Miscellaneous Identifications I: A New Fragment by the Scribe Antony David of Baghdad

1. The collection of Arabic manuscripts from St Catherine’s Monastery is of particular importance for our understanding of early Christian Arabic manuscript production. According to André Binggeli, it functions like a prism through which we must look at the production of manuscripts not only on Mount Sinai, but also in other places with which the monastery was interconnected.¹ In no other collection do we find as many Christian Arabic manuscripts written before the year 1000 CE (even if only some of them were written on site). Together with Miriam L. Hjälm, I have recently edited and translated a number of colophons of this corpus, all written in the 9th and 10th century CE.² They play an important role in the dating of manuscripts by the same scribes or workshops of scribes and provide an exclusive insight into the institutional and social history of early Christian Arabic scribality. In this series of posts, I will document a few identifications that I was able to make while studying the work of these scribes. These identifications are all related to dispersed Sinaitic manuscripts.

2. This post is about a fragment that can be found in the back cover of MS Sinai, St Catherine’s Monastery, Syr. 274. In his Catalogue of all manuscripts in the monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai, Murad Kamil noted with respect to this fragment: “Last folio in Arabic of the tenth century”.³ The same information was reproduced by Samir Khalil Samir in his 1986 Tables de concordance des manuscrits arabes chrétiens du Caire et du Sinaï.⁴ The Sinai Digital Manuscripts Library provides high-resolution images of the manuscript, allowing for a thorough inspection of the fragment (see also fig. 1).

3. We can give the following description of the fragment: The writing support is parchment. The fragment was used as a pastedown in the back board of the cover of the Syriac manuscript, which is a Sticherarion, i.e. a collection of hymns for services.⁵ The fragment’s dimensions are noticeably smaller than those of the Syriac manuscript and its back board. The Syriac manuscript measures 174 x 141 mm.⁶ The pastedown approximately measures 155 x 120 mm. It appears that the fragment was either cut to be used as a pastedown or was originally of a smaller size than the codex itself. In general, it is well preserved but it also exhibits some damages. The parchment has darkened and shows water stains. At the bottom we also see tears and holes. The text has only partly become illegible. The scribe used black-brown and red ink, the latter exclusively for textual dividers. The text has been partly re-inked by a later hand. There are no signs of ruling or pricking and no foliation or quire numbering has been preserved. On the folio there are 16 lines.

4. When we turn to the text, it quickly becomes clear that it is a fragment of a table of contents. The following is a standardised transcription⁷ with line numbers in round brackets:

(١) الرسول الذي تقول أن ربّنا بدّم صليبه ما [في] (٢) السماوات وما في الأرض : ومسئلة أسئل أنبا (٣) ثدروثى القدّيس : وقول ليحنّا فم ذهب القدّيس (٤) على المسكنة وصلاة لمري افرام القدّيس (٥) فم الذهب تفسير من الانجيل ليحنّا بن زبدي : (٦) تفسير بولس : ومن قول القدّيس يحنّا فم الذهب على [خوف] (٧) الله : شهادة حارث النجراني القدّيس وجميع من اشتهد (٨) معه من أصحابه القدّيسين بمدينة نجران : وقول القدّيس (٩) ماري فرام على الأبّهات الذين يتنحوا : وقول بأنبا اسطراط (٠١) الراهب القدّيس قاله على خرب بيت المقدس وأخذ (١١) الصليب وستى زخريا البطريرك القدّيس (٢١) وقول للأنبا القدّيس نسطاسيوس رئيس طور سيناء على تجلي (٣١) ربّنا المسيح لتلاميذه في طور تابور : وقوله أيضًا (٤١) على المزمور السادس : وقول للقدّيس يحنّا فم الذهب (٥١) على مزمور الخمسين : وقول للقدّيس ابيفانيوس [أسقف] (٦١) قبرس مديخ الطاهرة مرتمريم والدة [الله] […]⁸

5. Fortunately, we can match this table of contents with a specific manuscript: all these texts are contained in MS Sinai, St Catherine’s Monastery, Ar. 428 in the exact order of the table of contents, which leaves no doubt that the new fragment was the original table of contents of this manuscript.⁹ Some of the first (and last) folios of this manuscript are preserved in MS Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cod.arab. 1069. According to Binggeli, at the beginning, no more than one folio can be missing, on which there may have been a table of contents.¹⁰ This is exactly our newly identified fragment. In addition, we can date the fragment more precisely not only because of the now identified parent codex, but also because of the scribe’s hand: it belongs to the well-known Christian Arabic scribe Antony David of Baghdad (Anṭūna Dāwud b. Sulaymān al-Baġdādī).¹¹ From two of his colophons, both dated 272 AH (= 885/6 CE), we know that he was active in the second half of the 9th century CE. The same colophons also inform us that he was a monk of the Palestinian Lavra of St Sabas and that he had contact with arabophone monks at St Catherine’s Monastery who commissioned manuscripts from him.

6. Here is an overview of Antony David’s extant manuscript corpus as we know it at the moment:

(1) MS Strasbourg, Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire, Or. 4226 + MS St Petersburg, Rossijskaja Nacional’naja Biblioteka, Ar. N.S. 263 + MS Birmingham, Cadbury Research Library, Mingana Collection Chr. Ar. 93 + MS Birmingham, Cadbury Research Library, Mingana Collection Chr. Ar. Add. 136;

(2) MS Sinai, St Catherine’s Monastery, Ar. 428 + MS Birmingham, Cadbury Research Library, Mingana Collection Chr. Ar. Add. 132 + MS Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cod.arab. 1069 + MS Sinai, St Catherine’s Monasery, Syr. 274/II (our fragment);

(3) MS Sinai, St Catherine’s Monastery, Ar. NF M 35 + MS Sinai, St Catherine’s Monastery, Ar. NF M 20;

(4) MS Sinai, St Catherine’s Monastery, Gr. 35 + MS Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, L 120 sup. (ff. 125/132, 139/134);

(5) MS Sinai, St Catherine’s Monastery, Ar. NF M 21;

(6) MS Berlin, Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, GCS Akz.-Nr. 481/28-29;

(7) MS Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. Ar. 71.

7. The fragment in the back cover of MS Sinai, St Catherine’s Monastery, Syr. 274 does not add a great deal to this body of knowledge. But we can now add another fragment to set (2). What seems particularly interesting to me, however, is that our fragment does not go back to a modern biblioclasm – so it has a very different biography from the two membra disjecta of this set, which are no longer in St Catherine’s Monastery. As the table of contents must have been at the beginning of the original codex, it must have become detached from the binding through use. This also happened to other tables of contents of Antony David’s manuscripts, which were later restored (e.g. in MS Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. Ar. 71). The following question can be linked to this observation: Is there any connection between the pre-modern use-related disintegration of Sinaitic manuscripts and their modern dispersion? In other words, in what way could a poor state of preservation have contributed to the dispersion?

Acknowledgements: I would like to thank St Catherine’s Monastery and especially Father Justin Sinaites for the permission to use the image of the fragment identified here. I would also like to thank Dawn Childress for her kind support. For various comments and discussions I am also grateful to Lee Davis, Arianna D’Ottone, Iraj Sheidaee, and Alin Suciu.

Published: 4 March 2024. Last updated: 16 May 2024. License: CC BY-NC. Download PDF

1. André Binggeli, “Early Christian Graeco-Arabica: Melkite Manuscripts and Translations in Palestine“, Intellectual History of the Islamicate World, 3 (2015), pp. 228-247, at p. 231. [↩]
2. Ses Miriam L. Hjälm, Peter Tarras, “Early Christian Arabic Colophons from the Palestinian Monasteries: A Comparative Analysis“, in: George A. Kiraz, Sabine Schmidtke (eds), Literary Snippets: Colophons Across Space and Time (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2023), pp. 119–168; iidem, Hjälm, Miriam L., Peter Tarras. 2024. “Early Christian Arabic Colophons from the Palestinian Monasteries: Edition with Translation and Commentary“, in: George A. Kiraz, Sabine Schmidtke (eds), Literary Snippets: Colophons Across Space and Time: A Colophon Reader (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2024), pp. 47-98. [↩]
3. Murad Kamil, Catalogue of all manuscripts in the Monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1970), p. 160. [↩]
4. Samir Khalil Samir, Tables de concordance des manuscrits arabes chrétiens du Caire et du Sinaï, Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium, 482, Subsidia, 75 (Leuven: Peeters, 1986), p. 36. [↩]
5. I am currently not aware of any studies on the Syriac manuscript. [↩]
6. For comparison, the parent codex MS Sinai, St Catherine’s Monastery, Ar. 428 has about the same dimensions as the Syriac manuscript: 174 x 142 mm. [↩]
7. I have disregarded the orthography of so-called “Middle Arabic”. A few reading signs were added. I have used MS Sinai, St Catherine’s Monastery, Ar. 428 to restore illegible text (in square brackets). [↩]
8. English translation: “[…] (1) the Apostle, which says that our Lord [made peace] through the blood of his cross with that which is [in] (2) heaven and which is on earth; a question, which was asked by (3) St Dorotheus; and a sermon by St John Chrysostom (4) on poverty; and a prayer by St Ephrem; […] (5) Chrysostom commentary on the Gospel by John the son of Zebedee; and from (6) the commentary on Paul; and a sermon of St John Chrysostom on the [fear of] (7) God; the martyrdom of St Arethas of Najran and all those who were martyred (8) with him from among his holy companions in the city of Najran; and a sermon of (9) St Ephrem on the fathers who renounced; and a sermon by Abba St Eustrathius (10) the Monk on the destruction of Jerusalem, the taking of (11) the cross, and the captivity of the patriarch St Zachariah; (12) and a sermon by Abba St Anastasius, the leader of Mount Sinai, on (13) our Lord’s revelation to his disciples on Mount Tabor; and another one of his sermons (14) on Psalm 6; and a sermon by St John Chrysostom (15) on Psalm 50; and a sermon by St Epiphanius [the bishop] (16) of Cyprus being a panegyric of the Pure Lady Mary, the Theotokos […]”. [↩]
9. For a study of this manuscripts and its membra disjecta, see Binggeli 2016, pp. 85-87. [↩]
10. André Binggeli, “Les trois David: copistes arabes de Palestine aux 9^e-10^e s.”, in: André Binggeli, Anne Boud’hors, Matthieu Cassin (eds), Manuscripta Graeca et Orientalia: Mélanges monastiques et patristiques en l’honneur de Paul Géhin, Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta, 243 (Leuven, Paris, and Warpole, MA: Peeters, 2016), pp. 79-117, at p. 87. [↩]
11. On Antony David of Baghdad and his manuscripts, see Johannes Oestrup, “Über zwei arabische Codices sinaitici der Strassburger Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek“, Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, 51/3 (1897), pp. 435-471.; I. Kračkovsky, “Новозавѣтный апокриФъ въ арабской рукописи 885—886 года по P. Xp. [A New Testament Apokryphon in an Arabic Manuscript of the Year A.D. 885-886]“, Византийский Временник, 14/2-3 (1907), pp. 246-275; Willi Heffening, “Die griechische Ephraem-Paraenesis gegen das Lachen in arabischer Übersetzung: Ein Beitrag zum Problem der arabischen Ephraemübersetzungen und ihrer Bedeutung für eine kritische Ausgabe des griechischen Ephraem”, Oriens Christianus, 3. Serie, 2 [24] (1927), pp. 94-119; Michel van Esbroeck, “Un feuillet oublié du codex arabe Or. 4226, à Strasbourg“, Analecta Bollandiana, 96 (1978), pp. 383-384; Sidney H. Griffith, “Anthony David of Baghdad, Scribe and Monk of Mar Sabas: Arabic in the Monasteries of Palestine“, Church History, 58/1 (1989), pp. 7-19.; A. Binggeli, “Les trois David”, pp. 80-100; Miriam L. Hjälm, “From Palestine to Damascus to Berlin: Early Christian Arabic texts from the Qubbat al-khazna in the Violet collection”, in: Arianna D’Ottone Rambach, Konrad Hirschler, Ronny Vollandt (eds), The Damascus Fragments: Towards a History of the Qubbat al-Khazna Corpus of Manuscripts and Documents, Beiruter Texte und Studien, 140 (Beirut: Ergon Verlag, 2020), pp. 245-264, at pp. 252-255; M. L. Hjälm, P. Tarras 2023, “A Comparative Analysis”, pp. 143-144. [↩]

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