. 

The fellahs promptly divided the find among themselves.  Bindings until then intact were broken, folios dispersed.  Some say that some of the pages were used for fuel a fire for coffee.  Others were dunked in water to bring out the colour in order to make them seem more appealing to the dealers.

A week later, around 10 August, the police and the Service of Antiquities became aware that a find had been made, but too late.  Only one part of the found was retrieved by purchase, at a  high price, through the intermediary of the servant of an antiquary.  Three lots were successively acquired and deposited at the Cairo museum.  The rest — the main part — were removed and sold, page by page, at inflated prices to collectors.  The destination of some is no doubt even today unknown.

The manuscripts were written around the end of the 6th century on papyrus.  The language of the texts was Greek.  The state of the manuscripts was variable.  Each manuscript was composed of quaternions, each of four sheets folded to make sixteen pages.  The number of quaternions varied.  The quaternions were what was traded around, since there was little associating them together in the find into manuscripts.  The find was as follows:

Codex 1.  This was 29.5 x 16 cm, 6 quaternions, and contained Origen, Dialogue with Heracleides, and On Easter.  The quaternions were linked together, and so formed a unit.  It seems unlikely that the codex ever contained more.

Codex 2.  This was 28 x 18 cms, 6 quaternions, and contained extracts of Origen’s commentary on Romans; Extracts of his Contra Celsum; and a homily on the Witch of Endor.  This also seems to be complete.

Codex 3.  This was 27.5 x 24 cms, 15 quaternions, and contained the Commentary on Ecclesiastes, probably by Didymus the Blind.  This codex, like 4-7, had suffered in antiquity, since each of its quaternions was cut in two horizontally, then the two halves rejoined, and rolled up.  The cuts were done with great care to avoid the lines.  Since Ecclesiastes is 12 chapters long, it can be inferred that this manuscript was originally 25 quaternions long.  Part of the manuscript is in the Cairo collection, the rest in 1955 was in a private collection.

Codex 4.  This was 27 x 23 cms, 16 quaternions, and contained the Commentary on Genesis by Didymus the Blind.  The quaternions are numbered 1-16, and take the text up to Gen. 16:16.  Quaternion 1 is only fragmentary, however; the 6 pages of quaternion 16 are likewise falling apart.  If the work covered the whole of Genesis, this would require two codices of 30 quaternions; but it seems doubtful that these were at Tura.  The manuscript has blank pages, suggesting that the copyist did not complete the work.

Codex 5.  This was 27 x 24.5 cms, 14 quaternions, and contained the Commentary on the Psalms by Didymus the Blind.  Most of the pages of this were in private hands. 

Codex 6.  This was 27 x 22 cms, 26 quaternions, and contained the Commentary on Zachariah by Didymus the Blind.  This codex is complete.

Codex 7.  This was 31.5 x 15.5 cms, 25 quaternions, and contained the Commentary on Job by Didymus the Blind.  All but the last quaternion were at the Cairo Museum, the other being in private hands.

Codex 8.  This was 28.5 x 22 cms, 1 quaternion of 12 pages, and contained a Commentary on the Psalms of the Mountains and on John 6:3-28, by an unknown author.  It escaped notice in early reports.  The first page is blank, and much of the second also.  The commentary follows the Alexandrian exegesis. 

The museum thus ended up with 1,050 pages of the find, by various means.  It is permissible to wonder how much of it escaped.

These notes from H. Puech, Les nouveaux ecrits d’Origene et de Didyme decouverts a Toura, Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses 31 (1951), 293-329, and L. Doutreleau, Que savons-nous aujourdhui des papyrus de Toura, Recherches des sciences religieuses 43 (1955) 161-193.

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Coptic Museum Library — restoration of mss in progress

Posted on by Roger Pearse

This lengthy article in Al-Ahram records that a team of conservators are working over the manuscripts in the Coptic Museum in Cairo.  This collection contains not merely Coptic texts but also Arabic Christian manuscripts.  Thanks to Andie Byrnes at Egyptology News for this one.

The interest in the collection is welcome.  But… how can we access the mss?  How can we get reproductions?  There still seems to be no way to contact them using the internet, which is astonishing.  Especially when there is a website here.

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Manuscript news at Evangelical Textual Criticism

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The CSNTM team have discovered twenty-three (23!) previously unknown New Testament manuscripts in their trip to Athens.

There’s a post on how obtaining a reader’s pass for the Vatican library can allow you back-door access to the Vatican in general.

There is also a post on what search terms bring readers to the blog; which turns out to be stuff like “devil’s bible”!

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Waiting for Menander in the Vatican: 400 verses of Greek comedy discovered in a Syriac palimpsest manuscript

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Here is a translation of Prof. Harlfinger’s article in German, since very many people cannot read that language:

The Greek comedy writer Menander (342 – 292 BC) is rightly seen as a classic of the world literature. Recently 400 verses of the poet were discovered in the library of the Vatican in a Syriac palimpsest manuscript. The MS is Vat. sir. 623.

Six weeks ago in the reading room of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, the undersigned – who was busying himself there in the context of a widespread European project for the investigation of palimpsest Greek – ordered up a Syriac codex for inspection. In the 1965 printed catalogue it is stated that the Syriac had been written in 886, and that it was made by reuse of numerous parchment leaves with lower texts in Palestinian Aramaic, Greek, Arabic, and Armenian. Instead of the accustomed wait of about a half hour, the entire day passed, without the requested manuscript appearing. The following morning it was announced politely that the desired palimpsest volume would not be accessible, because another colleague was concerned with the analysis of the lower Greek text.

A good two weeks later, the Vatican let us know the secret. In a carefully phrased article by Giovanni Ricciardi in the “Osservatore Romano” of the 6th of December, the public learns that four hundred Greek verses of the comedy poet Menander (about 342–292 BC) have come to light in a Syrian Palimpsest code of the end of the 9th century; they belonged to a codex of Menander of the 4th century AD, and that there were further parchment leaves originally written in other languages used, after washing off of the original writing to replace it with Christian sermons in the Syriac language.

Half of the verses come from Menanders play “Dyskolos” (the misanthropist), which was published for the first time in 1958 by Victor Martin from the famous collection of the Bibliophile Martin Bodmer in Geneva, and was probably one of the most important papyrus finds of the 20th century. The other half – that is the exciting surprise – is from an unknown comedy, that is also by Menander, with a girl, a baby – perhaps the fruit of an act of violence – and an old woman as figures. The indicated characters can be recognized for example in the only fragmentary pieces of Menander, “the Heroes”, “the farmer”, “the Perinthian”.

This wonderful discovery is the find of Francesco D’Aiuto, a young professor of Byzantine Studies at the second University of Rome, “Tor Vergata” who was active until recently as a specialist in Greek manuscripts at the Vatican library. Now it is not just the profession who is waiting in hope that he will publish his findings in detail as soon as possible. It needs no gift as a prophet to predict that immediately afterwards a lively debate will take place among philologists, historians of literature and theatre specialists around the textual criticism and the interpretation of the new verses. For Menander is a classic of the world literature. He was “the favorite of a millennium” from the theatre into the school. The Roman stage – a Plautus, a Terence – adapted him, and he was significant for the Christians also. The generally valid and true-to-life subject matter of his pieces, the fine psychological character drawing, that he contributed to the art of linguistic expression, his dramaturgical skill – everything in addition, meant that he could be named in the same breath with Homer. Obviously he did not pass through the historical writing bottleneck into the Middle Ages. So studies in the philology of Menander have concentrated on papyrus finds since the end of the 19th century, above all from the preserving sand of Egypt – and we must not forget a hundred verses in elegant 4th century Majuscule on two parchment leaves (today in St. Petersburg), which the well known Bible researcher Constantine von Tischendorff found in 1844 in the monastery of St. Catherine in Sinai; this location, and the fact that our find was partially also overwritten with Syriac, must be considered in regard of the new Menander in the Vatican.

Syriac over Greek, Christian texts over Attic comedies – this does not represent a clash of cultures, nor monastic intolerance, but rather is primarily a sign of poverty. The parchment material obtained from animal skin (especially goat, sheep) was costly; for a larger volume a small animal herd had to be sacrificed. Thus the palimpsests that by a more or less thorough deletion of the original writing (scriptio inferior) with a sponge or scraper, so that the leaves could be used again (scriptio superior).

Since the sensational palimpsest discoveries at the beginning of the 19th century, such as Cicero’s “De re publica” in the Vatican by Angelo Mai, people have striven to make the lower writing visible through technical means. The chemical tinctures that caused persistent damage were followed by damage-free special photography and ultraviolet lamps in the 20th century. In the very last years, the first good results were obtained with multi-spectral digitalization, and in Europe, a network of cooperation emerged for digital palimpsest research. The signs therefore look good for the reading of the Menander in the Vatican, on whose discovery we congratulate Francesco D’Aiuto and we wait in anticipation for its publication.

F. D’Aiuto has since announced further details on the manuscript discovery: Graeca in codici orientali della Biblioteca Vaticana (con i resti di un manoscritto tardoantico delle commedie di Menandro), in: Tra Oriente e Occidente. Scritture e libri greci fra le regioni orientali di Bisanzio e l’Italia a cura di Lidia Perria, Rom 2003 (= Testi e studi bizantino-neoellenici XIV), S. 227-296 (hier 266-283 mit Tafeln 13-14).

Notes:

1) This article first appeared in: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Internationale Ausgabe, Nr. 301, am Montag, dem 29. Dezember 2003, Feuilleton S. 16. For this publication, the original heading by the author was restored and the concluding sentence added. The author is professor for classic philology at the University of Hamburg. He leads an EU project on palimpsest research (cf. http://www.rrz.uni-hamburg.de/RV).

UPDATE (21/6/2016): I learn from this link that other parts of the Dyscolus were found in P.Bodmer 4 in  1958; and that portions of the Misoumenos were found in 1981 in P.Oxy. XLVIII 3368.

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A palimpsest of Menander in the Vatican

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Menander did not reach us.  The New Comedy dramatists works were not part of the Byzantine school curriculum, and, at some time in the Dark Ages, the last manuscript was reused for other purposes.

A post in the CLASSICS-L list tells me that a manuscript was found in the Vatican in 2003, manufactured from reused parchment from a late-antique codex containing works by Menander.  Apparently hundreds of verses of this author can be recovered from the pages. 

A reference is given, with a mention of Wikipedia, which has a link to an article in German about this by D. Harlfinger (which says the Vatican ms. is a *Syriac* manuscript!):

F. D’Aiuto: Graeca in codici orientali della Biblioteca Vaticana (con i resti di un manoscritto tardoantico delle commedie di Menandro), in: Tra Oriente e Occidente. Scritture e libri greci fra le regioni orientali di Bisanzio e l’Italia, a cura di Lidia Perria, Rom 2003 (= Testi e studi bizantino-neoellenici XIV), S. 227-296 (esp. 266-283 and plates 13-14).

But the posters says that this “did not publish entire Greek text, and that in 2006 we were “still waiting” for an edition. “

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Coptic Paul found!

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The ps.gospel of Judas was sold together with three other manuscripts.  I have never been able to find what happened to one of them, which contained a Coptic version of three letters of Paul.  From Christian Askeland at Evangelical Textual Criticism I learn these excellent tidings:

Along with Codex Tchacos (= the Gospel of Judas Codex), two other codices were found. One of these contained the Pauline Epistles. This codex was sold about a year and a half ago and has been sent to Augsburg to be restored by Gregor Wurst. Apparently, it is also Sahidic with considerable Middle Egyptian influence. A picture has apparently been published of one side of a relatively intact leaf of Colossians in Ink and Blood Dead Sea Scrolls to the English Bible. Is there anyone out there who can send me a scan of the photo from this publication? The pamphlet was created as part of a traveling exhibition. cha25 [a] cam.ac.uk

In the comments he adds:

Gregor Wurst gave a paper at the International Association of Coptic Studies Conference in Cairo this last summer, and revealed the details posted here. In my notes, I have written “~13 fragmentary leaves, Galatians and Colossians”. Hans-Gebhard Bethge (Humboldt University, Berlin) is editing the text.

I think that these fragments were bought at an antiquities auction — not on eBay, although I am aware of the eBay incident. 

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