I thought this Facebook post by Alin Suciu was interesting enough to share:
I find it striking that most Eastern Christian traditions—with the notable exception of the Syriac—began to explicitly date their literary manuscripts only in the 9th century CE. From this point onward, scribes often recorded the date when the transcription of the manuscripts was completed in a colophon. Therefore, manuscripts copied before the 9th century must be dated based on more ambiguous criteria, such as paleography, realia, radiocarbon analysis, and archaeological context. This overlooked pattern of dating manuscripts starting from the 9th century CE marks a shift in scribal culture and may provide significant details about broader developments in book production throughout the Mediterranean world. So it’s worthy of more serious consideration.
The earliest known dated Coptic manuscript is a parchment codex housed in the Morgan Library & Museum, New York (M579), which was copied in 822/823 CE. In the Greek tradition, the first manuscript to bear a date is the Uspenski Gospels, copied in Constantinople in 835 CE. Christian Arabic manuscripts follow a similar trajectory, with the oldest known dated example being a Sinaitic codex (Sinai Arabic NF Parch. 3) whose transcription was completed either in 858 or between 858 and 867 CE, depending on how we interpret the second digit of the year recorded in the colophon—a brilliant discovery made by my friends Miriam Hjälm and Peter Tarras [Literary Snippets, p. 58]. The Armenian and Georgian traditions align with the same trend. The earliest known dated Armenian manuscript is the Queen Mlk’e Gospels, copied in 862 CE and now housed in the Mekhitarist Library in Venice. Similarly, the oldest dated Georgian manuscript was copied in Sinai in 864 CE (Georgian 32-57-33).
However, unlike the Coptic, Greek, Arabic, Armenian, and Georgian traditions, the Syriac stands out as an exception to this pattern, predating all others by over four centuries. There are at least six Syriac manuscripts explicitly dated to the 5th century CE. The earliest is British Library Add. 12150, a manuscript copied in Edessa in 411 CE. It was brought to Egypt in the 10th century by Moses of Nisibis and preserved at the Monastery of the Virgin in Wadi Natrun, the famous monastic hinterland situated west of the Nile Delta. It’s a mystery to me why the Syrians chose to date their literary manuscripts so early, at a time when the practice was most likely unknown elsewhere. The remarkable antiquity of this tradition highlights the unique textual culture of Syriac Christianity.
The fact that all the other Eastern Christian traditions began to date their literary manuscripts only in the 9th century suggests that a broader transformation in scribal practices took place all over the Mediterranean during this period. Whether this practice was due to administrative needs, a growing awareness of historical documentation, or external influences, it marks a significant moment in the history of book production. The implications of this phenomenon deserve further scholarly inquiry.
I’ve quoted the whole post; here are a couple of good exchanges from the comment thread for those without FB access:
Adrian Munteanu
I wonder (I genuinely wonder, because I have no clue) – could this be also related to something that was happening at the same time in Western Christian Monastic scribal practices? I’m thinking about the so-called “Carolingian Renaissance,” which brought a flurry of copy-work of Ancient manuscripts in Western monastic scriptoria.Alin Suciu
Adrian Munteanu Perhaps it is related to something that happened in the Abbasid Caliphate, though I am not sure. The 9th century CE marked the golden age of Arabic letters, but I do not immediately see how that would be connected to the practice of dating manuscripts.Adrian Munteanu
It was a wild shot in the dark from me, I admit. I was thinking maybe something along the lines of the increase in volume of manuscript production brought about the need for ordering and cataloging them more neatly – hence the dating. And once again, mine is a mere supposition.Alin Suciu
Adrian Munteanu I think it’s a likely hypothesis.Dániel Kiss
Adrian Munteanu I too am wondering when scribes writing in Latin started to date their manuscripts.Alin Suciu
Dániel Kiss I’m not entirely sure when scribes began dating Latin manuscripts, but I am pretty certain that the earliest known Latin manuscript with a recorded date is the Codex Fuldensis. However, it was not dated by the scribe but rather by a reader, Victor of Capua, who perused it in the 6th century. By the Carolingian period in the 9th century, dated manuscripts had become common. However, I am uncertain about the situation between these two points in time.Dániel Kiss
Alin Suciu Scholars of the later Roman Empire sometimes added their name — and occasionally even the date — to the manuscript they corrected, or to the manuscript that contained their edition of a classical Roman author. I now realize that this means that they effectively dated some manuscripts.
The practice does not seem to have continued beyond the 6th century. And of course, these were not ordinary scribes dating their copy of a text.* * *
Arkadiy Avdokhin
Incidentally, 9 c. is also when the reform of the Greek writing happens, inaugurated at the Stoudite monastery, which shifts to cursive with, quite suddenly, systematically restored accent types and aspirations, which had been out of phonetic use for a long while by then (how *exactly* the etymologically correct restoration was attained has never been properly explored, I think)Alin Suciu
Arkadiy Avdokhin Exactly! And, at the same time, I suspect the texts were edited and the old-fashioned Atticisms were removed.Arkadiy Avdokhin
Alin Suciu Interesting. Have there been studies to that effect (removal of Atticisms)?Alin Suciu
Arkadiy Avdokhin I don’t think so. However, everything seems to have occurred during the period when the minuscule script was adopted and Greek uncial manuscripts vanished.Arkadiy Avdokhin
Alin Suciu Right, makes sense. Well, I wish somebody would do an ERC or something on this topic (rather than… well 😉 )
I’ve added links to post and comments. (Anybody know what is meant by “an ERC”?)
ERC = European Research Council, the EU equivalent of the NSF; “grant application” is implicit.
I know the oldest dated Arabic “manuscript” is PERF 558, written in 643; but that’s just a tax receipt. I wonder when the oldest internally dated Arabic literary ms goes back to?
I would imagine that letters and contracts, as time-sensitive manuscripts, would have commonly been given a date earlier in Europe? Not sure how big that corpus is in Europe, though – when I think dated letters and contracts from the first millennium, it’s about faraway Sogdiana or Bactria.
For Hebrew, I find multiple references to the Codex Cairensis as the earliest (AD 895) dated Hebrew codex, but as the link discusses, the colophon bearing that date is questionable. I haven’t found the next-earliest one.
The Codex Laurentianus-Mediceus (M) of Virgil has a subscriptio by Turcius Rufus Apronianus Asterius, “patricius et consul ordinarius”. This is at least an implicit dating, as Apronianus was consul ordinarius in 494. He claims to have edited the codex (“legi et distincxi”). There is also an explicit date (XI Kal. Mai.= April 21), but that leaves out the year.
I wondered about Vindolanda letters, but found this instead https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-36415563 – ‘In the consulship of Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus for the second time and of Lucius Calpurnius Piso, on the 6th day before the Ides of January’
For another 9th-century CE instance rather distant from the primary area under discussion, I am advised by wikipedia that the oldest surviving woodblock-printed book with an identifiable internally-specified date of publication is a Chinese version of the so-called Diamond Sutra whose colophon translates as “Reverently made for universal free distribution by Wang Jie on behalf of his two parents on the 15th day of the 4th month of the 9th year of Xiantong,” which = May 11, A.D. 868. Remarkable coincidence, or rapid diffusion along the Silk Road of a clever new idea that was promptly recognized as such in quite varied cultural/linguistic contexts?
Well… A vast enough grammatical literature from the Roman period survives (often in the form of later reworkings and abridgements) dealing with the prosodic features of Attic and other classical dialects. (To the Greeks, initial aspiration was a ‘prosody’ just like the accent). The 2nd-century-CE work of Herodian on Greek accentuation (mostly surviving in fragments, epitomes, and quotations, and unfortunately very badly served by Lentz’s edition) immediately springs to mind. Doubtlessly, many other such lexica and treatises existed from the Hellenistic age onwards. Of course, the grammarians did not always really know the details of classical pronunciation, and tried to guess or extrapolate from what they knew, producing hyper-Atticisms and the like. However, what is remarkable is the extent to which the grammarians’ prescriptions *do* agree with what is known or reconstructable from other sources. To quote from Philomen Probert’s masterful study of Ancient Greek accentuation,
So, I suppose that it is safe enough to assume that when the shift to cursive occurred, Greek-speaking scholars could rely on such a corpus of detailed and generally dependable observations, based on a continuous tradition which stretched back to when the pitch accent and /h/ where still living phonological features.
That having been said, I can only agree that a detailed, ERC-scale study such as that advocated for by A. Avdokhin would be very welcome indeed.
I’m curious what words are being used for the dates. I tried to look. They all except the Syriac seem to be after the creation of the Anno Domini system, but that system took centuries to penetrate even western Christianity.
The Greek ms link leads to a wiki that gives the colophon in Greek. Which I don’t know, but I think I’d recognize numbers and didn’t see any. The Coptic goes to a Morgan Library synopsis which doesn’t make it clear (maybe AM 539 is a date? But I didn’t find any indication of such a system.) Clearly “Aug 29, 822 AD – Aug 29, 823 AD” is not a direct translation.
Using google translate on the Greek tells me it mentions the month of May and the years of the world. But I can’t make out what google is getting wrong that might give the year.
@Ryan: in other systems A.M. is Anno Mundi but for the Copts it’s Anno Martyrum. 1 A.M. began on Aug. 29, A.D. 284, the relevant Era of Martyrs coinciding with the beginning of the reign of Diocletian. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayrouz will tell you that the Coptic calendar’s New Year coincides with Sept. 11 but it *really* coincides with Julian Aug. 29 and has failed to adjust itself to keep up with the new-fangled Gregorian calendar favored in certain modernizing circles. Thus, to quote a different wiki article “To obtain the Coptic year number, subtract from the Julian year number either 283 (before the Julian new year) or 284 (after it).”
I think I’d recognize numbers and didn’t see any.
Ancient Greek numbers look just like letters.
@Ryan, the numerals are the Greek letters with the line above them.
Thanks. Of course! I don’t know why I was expecting number words.
A super Syriac mystery!
I have no good clue, though I did wonder, so far, about other Aramaic writings. And related alphabets, such as Kharosthi script Buddhist birch bark texts.
And dated coins.
Qumran scrolls aren’t explicitly dated, but have internal clues. If I may complain: Brill charges $211 for a book that includes my article “Qumran-Related History: Jannaeus, Absalom, and Judah the Essene”
https://people.duke.edu/~goranson/Qumran-Related%20History.pdf
And dated coins.
Dated coins were in a fairly continuous, though not universal, Hellenistic tradition from the 3rd century BC to the 3rd century AD, when Hellenistic provincial coinage was abolished (and/or otherwise went out of use) across the Roman empire [EDIT: apparently by Aurelian, except in Alexandria where it held on until the revolt of Domitius Domitianus]. The outlying Bosporan Kingdom (in Crimea) held on until 341 AD, when it was probably conquered by a Sarmatian raid (sources on this period are extremely scanty).
This is followed by a gap of almost no dated coins at all. In a probably-unrelated continuous tradition far to the east, the Western Satraps dated their coinage from the 2nd century AD to the late 4th, but their Gupta successors only used dates very sporadically. Parthian coins were dated (at least in the large denominations) but Sassanian coins weren’t, at least until the late 5th century.
To an extent the use of dated coins picks up in the 6th century AD, with the Sassanians and the Byzantines both using regnal dates; both traditions continue into the 7th century but seem to die off by the start of the 8th.
By the 8th century AD, however, there is a new tradition, of Islamic coins dated in the Hijri era; that one continues uninterrupted (modulo variance in designs) to the present day.
After the end of the Byzantine dating tradition, medieval Europe (in its non-Islamic parts) did not date coins until the 14th century (aside from a few very sporadic examples in Spain and Sicily, and that one infamous 1234 AD commemorative in Denmark), and even in the 15th century it was more of a rare exception. It was not until the 1500s (1503 in Hungary, 1507 in Poland) that large European countries started actively dating their coinage, and many European regions did not jump on that bandwagon until several decades later.
Incidentally, 9 c. is also when the reform of the Greek writing happens, inaugurated at the Stoudite monastery, which shifts to cursive with, quite suddenly, systematically restored accent types and aspirations, which had been out of phonetic use for a long while by then
The use of cursive must have still been a newfangled innovation by 893 AD, when the council of Preslav adopted (somewhat extended) uncial Greek script for their newly introduced Bulgarian (i.e. “Church Slavonic”) liturgy.
I thought the NSF was much broader? ERC grants are rare; they’re very hard to get – not just very competitive, but they have age limits except the versions that are intended for well-established laboratories. They come with immense prestige; back when my institution had any money, getting one was supposed to guarantee you a permanent position afterwards. If your proposed research isn’t breathtakingly groundbreaking enough and your publication list isn’t long and breathtaking enough, you simply have no chance.
I thought the NSF was much broader?
Yes indeed — I got an NSF grant to study Indo-European in grad school!
ERC grants start with the Starting Grant, for which you need to be between 0 and 7 years after you defended your thesis.
I would never date a manuscript. We’re not even the same species.
Rhywogaethwr!
By no means. However, I only date chordates. Even with maximum goodwill on both sides, you just run into fundamental incompatabilities of outlook otherwise. It’s no basis for a lasting relationship. It was in Cosmopolitan and everything.
Do you believe in interspecies dating?
Don’t be shy, DE. I dated a few rocks once. They were much older than me, even more than any manuscript, and they weren’t even carbon-based.
I only believe in carbon dating.
A lot of astronomers are interested dating the Big Bang. That seems kind of presumptuous/unwise to me…
The so-called “Big Bang” talks a great game, but …
I feel obliged to confess that I have dated Mss. But never Mrss.
All this talk about dating fits nicely with Heartstopper.
The Brit teenagers in the series “go out” and smooch (not even a single French kiss !!!) for years before they get up the courage to “do things”. And they ask “is this allright with you” before kissing on the neck instead of the mouth.
I always wanted to do things first. But I see that caution is appropriate when dating manuscripts about which little is known.
Heartstopper is beautifully constructed. Never before have I been interested in the technical side of film-making. The number of people working on this along with Oseman and the director, the “intimacy coordinator”, other crew and the actors ! My lonesome cowboy approach to life has left me pretty ignorant about such things.
Sounds like a cultural export we can be rightly proud of, if a bit soppy for my taste. I wonder if the Cthulhu Party will place it on the Index?
I must say that when it comes to dating MSS, proclivi scriptioni praestat ardua. Love it when they do that hard-to-get thing.
From the little of Schleiermacher I read years ago, I thought he had come up with that one. The WiPe tells me it was Johann Albrecht Bengel.
if a bit soppy for my taste
That’s the lectio brevior. It was my initial take as well.
Stu Clayton: But I see that caution is appropriate when dating manuscripts about which little is known.
You don’t want to contract paper lice.
That’s about the only thing I didn’t contract.
The Brit teenagers in the series “go out”
This is the origin of the expression “go out with a bang.”
Going out with the big bang !
and here i thought dating was supposed to precede a contract…
I have heard that a badly chosen date can pose a serious contract risk.
C, you’re 14 and I’m only 12 but in 50,000 years that won’t matter
@mollymooly:
[Deep bow, hat in hand.]
With every passing moment, we get relatively closer in age; can’t argue with math.
It 50,000 years 14 will have produced two daughters and changed to a different species.
[Sam the Eagle]You people are all degenerate! [/Sam the Eagle]
Or, as they say in New York, sophisticated.
https://www.allthelyrics.com/lyrics/tom_lehrer/i_wanna_go_back_to_dixie-lyrics-211890.html
Freakos . . .Sophisticates 1, Civilization 0[Kermit the Frog] Moving right along . . . [/Kermit the Frog]
I was wondering if there was some collection of all of the different possible dating systems used by scribes, and after browsing a few WikiP pages on related topics, I came upon what is a large, but possibly not complete, list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_era
It’s a heck of a lot.
Just one minor example of incompleteness is the fact that Anno Mundi only shows up as being used by Jews — but the page for Anno Mundi has sections that describe how different Church fathers came up with their own figures (using the Septuagint and some astronomical data), most of them differing by about 1700 years from the Jewish one calculated from the Masoretic text, and the Byzantine Church used their calculated Anno Mundi for a long time. Oh, wait. It’s actually there, but not as Anno Mundi; they call it Ἔτος Κόσμου (Etos Kosmou).
There were also disagreements between churches as to what month creation occurred in — some went with September/October (presumably to correspond with Tishrei, the Hebrew month in which Rosh Hashana occurs), others went with March (because the equinox and the proximity to the resurrection was appealing). . . and so on and so forth.
So many different dates of creation.
But each one indisputably accurate!
Well, if for God one day is like thousand years and thousand years like one day, and the Creation took 6 days (or seven, because of numerology, I guess) then all of these disagreements are but minor quibbles.
At least if you take wikipedia at face value you also have the Mandaean calendar which assumes a rather earlier date for creation, because it counts years from the creation of Adam and we are now in year 481,348. Although their years are a bit short in that Sothic kind of way so the Adam-creation date apparently corresponds to our 443,370 B.C. And the “Assyrian calendar” counts from our 4750 B.C., said to be the year when the Great Flood receded. Although this calculation is supposedly not long-standing but a confection of 20th-century nationalist intellectuals associated with a nationalist magazine titled _Gilgamesh_, so perhaps they were not simply trying to work out the timeline from the Syriac text of the Old Testament.
Wow, that was five ice ages ago…
Why extant Syriac colophons appear from four centuries earlier than in several other language manuscripts fascinates me. Though I’ve looked into some scribal practices, such as the transition from rush brush and palette to split nib reed pen and inkwell, I am ignorant of why in this case. (Nor am I on Facebook, too read further discussion there.)
So, here, some wild guesses, in hope for better-informed views.
The 411 one is in Western Syriac. Is that significant?
Does the Seleucid, or some other era used for dating, have legal consequences?
Does the colophon sometimes have group ownership consequences in a divided church?
Has the role of individual scribes changed in a church culture, whether for status of the person or for the manuscript reliability status?
Canonical status?
(Obviously, as Peter T. Daniels and others noted, dated colophons aid paleography.)
Or, as suggested above, for cataloging purposes?
Why earlier in Christian mss than in that of some other religions?
[Perhaps offer better questions or comments below.]
The Holocene calendar, meanwhile, counts from 10000 BC (to make the dates correspond neatly), though the actual events from which it is purportedly counting had since been reattributed to circa 11590 BP = 9641 BC.
(Apparently there’s some disagreement on the exact dating; officially the start of the Holocene is defined as 11700 “b2k” = 11650 BP = 9701 BC, but that figure has an uncertainty of about a century either way, and the most precise estimates converge on 11590 BP.)
I was wondering if there was some collection of all of the different possible dating systems used by scribes
Scribes were, at least, mostly working late enough to use variants of a few common dating systems. Late Hellenistic (a.k.a. “Roman provincial”) coinage is dated in a bewildering variety of local eras, some of them, AFAIK, not known from anything except the coins…
EDIT:
Does the Seleucid, or some other era used for dating, have legal consequences?
…IIRC for Jews it does.
(In that early period, anyway.)