Notes from the Field: Materiality

Gorgias Press eBooks, 2023

The present study offers a comparative analysis of colophons written in Arabic by Christian scribes at the monasteries of Saint Chariton, Saint Sabas, and Saint Catherine in the ninth and tenth centuries CE. These monasteries have played a crucial role in the formation of the early Christian Arabic manuscript tradition. The colophons of these manuscripts provide the most immediate access to the socio-cultural milieu of their producers. The present study is based on a selection of 20 colophons, which are explicitly connected to one of the three monasteries. Our main aim is to draft a typology of early Christian Arabic colophons as a means to investigate the various issues surrounding emergent Christian Arabic scribality. Additionally, we will discuss paleographical features of the handwriting of the scribes who authored the colophons discussed here. As we will show, these can be used to connect anonymous colophons and manuscripts without colophons, at least with some probability, to the workshops of these monasteries. Overall, our aim is to highlight the microhistorical significance of early Christian Arabic colophons, which not only offer spatio-temporal, prosopographical, social, intellectual, and, to some extent, economic coordinates for the contextualisation of early Christian Arabic manuscript production, but also allow us to catch a glimpse of early Christian Arabic scribal self-perception.

In this chapter, we offer the Arabic text of 20 colophons of early, i.e. pre-1000 CE, Christian Arabic manuscripts together with English translations and short commentaries. All these colophons are in some way or another connected with one (or more) of the three most important monastic centers of early Christian Arabic manuscript production: the monasteries of Saint Chariton and Saint Sabas in the Judean Desert and the Monastery of Saint Catherine in the south of the Sinai Peninsula. 2 The names of these places are either mentioned explicitly in the colophons or can be connected to them through the names of scribes, which we know were active there. In the following, the place of the colophon in the manuscript is indicated by means of the folio number. In one case (see section 1.5 below), no such information 1 This paper is a companion to "Early Christian Arabic Colophons from the Palestinian Monasteries:

Literary Snippets: A Colophon Reader, 2024

“A ‘Colophon’ or a ‘Chronicle’? A Lengthy Garshuni-Arabic Colophon” in Literary Snippets: A Colophon Reader, edited by Sabine Schmidtke and George Anton Kiraz, Gorgias Press 2024, pp. 101-145. "At the end of the Shḥimo (Daily Office) manuscript (MS) from the collection of the Church of Forty Martyrs in Mardin No. 1099 (CFMM 01099), the Garshuni colophon documents information about the scribe and the date of the MS. Surprisingly, the Garshuni-Arabic colophon continues to narrate some contemporary historical events, such as the life and the death of Patriarch Peter III (IV), and about the problematic conflict among the competing bishops of who is going to be the successor Patriarch...."

2024

This article deals with the study of the Dagestan handwritten tradition through an examination of colophons found in Arabic and Arabographic manuscripts produced by Dagestanis between the 16th and 20th centuries. The author examined colophons of Arabic manuscripts stored in various public and private collections throughout Dagestan. The process of copying a manuscript often involved the scribe checking their work against the original text (protograph) and other manuscripts. The quality of the final handwritten book depended significantly on both the quality of the protograph and the availability of other manuscripts for collation. Colophons sometimes contain information recorded by the scribe concerning the copying process, the circumstances surrounding the creation of the manuscript, the protograph used, and any other manuscripts consulted during the copying process. Thus, the colophon is an important and valuable historical source that sheds light on numerous aspects of Arab-Muslim written culture in Dagestan. Information detailing the process of copying manuscripts appears in Dagestan colophons around the end of the 17th century, which coincides with a qualitative leap in the Arabic manuscript tradition and Muslim education during this period. This phenomenon can be associated with a new stage of Islamization in Dagestan, which began in the 17th century and involved a deepening of Islamic influence. As a result, the number of madrasas-Muslim spiritual and educational centers-increased significantly during this period. These madrasas, which became the primary places for manuscript copying, relied on high-quality educational materials in the form of reliable copies of Arabic manuscripts on various Muslim disciplines.

2020

This paper unfolds parts of the dynamic, yet mostly hidden, history of MS Sinai Arabic 151 based on its paleographical, codicological, paratextual, and textual features. Combining these aspects opens new horizons of research in the Arabic Bible manuscripts that had previously received attention limited solely to the text. MS Sinai, Ar. 151 is an intact manuscript containing the Pauline Epistles, Acts of the Apostles, and the Catholic Epistles. Its fame derives mainly from its colophon, which dates it to 867CE, and bestows it with the distinction of belonging to the earliest Arabic Bibles. In observing the various stages through which the manuscript evolved from two separate units of production into the codex preserved today, several aspects of the life of MS Sinai, Ar. 151, such as the copies made from it, its damage and restoration, and the functions it served, become clearer. Furthermore, for different reasons, scholars have cast shadows on its colophon's authenticity. Our investigation clarifies that there is no reason to suspect the authenticity of the colophon.

De Gruyter eBooks, 2022

Colophons have rarely been preserved in Tocharian manuscripts, as the final leaves of pustaka format manuscripts are often destroyed or lost. The corpus features, however, a significant number of sub-colophons, i.e. colophons written at the end of the sections of a longer Buddhist work. A particular instance are those colophons of the chapters of the drama about Maitreyasamiti in Tocharian A, that may be compared with the parallel colophons in the Old Uyghur text Maitrisimit nom bitig, translated from Tocharian. In addition to the author and translator names, these colophons contain the name and the number of the chapters. Several colophons have been transmitted with a text containing the names of the donors who sponsored manuscript copy. This mention is frequently accompanied by wishes and words of praise, highlighting the reward donors and their family expect from copying a sacred text. Similar instances are to be found in manuscripts in Tocharian B. In both Tocharian languages, one may observe the development of writing colophons in verse, as a literary practice that certainly gained significance for Buddhist culture in the Tarim Basin during the second half of the first millennium CE.