Miscellaneous Identifications II: The Christian Arabic Undertext of the Mingana-Lewis Palimpsest

1. This is the second post in a series in which I document identifications associated with the work of early Christian Arabic scribes (you can find the first post here). Quite inadvertently, the material that I would like to present in this post has even led to three and not just one identification: the identification of a previously unspecified text in one of the dispersed Sinaitic fragments, the Arabic Vorlage of an Ethiopic homily, and the undertext of a palimpsest. The starting point of my research, however, was the palimpsest.

2. This is the so-called “Mingana-Lewis Palimpsest” (MS Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, Or. 1287 + membra disjecta). I was particularly intrigued by one of its Arabic undertexts, which was recognised early on as a Christian Arabic text but not yet identified. Various manuscripts in different languages ​​were used to produce the Mingana-Lewis Palimpsest, including Arabic, Armenian, Greek, and Syriac manuscripts. Of the Arabic manuscripts, some have been identified as Muslim documents, most importantly two ancient Quranic fragments (7th or 8th century) for which the Mingana-Lewis Palimpsest became famous in the first place.¹ According to Alain George, the palimpsest might have preserved “one of the earliest Qur’anic fragments in existence”.² At least one Arabic manuscript fragment, however, is of Christian origin. This was already pointed out by Agnes Smith Lewis (1843-1926), the former owner of MS Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, Or. 1287 and editor of some of its undertexts. Still, she encountered difficulties reading the text: “ff. 155, 162³ were originally two leaves of an Arabic MS. containing a small Arabic script, of which even with the help of the reagent I have been able to decipher little, and to identify nothing”.⁴ Still, the dozen or so words she was able to decipher “point to a Christian text”.

3. Both the scriptio superior and scriptio inferior have the same orientation, which, as Lewis rightly stressed, “presents peculiar difficulties”. One of the snippets on which Lewis based her estimation that we are dealing with a Christian text was the following line: لان له المجد … الى الدهر امين (“for to Him belongs glory … forever, amen”). This looks very much like a typical closing formula at the end of texts in Christian Arabic manuscripts (see fig. 1).

4. More recently, Alain George turned to this text and complemented Lewis’ reading as follows: “lahu al-majd wa’l-subḥa ilā dahr amīn” (“for to Him belongs glory and majesty forever, amen”).⁵ This line is clearly legible in the bottom margin, since it has no text written over it (fig. 1). George repeats Lewis’s assessment that the phraseology points to a Christian text, but also does not offer an identification, at least not of the text. However, he hypothesises that the scribe of the undertext could be Antony David of Baghdad, who was also the subject of my first post in this series. The reason he gives for this is the fact that the style of the hand is very similar to that of the hand responsible for the upper text. From this, George infers that the lower text was probably written in the 9th century, but not necessarily in the same monastery in which the upper text (and hence the palimpsest) was produced.⁵

5. I agree that there is sufficient similarity and, accordingly, probably coevality of both hands. But I disagree with George’s suggestion that the scribe responsible for the undertext could be Antony David of Baghdad. I want to point out just one significant difference between the hand of the scribe of the undertext and that of Antony David (fig. 2): the final nūn of the anonymous hand ends with a stroke that runs almost parallel to the base line and then terminates with a stroke that breaks off downwards in a 45 to 90° angle. This creates a serif-like shape at the end of the letter’s arc. By contrast, Antony David’s final nūn forms an open half circle. The calamus ends in a way that the last stroke exhibits an upward movement returning to the base line, completely without a serif.

6. Of all the Christian Arabic hands I have studied so far, the hand that is actually the closest to that of the scribe of the undertext is the that of the upper text. The hand of the upper text is quite well known. It belongs to the scribe Thomas of Fustat (Tūmā al-Fusṭāṭī), who was active on the Sinai in the 9th and 10th centuries CE.⁶ This is actually one of a number of indications as to the place of origin of the palimpsest, but provenance is not our topic here.⁷ Still, there are again some clear differences between Thomas’s hand and that of the scribe of the undertext. We cannot therefore identify this scribe for the time being, but I do not want to rule out the possibility that he may also have been active in the Sinai monastery. The observation that the original codex could have been reused within less than a century, perhaps only within a few decades, is consistent with what we can observe in other Sinaitic palimpsests.⁸ This issue needs to be studied in more detail, but it seems likely that in some cases the monks also reused their own (unsuccessful?) products or those of the previous generation. The undertext itself, to which we can now turn, also points to the same monastic milieu.

7. The line read by Lewis and George is found at the bottom of what used to be f. 155v. This folio together with f. 162 now forms the bifolium 91. Accordingly, ff. 155v + 162r are now designated 91r, and ff. 155r + 162v are designated 91v. I will be concerned here exclusively with the content of the former f. 155.⁹ Even though the fold has almost completely dissolved, it seems to have been an original bifolium that Thomas of Fustat reused, copying his text in the same direction as the undertext. On the former f. 155v, we can note that the scriptio inferior consists of 21 lines. The right margin has been trimmed so that some text is missing there, while the left margin is entirely preserved. The end of this folio obviously marks a textual break, since the line that has already been deciphered is a closing formula. In the two lines above we can also recover parts of another interesting formula. They read as follows: […] (19) wa-tasmaʿu ḏālika ṣ-ṣawt al-faraḥ allaḏī yaqūlu (20) […] abī riṯū l-mulk allaḏī huyyiʾa (?) lakum min (21) […] al-ʿālam […] (“[…] and you shall hear that voice of joy, which says:  […] my father, inherit the kingdom that was prepared for you […] the world […]”).

8. This text excerpt, which contains a quotation from Matthew 25:34, immediately caught my attention when I read it, because I already knew it from some colophons of early Christian Arabic manuscripts.¹⁰ So I was very excited and suspected that we might be dealing with another colophon here. But I also already knew that the quotation from Matthew occurs in other contexts. Because I had already had a moment like that before, when I came across the quotation and it wasn’t a colophon.

9. This happened to me with the first text in the fragment MS Munich, Bavarian State Library, Cod.arab. 1068. The text ends on f. 2v with the same biblical quotation (fig. 3). Georg Graf published a description of this fragment in 1954.¹¹ As the beginning of the first text is missing, he was unable to identify it and described it as a “discourse on the spiritual battle with Satan and an exhortation to good works” (“Rede über den geistigen Kampf mit dem Satan und Mahnung zu guten Werken”). The following text is attributed to Basil the Great and is entitled “On the monastic way of life” (fī sīrat ar-ruhbāniyya) in Arabic. This is a translation of Prologus IV (CPG 2881). We know this text also from MS Strasbourg, Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire, Or. 4226, which was produced by the aforementioned scribe Antony David for the Sinai monastery.¹² This made me wonder whether the unidentified text could also be contained in this manuscript. Luckily, it is there in its entirety (ff. 64v-66v) and bears the title “Exhortation to the Monks Who Receive the Schema” (Mawʿiẓa ʿalā r-ruhbān allaḏīna yaʾḫuḏūna l-iskīm). The text is a homily that rhetorically expands on the theme of inheritance from the biblical quotation Matthew 25:34 and theologically applies it to the occasion of the reception of the monk’s habit (schema). As it turns out, this is exactly the Christian Arabic text that can also be found in the undertext of the Mingana-Lewis Palimpsest.

10. The digital images of the palimpsest available online do not allow much of the text to be recovered. But the few snippets that can be read make this identification certain. For example, in line 18 we read šayʾ min al-umūr al-qabīḥa ḥattā and in line 15 we read a-laysa lahu himma illā an yartaṣida. These two snippets of text can also be found on the above folio page of the Munich fragment in lines 6 and 3. It should be noted that the Munich fragment also comes from the Sinai collection and, like the upper text of the Mingana-Lewis Palimpsest, was copied by the Sinaitic monk Thomas of Fustat. We can therefore state at this point that the text entitled “Exhortation to the Monks Who Receive the Schema” was well known among the arabophone monks of the Sinai monastery in the 9th and 10th centuries and was frequently read and copied here. I now wanted to know whether this text could also be attributed to an author.

11. In his Geschichte der christlichen arabischen Literatur, Graf assigned the text to the Arabic corpus of the “Advices to the Novices” of Isaiah the Solitary (d. 491).¹³ According to Graf, the Arabic Isaiah texts “also contain pieces of text that have no equivalent in the previously known Greek (and Latin) tradition”.¹⁴ Our text is in fact a translation. At the end, the scribe asks for God’s mercy for “the one who translated it” (raḥima man fassarahū).¹⁵ There are also some indications that the text was translated from the Greek. For example, the word شرويين (“cherubim”) is written with the letter šīn at the beginning, which is probably a transcription of the Greek letter chi. Nevertheless, the text is nowhere associated with the name of Isaiah. Even Graf no longer makes this connection in his 1954 article.

12. As already mentioned, the text in MS Strasbourg, Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire, Or. 4226 only has a title, but no author’s name. The same title, again without the author’s name, appears in the manuscript’s original table of contents on f. 2v, line 10. My search for patristic texts on the subject of the schema was also not very successful at first. By pure chance, however, I came across an important hint about the history of the transmission of this text in an unexpected place. While preparing an article, I recently took a look at the entry on Jacob of Serugh by Witold Witakowski in the Encyclopaedia Aethiopica.¹⁶ Witakowski mentions there a “Rite of the taking on the habit” (ሥርዐተ ፡ ሢመተ ፡ ምንኵስና) and says that the text does not exist in Syriac and that it must be a translation from Arabic.¹⁷ The manuscripts mentioned there are easily accessible online (EMML 1012; EMML 1203; MS Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Ethiopien d’Abbadie 71). The first manuscript, EMML 1012 (= MS Addis Ababa, Ethiopia Qeddest Śellāsē Cathedral, 35), harboured another surprise. The corresponding catalogue entry states that the actual rite (ff. 1r-33v) is followed by a “Homily to be read after clothing” (ff. 33v-44r).¹⁸ In the manuscript, it is called “a command that is read over the monk after [receiving?] the schema” (ትእዛዝ ፡ ዘይትነበብ ፡  ላዐለ ፡ መነኮስ ፡ አምድኅረ ፡ እስኬማ).¹⁹ That sounded promising. The connection to Jacob of Serugh also made me curious, as texts by this author appear relatively frequently in the manuscripts of Thomas of Fustat. And indeed, the beginning of this homily largely corresponds to our Arabic text, as the following comparison shows (differences in the Gǝʿǝz translation are marked in red):²⁰

13. Now let us summarise some of the results. One of the Christian Arabic undertexts of the Mingana-Lewis Palimpsest is the “Exhortation for the Monks Who Receive the Schema”, a text that was apparently popular in Arabic in the Sinai monastery in the 9th and 10th centuries. It is also found in another manuscript copied by the same scribe who also produced the Mingana-Lewis Palimpsest. The text is a translation, possibly of a Greek original. This shows that it is very likely not a text by Jacob of Serugh. However, it was apparently handed down under the name of this author and thus also translated into Gǝʿǝz. Hence, we have identified not only one of the Christian Arabic undertexts of the Mingana-Lewis Palimpsest as well as the first text in the Munich Fragment, but also the Arabic Vorlage for an Ethiopian homily. It is not possible to say whether our text was already being transmitted under Jacob of Serugh’s name at the time when it was copied into the Arabic manuscript that was then used to produce the palimpsest. It would also be very interesting to find later Arabic manuscripts that might possibly transmit it under Jacob’s name.

Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Sophia Dege-Müller and especially Jonas Karlsson, to whom she introduced me. I was able to borrow Jonas’s expertise for the Gǝʿǝz language and Ethiopic manuscripts, which hopefully masked my lack of experience and amateurishness in this area. Of course, any shortcomings are still my own fault. I would also like to thank Aaron Butts, who made literature on the Ethiopian tradition of Jacob of Serugh accessible to me.

Published: 24 September 2024. Last updated: 2 October 2024. Licence: CC BY-NC. Download PDF

1. See Agnes Smith Lewis, Apocrypha Syriaca: The Protoevangelium Jacobi and Transitus Mariae with Texts from the Septuagint, the Corân, the Peshiṭta, and from a Syriac Hymn in a Syro-Arabic Palimpsest of the Fifth and Other Centuries, Studia Sinaitica, XI (London: C. J. Clay and Sons, 1902), pp. xvii-xxi; Mingana, Alphonse, Agnes Smith Lewis, Leaves from three ancient Qurâns possibly pre-‘Othmânic with a list of their Variants (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914); Alba Fedeli, “Mingana and the manuscript of Mrs. Agnes Smith Lewis, one century later”, Manuscripta Orientalia, 11/3 (2005),  pp. 3-7; eadem, “The Digitization Project of the Qurānic Palimpsest, MS Cambridge University Library Or. 1287, and the Verification of the Mingana-Lewis Edition: Where is Salām?“, Journal of Islamic Manuscripts, 2/1 (2011), pp. 100-117; eadem, Early Qurʾānic manuscripts, their text, and the Alphonse Mingana papers held in the Department of Special Collections of the University of Birmingham, PhD Dissertation (Birmingham: University of Birmingham, 2015); eadem, “Manuscript Acquisitions and Their Later Movements: A Further Note About the Case of the Lewis Quranic Manuscript“, in: Boris Liebrenz, Christoph Rauch (eds), Manuscripts, Politics and Oriental Studies: Life and Collections of Johann Gottfried Wetzstein (1815-1905) in Context, Islamic Manuscripts and Books, 19 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2019), pp. 228-247; Alain George, “Le palimpseste Lewis-Mingana de Cambridge, témoin ancien de l’histoire du Coran“, Comptes rendus de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 1 (2011), pp. 377-429; idem, “On an Early Qur’anic Manuscript and Its Stratigraphy: Cambridge Or. 1287”, International Qur’anic Studies Association: Conference Papers (St Andrews, Scotland, July 2013) (23 December 2013), URL = <https://iqsaweb.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/st_andrews_ag2.pdf>; J. F. Coakley, A Catalogue of Syriac Manuscripts in Cambridge University Library and College Libraries Acquired since 1901 (Ely: The Jericho Press, 2018), pp. 84-88. [↩]
2. A. George, “On an Early Qur’anic Manuscript“, p. 4. [↩]
3. Now this is bifolium 91. [↩]
4. A. S. Lewis, Apocrypha Syriaca, p. xxvii. [↩]
5. A. George, “Le palimpseste Lewis-Mingana”, p. 421. [↩] [↩]
6. On Thomas of Fustat, see Peter Tarras, “Thomas of Fustat: Translator or Scribe?”, Biblia Arabica Blog (26 November 2019), URL = <https://biblia-arabica.com/thomas-of-fustat-translator-or-scribe/>; idem, “Building a Christian Arabic Library at Mount Sinai: The Scribe Thomas of Fustat and the Manuscripts of His Workshop“, forthcoming; see also Grigory Kessel, “A Catacomb of Syriac Texts: Codex Arabicus (Sin. ar. 514) Revisited“, in: Claudia Rapp, Giulia Rossetto, Jana Grusková, Grigory Kessel (eds), New Light on Old Manuscripts: The Sinai Palimpsests and other Advances in Palimpsest Studies, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften: Philosophisch-Historische Klasse: Denkschriften, 547, Veröffentlichtungen zur Byzanzforschung, 45 (Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2023), pp. 101-129. [↩]
7. The “Lewis” part of the Mingana-Lewis Palimpsest was acquired by Agnes Smith Lewis in Suez in 1895. When in 1902 Lewis published some of the Syriac undertexts of the palimpsest in her Apocrypha Syriaca, she did not reveal from whom she had acquired the manuscript, but she gave a justification for its inclusion in the Studia Sinaitica series and, at the same time, an unmistakable hint: “I have since traced it through several hands into those of one who spent many months at Sinai, and proved himself more of an expert than I have been in acquiring manuscripts”; see A. S. Lewis, Apocrypha Syriaca, p. xxviii. This “expert” could be none other than the collector Friedrich Grote (1861-1922), whom Lewis knew personally and with whom she was certainly not on good terms. All the membra disjecta of the manuscript known to date can be traced back to Grote, and we know that he divided up manuscripts for profit. Another indication has to do with another famous palimpsest, for whose upper script Thomas of Fustat is also responsible. It is the so-called “Codex Arabicus” (MS Sinai, St Catherine’s Monastery, Ar. 514 + membra disjecta). As Grigory Kessel recently discovered, at least two of the reused manuscript parts in this palimpsest seem to come from codices whose parts were also used for the Mingana-Lewis palimpsest; see G. Kessel, “Catacomb”. In short, both palimpsests were most likely created in the same workshop. [↩]
8. See esp. the findings in G. Kessel, “Catacomb”. [↩]
9. The other folio bears another Christian Arabic text from the same original codex that needs to be identified as well. [↩]
10. See e.g. Miriam L. Hjälm, Peter Tarras, “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, at pp. 49-53. [↩]
11. Georg Graf, “Christlich-arabische Handschriftenfragmente in der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek”, Oriens Christianus, 4. Serie, 38 (1954), pp. 125-132, at pp. 128-129. [↩]
12. Cf. Alin Suciu, “Coptic Vestiges of Basil of Caesarea’s Asceticon Magnum (CPG 2875)“, Vigiliae Christianae, 73 (2019), pp. 359-384, at pp. 367-370. [↩]
13. Georg Graf, Geschichte der christlichen arabischen Literatur, vol. 1: Die Übersetzungen, Testi e studi, 118 (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1944), p. 403. [↩]
14. G. Graf, Geschichte, p. 402; Eng. tr. mine. [↩]
15. This bit is missing from the version found in the Munich fragment, which seems to preserve a different translation from the one found in MS Strasbourg, Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire, Or. 4226 and the Mingana-Lewis Palimpsest. [↩]
16. Witold Witakowski, “Jacob of Serug”, in: Siegbert Uhlig (ed.), Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, vol. III: He–N (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2007), pp. 262-263. [↩]
17. W. Witakowski, “Jacob of Serug“, p. 263. [↩]
18. William F. Macomber, A Catalogue of Ethiopian Manuscripts Microfilmed for the Ethiopian Manuscript Microfilm Library, Addis Ababa and for the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library, Collegeville, vol. III: Project Numbers 701-1100 (Collegeville, MN: Hill Monastic Manuscript Library, 1978), p. 349. [↩]
19. This translation is tentative. In the manuscript, the word ትእዛዝ is preceded by the letter በ, which seems to make no sense in this place. [↩]
20. The Gǝʿǝz translation is unidiomatic in places and differences have obviously crept in due to scribal errors. Overall, the copy of the text does not make a very careful impression. [↩]

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