Palimpsests!

Wilson, Nigel.  ”The Archimedes Palimpsest: A Progress Report.”  The Journal of the Walters Art Museum 62 (2004), 61-68.

                This particular article is very interesting, and it shows the importance of palimpsests to historians.  This article deals with a particular manuscript found by a German Byzantinist, Heiberg, in Istanbul in 1908.  Soon after the First World War the manuscript mysteriously ended up in the hands of French family who, despite the beggings of various historians, did not sell the texts to any museums.  After unsuccessfully attempting to sell the manuscript, the French family finally sold it for a relatively low price to a museum where it was available to be studied by many historians. 

                The manuscript was shown to be a palimpsest.  The newer writing was a eucholion, or a collection of prayers.  The underwriting consisted of three books of Archimedes which were copied sometime in the latter half of the tenth century, probably under the reign of Constantine VII Porphyrogentitus (the purple-born).  The upper writing was from either the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century.  The three books of Archimedes are On Floating Bodies, Stomachion, and the Method.  On Floating Bodies, surprisingly, is about floatation and why some things can float and others cannot.  The Stomachion, due to a mistransliteration of a word due to the poor condition of the manuscript was thought merely to be about a children’s puzzle until new technology allowed a better reading.  This better reading allowed historians to figure out the manuscript was an essay about combinatorics (it is a branch of mathematics dealing with countable objects… look it up on Wikipedia if you are really that interested).  The Method deals with the Greek concept of infinity and an early form of calculus. 

                This manuscript shows that advanced mathematics were known to the Byzantines and that classical authors continued to be read, studied, and copied throughout the Byzantine period.  The fact that these manuscripts were scraped and then written over also suggests that they were in high enough quantity (or at least that multiple copies had already been made) to destroy the original. 

                Although this article was mostly about the nature of the palimpsest, Wilson also goes into some of the interesting points about the script.  The script does not make it clear where the Archimedes manuscript was written or even where the palimpsest process occurred.  The Archimedes scribe used more abbreviation than would be found in an ecclesiastical or even any other text.  Most of these abbreviations are of uncommon technical terms.  This means that the manuscript was copied for people knowledgeably in advanced (well, advanced for the tenth century) mathematics.  The scribe also made some odd correction when he made mistakes in word order.  When these kinds of mistakes are made, most scribes will put an alpha above the word that is first and a beta above the word that follows.  This scribe drew two dashes over the word that was supposed to be second and one dash above the word that was supposed to be first.  Corresponding dashes were also placed in the margins.

Alexiad

Taking a look at the Alexiad

Neville, Leonora.  “Lamentation, History, and Female Authorship in Anna Komnene’s Alexiad.”  Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 53 (2013), 192- 218.

                Byzantines wrote in three levels of writing, Attic, Koine, and demotic.  Demotic was not actually written down until about the late eleventh or early twelfth centuries.  Koine was usually reserved for either religious texts or state documents (koine was the official language of the court).  Attic was reserved for copies of the Classics and creating new works based on Classical styles.  The most widely written of the styles was histories.  Greeks had a long tradition of writing histories going back to Herodotus.  Previous kingdoms had kept records and made monuments describing historical events, but these were often propaganda.  Herodotus systematically interviewed eyewitnesses to the events he wrote about.  When he reported myths and uncertain accounts he usually identified them as such.  The Byzantines kept this tradition alive into the Late Middle Ages.  The most widely read of these medieval histories is the Alexiad.

                The Alexiad was written by the princess Anna Komnene about the reign of her father Alexios Komnenos (ruled 1081- 1118).  It is considered an important primary source for both the workings of the Byzantine court and the First Crusade (from the Byzantine perspective of course).  Anna wrote in Attic style to emulate the Classical authors, but her style was much different than other authors of her time.  She was an eyewitness to these events and she also sought the accounts of others.  Her narration differs from other contemporary authors through her use of emotional outbursts in her narrative.  These outbursts have often confused historians and have led some to criticize the Alexiad.  Edward Gibbon, probably the most hated historian by Byzantinists, claimed that these outburst just showed the vanity of a female author. 

                Neville explains that many other historians have tried to explain Anna’s emotional outbursts.  These outbursts revolve around her memories of dead loved ones such as her husband, brother, mother, and father.  Few modern historians take on Gibbon’s views, but they are still uncertain why Anna included these outbursts for people who were long dead.  Neville claims that Anna’s outbursts follow a long tradition of Greek women.  Greek women traditionally were the mourners and leaders of lamentation.  Most of the contributions of women in Classical writings are lamentations and mournings.  This was an acceptable form of expression for women, who generally had less freedoms than they do now.   Anna was well versed in Classical works, especially the Iliad and the Odyssey.  These works are full of women interrupting their dialogue with outbursts of lamentation.  This behavior would have seemed normal to the readers of Anna’s day.  Neville claims that Anna used this method to make her writing easier for her male counterparts to digest because women did not usually meddle in the intellectual sphere in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.  Neville also notes that it is ironic that the method Anna used to make herself more acceptable to her contemporaries has confused modern historians.  I have also found it ironic that none of these historians have entertained the idea that Anna was genuinely sad about all of these deaths.

Transcription of a Byzantine manuscript of the Pauline Epistles

Byzantine Manuscript Transcription

Introduction:

Before I could even hope to transcribe anything from Medieval Greek, I first had to gain a better knowledge of how Greek letters were formed including the various ligatures and forms of diacritics.  I found a few neat videos on Youtube explaining Medieval Greek letter and word formantion.

1.  Alphabet with letter variants

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A24NuGvK5cc

2.  Diacritics

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcFxxRsVAD0

3.  Basic Ligatures

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erxqLP3WKTw

4.  Unique Ligatures

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GryhwMJAjoU

The Manuscript:

The particular manuscript I chose to transcribe is an eleventh century copy of Romans.  This manuscript is identified as MS 5116.   The below link is part of a collection from the British Library.  They are in the process of scanning all of their Byzantine manuscripts.

http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=add_ms_5116_fs001r

http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Browse.aspx

Transcription:

 I started at the very beginning of Romans.

1.  Title

Pros Rwmaious Theia Epistole Paulou

Notes: Uncial title and the Rho-Omega ligature.

2.  archei (the notes in the right hand margin are unreadable)

Notes:  Guidelines and marginal notes (scholia).

3.  Paulos doulos i(eso)u ch(risto)u kleitos apostolos

Notes: nomina sacra IU XU

4.  athorisme[nos] eis euaggelion Th(eo)u, ho pro-

Notes: faded ink, nomina sacra, breaking up words and double gamma

5.  epeggeilato dia tw[n] [p]ropheitwn autou

Notes: ligatures, and similarity between omega and pi.

6.  en graphais  hagiais, peri tou huiou autou

Note: “agi“ ligature and punctuation

7.  tou genomenou ek spermatos da(ui)d ka-

Notes: similarity between mu and nu.

8.  ta sarka, tou horisthentos huiu Th(eo)u en

Notes: square and rounded breathing marks used together.

9.  dunam[ei] kata pn(eum)a agiwsuneis ex ana-

Notes: crazy ex.

10.  stasews nekrwn I(eso)u Ch(risto)u tou k[urio]u heimwn,.

Notes: nomina sacra and “st” ligature.

11.  Di ou elabomen charin kai apostolein

Notes: ornamented delta and no abbreviation for Kai.

12.  eis hupakoein pistews en pasin tois

Notes: Kapa and Eta shapes

13.  [e]thnesin huper tou onomatos autou,

Notes: seemingly odd word breaks.

14.  en hois este kai humeis kleitoi I(eso)u Ch(risto)u pasin

Notes: nomina sacra and hanging I

15.  (top of page 2) Tois ousin en romei agapeitois Th(eo)u klei-

Notes: nomina sacrum (I don’t know what the scholia says), and ornamented tau.

16.  tois agiois, charis humin kai eireinei apo

            Notes: eta shapes and ei ligature.

17.  Th(eo)u p(at)r(o)s heimwn kai K(urio)u I(eso)u Ch(risto)u.  prwton

Notes: Nomina sacra, and pi-omega similarities

18.  men eucharistw twi Th(e)wi mou dia I(eso)u Ch(risto)u

Notes: nomina sacra and iota subscript.

19.  huper pantwn humwn hoti hei pistis hu-

            Notes: rounded breathing marks and the square breathing above hoti.

20.  mwn kataggelletai en holw twi kosmw.

Note: iota subscript, ambiguous punctuation

21.  martus gar mou estin ho Th(eo)s Hwi latreuw en

Note: nomina sacra, ornamented mu

22. Twi pn(eumat)i mou en twi euaggeliw tou hui-

            Notes: iota subscript and nomina sacra

23.  ou autou, hws adialeiptws mneian humw(n)

            Notes: adialeiptws has interesting ligatures.

24.  poioumai pontote epi twn pro-

            Notes: pontote and seeming word separation.

25.  euchwn mou deomenos, ei pws eidei

            Notes: ei ligature and pi and omega next to each other.

26.  pote euodwtheisomai en twi theleima-

            Notes: iota subscript and word of death.

27. ti tou Th(eo)u elthein pros humas.  Epipo-

Note: nomina sacra

28.  Thw gar idein humas, hina ti metadw cha-

            Notes: red theta

29.  risma humin pneumatikon eis to

            Notes: interesting lack of nomina sacrs

30.  sterichthenai humas, touto de esti[n]

31.   sumparakleitheinai en humin dia teis

            Notes: interesting use of two differen etas in one word of death.

32.  en alleilois pistews humwn te (kai)

Note:  Abbreviation for Kai (and)

33.  emou.  Ou thelw de humas agnoein

34.  Adelphoi , hoti pollakis proethemein

35.  tou elthein pros humas, kai ekolu-

            Notes: pros instead of epi (used in most texts), and two different forms of kappa.

36.  thein achri tou deuro, hina tina karpov

Greek Manuscript Tradition Part 2

Studies in Greek Manuscript Tradition part 2

            The first of the essays that I chose for this past week was “Byzantine Lists of Old and New Geographical Names.”  The Byzantines were always looking back to classical Greek and Roman times.  This was no surprise as they were the remnants of the Eastern Roman Empire.  This is also heavily reflected in their writings.  Anna Komnene often refers to foreigners by an archaic classical name such as “Kelt” for Normans, “Scythes” for Petchenegs, and “Alemanni.”  This was a common practice amongst Byzantine historians, especially those writing in Attic Greek. 

This idea of classicizing names also carried over into place names.  Byzantine authors writing in both Attic styles and Koine styles often referred to place names by their ancient names instead of their medieval names.  This often confuses some modern Byzantinists if they are unused to this device.  Luckily for modern historians of the Byzantine Empire, the medieval Greek authors often left lists of classical place names and the medieval Greek equivalents.  These lists are called metonomasy. While these have little to do with the actual script, these lists show that the Byzantine authors were always looking to classical works as a model.  This helps to explain the numerous other literary devices that are found in Byzantine writings.

The second essay, “Three Greek Scribes Working for Bessarion: Trivizias, Callistus, Hermonymus,” describes another major stumbling block in studying medieval Greek manuscripts.  It is often difficult to assign a particular manuscript to a place, time, or scribe unless it has a colophon making these things obvious.  Both uncials and miniscule scripts overlapped for much of Byzantine history.  Because Byzantium was such a conservative empire for much of its history (at least in a literary sense), scripts tended to remain in use even as new ones came into being.  This has led to many scholars confusing scribes.  One of the more dramatic cases is the Georges of Crete.  He was originally thought of as a scribe of just one manuscript, but other manuscripts without colophons but bearing a similar style were assigned to George.  These manuscripts were later discovered to be from different scribes, but their names were unknown.  Thus, George of Crete became the Georges of Crete.

This particular essay goes into the identities of the different scribes called the Georges of Crete.  There were three of them, and none were actually named George.  These three scribes lived and worked in the period following the Fall of Constantinople.  They worked mainly in Venice (but their manuscripts were found in Crete).  These three represented the movement of Greek scholars and scribes into Italy and Western Europe after the Ottoman invasion.  They helped to bring about the Renaissance in Italy and were the ones responsible for the distinctive Greek script from that time.  That script was mentioned a few posts back as being a rather simple and clear script.  It was designed almost exclusively to teach to Italians and Western Europeans who had no knowledge of Greek cursive.  

Greek Manuscript Tradition Part 1

Diller, Aubrey.  Studies in Greek Manuscript Tradition.  Amsterdam: Adolf M. Hakkert, 1983.

Part 1

This book is a collection of fifty-three essays written on different aspect of Byzantine Greek manuscripts.  Many of the essays are about the origins and travels of a particular manuscript, but many deal with the writing styles and script styles of the Greek authors.  As my previous posts have mentioned, dating a manuscript that does not include a date or a signature of a known scribe is very difficult due to each style coexisting with each other.  Because this book is divided into numerous essays, I will choose multiple essays to read for each week.

A) “A Companion of the Uspenski Gospels.”

This article deals with a codex called the Uspenski Gospels.  This codex included a colophon, a mark or short description by the author usually giving a date and name for the author, that dated the codex to AD 835.  This was the second Greek codex to have been dated (this article was written in 1956), and is one of the earliest manuscripts containing miniscule letters.  The author first goes into the travel log of the manuscript.  It was written in Palestine and ended up in Russia in the eighteen hundreds.  After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, many Byzantines fled to Orthodox Russia seeking asylum, and they took their manuscripts with them.  The codex includes the seven Catholic Epistles and the fourteen Pauline Epistles.  The text is in two columns.  The first column is written in majuscule (Uncial).  This is the main text.  The second column is a commentary on the epistles.  The commentary is mainly written in miniscule, but there are some majuscule forms of letters throughout the commentary.  This document presents a problem to scholars because while it is one of the first surviving examples of miniscule writing, the miniscule is so well developed that there must have been many precursors.  This makes it very difficult to put a date on when miniscule began being used.

B) “Incipient Errors in Manuscripts.”

This rather fun and interesting article explains some of the different errors found in manuscripts.  The author points out that the two most common types of errors are omission of whole lines and the repetition of lines.  These are most prevalent in manuscripts copied during the Renaissance in Italy.  This is probably because the scribes were so focused on copying down each line that they did not realize they had skipped or repeated a line.  This seems to suggest that Italian students were copying these manuscripts under a either a Greek tutor or an Italian tutor who knew Greek.  These grammatical units that are omitted or repeated are called homoeoteleuton.  When these scribes, or their supervisors, realized the mistake they would either erase the error and continue writing the correct version, or, if the error was found in the middle of a paragraph, the author would scratch out the mistake and put the correct version in the margins as a note.  The author suggests that these errors could be a useful tool in determining whether a manuscript is a derivative or not.  A derivative manuscript is simply a manuscript that is a copy of another, older manuscript.

Development of Greek part 2

Barbour, Ruth.  Greek Literary Hands: A.D. 400-1600.  Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981.

Part 2

In the second part of her book, Barbour talks about the development of letter forms, the use of diacritics, and the use of guides.  She claims that the beginnings of these changes are hard to date because many of the manuscripts themselves are difficult to date.  Many of these different ways to write letters and represent diacritic marks also tend to coexist, even in within the same manuscript.  The shape of words tended to remain fairly similar, and only varied slightly.  The biggest example is the eta (η).  This sometimes had an extended neck and shortened legs, so it looked more like our “h” than a typical eta.

Greek used to be a tonal language (not in quite the same sense as Chinese), and these tones were marked for each word by the Hellenistic period.  The Greeks had three different tonal markings:   ︠,  ︡  ,  and   ︢.  These represented a rising voice, a falling voice, and a circumflex voice.  These are not pronounced as tones in modern times, instead they are pronounced as accents.  Historians are unsure as to whether these tones were pronounced as tones or accent marks during the Byzantine era.  In modern times these tonal markings (also called diacritics) are usually referred to as accent marks.  Historians also use that term to describe those same markings in the Byzantine, Hellenistic, and Classical eras of Greek writing because they are unsure as to when they switched from being tonal to accentual.  This is probably a form of diglossia.

Greek words also have another distinguishing feature called breathing marks.  The Greek language does not actually have a letter for the /h/ sound.  Instead, if a word begins with an /h/ sound (or a rolling /r/) then a ( is written above the first vowel (this only applies to words that actually begin with a vowel, as no self-respecting Greek would put an /h/ sound in front of a consonant).  If a word does not begin with an /h/ sound then a ) is added over the initial vowel.  These marks over words beginning with vowels, called closed and open breathing marks respectively, made it so Greek scribes saw little need in separating words.  The breathing marks seemed, at least to them, to sort out the words that would be difficult to tell apart anyways.  The breathing marks were also sometimes marked with └ ┘instead of rounded marks.  These square marks tend to be from earlier manuscripts from before 900, but they also continued to exist along with the rounded marks well into the thirteenth century.  They were even used together in the same manuscript.

Thisisapainforforeign,modernstudentstoread,butforthemitwasnotverydifficultastheyknewthelanguage.  Luckily, for the modern reader, the scribes used punctuation marks to show the ends of sentences (marked by a floating “.”) and questions (marked by a semicolon).  In miniscule scripts important words such as nouns and verbs often began with an uncial form of the letter.  Words ending in a sigma or an alpha also often changed these letters to their uncial form.  This further helped readers to distinguish between words.  When division did occur they were usually to make the page seem symmetrical and often did not break between words, but in their middle.

Greek scribes used guidelines in formal manuscripts to keep the text straight.   Uncial, and the first miniscule stood on top of the guidelines much like we write today.  Eventually the scribes changed their writing styles.  Historians are not entirely sure when this change occurred, because like everything else in Byzantine writing, these styles coexisted for most of the Byzantine era.  These different styles of guides including hanging the letters below a line or of the lines passing through the middle of the letters.  Multiple guide styles were often used within the same manuscript, especially if it seemed that it changed scribes.

Development of Greek part 1

Barbour, Ruth.  Greek Literary Hands: A.D. 400-1600.  Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981.

Part I

                This rather interesting book is divided into three main sections.  The first section is a very long introduction that explains the history of the Byzantine text.  The second part is a bibliography that turned out to be mostly in German.  The third part is a list of scanned portions of Byzantine manuscripts and their descriptions.  The most relevant portion of this book for our class is the introduction to the book, though this is a poor name as the introduction is about a third of the book.  Barbour goes through the various periods of script development from uncial and miniscule up to the varying hands of the provincials and Renaissance. 

                Before she delves into the different periods of medieval Greek script, Barbour mentions two big problems in mapping the development of Byzantine Script.  The first of these is that most of the thousand plus dateable manuscripts fall between into two categories: religious texts from about 950 to 1200 and a mixture of texts between 1300 and 1600.  There is an understandable lack of texts between 1204, when the Fourth Crusade conquered Constantinople, and 1261, when the Empire of Nicaea reconquered Constantinople.  There are very few dateable texts from the other periods of Byzantine history.  The second problem is that there are no distinct differences between scripts based on time and place of writing.  Barbour explains this by saying that because Byzantium did not break apart as the Western Empire did, they were able to maintain a more unified and traditional way of writing.  She also mentions that as the Byzantine Empire lost territories to enemies such as the Arabs, Bulgars (excepting when Basil II slew a few), and Normans they developed the idea that they had to protect their time honored-traditions.  This last problem explains why it is difficult to date manuscripts that are neither signed nor state where they were copied or created.

                The first major script of the Byzantine era (most scholars agree this started in the early fifth century, but others argue various other dates) was the uncial script.  Uncial just means a script that is written in all capital letters.  This was probably adopted from the Latin uncial script used by the Romans because the Hellenistic and Classical Greeks wrote in a miniscule script (in fact, early forms of the Greek New Testament were written in miniscule Koine).   Byzantines used the uncial script between roughly 400 and 1200 A.D.  This period is divided into two halves.  The first half saw all literature being written in uncial script, while the second half (800 onwards) saw uncial written in official documents and in liturgical texts (which would be read in dim light, so they needed to be clear and large).

                The second script to emerge was the miniscule script.  This script contained lower-case letters; capital letters were still used for proper nouns and the beginnings of paragraphs and pages only.  Miniscule lasted from about 800 all the way into the seventeenth century.  The miniscule script saw very little change until about the thirteenth century.  Without a signature, date, or stated place of manufacture it is nearly impossible to date or place the manuscript.  Sometimes historians are able to tell whether a manuscript was written in the provinces of Greece or Anatolia as opposed to in Constantinople by the quality of the items used in the manuscript’s production.  In order for this observation to be possible a lot of different factors have to fall into place.  Constantinople was much wealthier than any other city or province in Byzantium, so provincial manuscripts were often made of poorer quality and written with instruments influenced by either Europe or Syria.  Even these details do not guarantee that a script can be dated or placed.

                The third period of script development in Byzantium was during the late Byzantine period (1261-1453).  During the second half of the thirteenth century a script in which letters lost their proportionate size developed.  Some letters, often the first and last letters of each word, would be written with crazy stylistic whooshes and swirls along with being much larger than the other letters.  Middle letters of words would sometimes be reduced to unreadable sizes.  This was possibly a reactionary element to the chaotic times of the Latin invasions of Greece and the steady decline of Byzantium.  By the end of the thirteenth century the craziness died down and the miniscule returned to a similar style as the pre-Latin invasion of 1204.

                The final period of the Byzantine script was during the Fall of Byzantium and the Renaissance (1400-1600).  This period saw many Byzantine scholars fleeing the advance of the Ottomans.  They mostly fled to Italy, but some went as far afield as England.  These scholars began teaching Greek to Italian students and copying Greek manuscripts for Italian use.  This helped spark the Italian Renaissance.  Because the scholars were teaching Greek to western Europeans they had to keep the script neat and simple.  Out of this migration of scholars developed a script that was clear and almost cartoonish in its simplicity when compared to former Greek scripts.  This script was eventually used to print Greek well into the nineteenth century.