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Literary Snippets (Reader)

A Colophon Reader


This companion volume to Literary Snippets: Colophons Across Space and Time (Gorgias Press, 2023) gives examples of colophons (and their translations) from the Ancient Near East up to the pre-modern world, in Akkadian, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, and Persian.
Publisher: Gorgias Press LLC
Availability: In stock
SKU (ISBN): 978-1-4632-4402-6
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Publication Status: In Print
Publication Date: Feb 27,2024
Interior Color: Black
Trim Size: 7 x 10
Page Count: 197
Languages: English
ISBN: 978-1-4632-4402-6
$114.95
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This companion volume to Literary Snippets: Colophons Across Space and Time (Gorgias Press, 2023) gives examples of colophons from the Ancient Near East up to the pre-modern world, from different traditions – Akkadian, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, and Persian. Colophons typically provide their readers with the historical context in which the scribe produced his or her work: Who was the scribe? When and where was the manuscript produced? For whom was it produced and who paid for it? But colophons are far more rich. They are literary works in their own right, having a style and rhetoric independent of the main literary text of the manuscript. Some are assertive, providing contextual data about the scribe/publisher and manuscript/book; others are expressive, demonstrating the scribe’s feelings and wishes. Some are directive, asking the reader for an action; others declarative, providing all sorts of statements about the scribe/publisher or even the reader. The latter sometimes provide historical facts otherwise lost to history: wars, earthquakes, religious events, and legal agreements. Through the colophons and translations in this volume we hope to present the colophon as a literary genre, and as literature to be studied, read and enjoyed.

This companion volume to Literary Snippets: Colophons Across Space and Time (Gorgias Press, 2023) gives examples of colophons from the Ancient Near East up to the pre-modern world, from different traditions – Akkadian, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, and Persian. Colophons typically provide their readers with the historical context in which the scribe produced his or her work: Who was the scribe? When and where was the manuscript produced? For whom was it produced and who paid for it? But colophons are far more rich. They are literary works in their own right, having a style and rhetoric independent of the main literary text of the manuscript. Some are assertive, providing contextual data about the scribe/publisher and manuscript/book; others are expressive, demonstrating the scribe’s feelings and wishes. Some are directive, asking the reader for an action; others declarative, providing all sorts of statements about the scribe/publisher or even the reader. The latter sometimes provide historical facts otherwise lost to history: wars, earthquakes, religious events, and legal agreements. Through the colophons and translations in this volume we hope to present the colophon as a literary genre, and as literature to be studied, read and enjoyed.

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ContributorBiography

SabineSchmidtke

Sabine Schmidtke is Professor of Islamic Intellectual History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. She has published extensively on Islamic and Jewish intellectual history, as well as the Muslim reception of the Bible and its early translation history into Arabic. Her works include Theologie, Philosophie und Mystik im zwölferschiitischen Islam des 9./15. Jahrhunderts: Die Gedankenwelten des Ibn Abī Ǧumhūr al-Aḥsāʾī (um 838/1434-35–nach 906/1501) (Brill, 2000), The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Theology (OUP, 2016), and, together with Hassan Ansari, Studies in Medieval Islamic Intellectual Traditions (Lockwood Press, 2017). She is also the executive editor of Intellectual History of the Islamicate World (Brill) and, with Hassan Ansari, of Shii Studies Review (Brill).

GeorgeKiraz

George A. Kiraz is the founder and director of Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute, the Editor-in-Chief of Gorgias Press, and a Senior Research Associate at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He earned an M.St. degree in Syriac Studies from the University of Oxford (1991) and an M.Phil. and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge (1992, 1996). He has published extensively in the fields of computational linguistics, Syriac studies, and the digital humanities. His latest books include The Syriac Orthodox in North America (1895–1995): A Short History (2019) and Syriac-English New Testament (2020).

George is an ordained Deacon of the rank of Ewangeloyo (Gospler) in the Syriac Orthodox Church where he also serves on several Patriarchal, Synodal, and local committees. He lives in Piscataway, NJ, with his wife Christine and their children, Tabetha Gabriella, Sebastian Kenoro, and Lucian Nurono.

Table of Contents (v)

Foreword (George Anton Kiraz and Sabine Schmidtke) vii

Two Dedicatory Colophons from the Late Babylonian Period (Szilvia Sövegjártó) 1

Ashurbanipal’s Dedication to the Temple Library of Nabû (Jon Taylor, Enrique Jiménez, Babette Schnitzlein and Sophie Cohen) 5

Opening Formulas by Scribes in Talmudic Manuscripts (Menachem Katz and Hillel Gershuni) 11

Eleven Colophons by Ten Printers from Seven Cities in the Cairo Genizah (Nick Posegay) 25

The Colophons of Two Tenth-Century Sibling Scribes (Robert Vanhoff) 39

Early Christian Arabic Colophons from the Palestinian Monasteries: Edition with Translation and Commentary (Miriam L. Hjälm and Peter Tarras) 47

A ‘Colophon’ or a ‘Chronicle’? A Lengthy Garshuni-Arabic Colophon (Ephrem Aboud Ishac) 99

Nun-Scribes’ Colophons in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Italy (Melissa Moreton) 143

Five Arabic and Persian Colophons of Mathematical Treatises (Hamid Bohloul) 153

The Colophon of the Psalter Ms. Paris, BnF, Suppl. Pers. 1: A Witness to the Writing of a Trans-Judeo-Persian Manuscript (Ali B. Langroudi) 169

“A Scholarly Copyist”: Early Ilkhanid Intellectual Networks Through the Prism of Two Colophons (Aslisho Qurboniev and Gowaart Van Den Bossche) 181

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