Unpublished Sacred Monuments

...written in silver and gold on purple parchment, which we published in 1846 in Unpublished Sacred Monuments Original Latin title: Monumenta sacra inedita under the names of the Cotton (I), Caesarean (N), and Vatican (Γ) codices; 2. two palimpsest fragments of Luke published by us in the first volume of the New Collection of Unpublished Sacred Monuments and represented by a facsimile in what they call Plate II, number IV; 3. other palimpsest fragments of Luke published in the same volume, a specimen of which we displayed engraved in stone in Sacred and Profane Anecdotes Original Latin: Anecdota sacra et profana on Plate III, number VI. To these is added another of the Gospel codices found in the Wolfenbüttel palimpsest books Wolfenbüttel is a city in Germany famous for its ducal library (the Herzog August Bibliothek), which houses many ancient "palimpsests"—manuscripts where the original text was erased and written over., a specimen of which was shown by Knittel on Plate III of that book, in which he first published the Gothic fragments of Ulphilas Ulphilas was a 4th-century bishop who translated the Bible into the Gothic language; his work is the primary source for that extinct Germanic tongue. along with various other literary monuments.*) Furthermore, the Laudian Codex of the Acts of the Apostles (in Greek and Latin) can be compared, as can, if I am not mistaken, the Dublin palimpsest of Matthew.

Now the question is whether this letter size carries weight in defining the age of the codex. Against someone concluding a later age from this, it can be argued that some of the oldest Latin codices—among which the St. Gall palimpsest fragments of Virgil are prominent, written in the third or fourth century—are very conspicuous for their great letter size. But I do not know if the rule for Greek and Latin writing was different in this matter. Indeed, the oldest Greek parchment monuments we know—such as the Codex Frederico-Augustanus, the Vatican Bible codex Known today as Codex Vaticanus (B), one of the oldest and most important Greek Bibles., the Sarravianus Pentateuch, the Vatican fragments of Dio Cassius, and the palimpsest fragments of the New Testament that I brought from the East of the first, second, and third types, and the Cotton Genesis—all have a certain medium letter size, hardly different from the style used in papyrus rolls.

On the contrary, among those codices which show signs of a later age because of the very style of their uncial Uncial letters are a type of large, rounded capital script used by Greek and Latin scribes between the 4th and 8th centuries AD. letters—which already deviate in various ways from the full, classical forms—most surpass the older ones in the size of their writing. Nor should it be overlooked that in the London palimpsest of Luke, examples of "elongated uncial" script Original French: "onciale altérée," referring to a style where letters are stretched or distorted from their original proportions. are not entirely missing. Such is found on page 48, column 2, line 16, in the word telesthē completed, likewise on page 66, column 2, line 8, the ou in anthrōpou of the man The OCR shows the Greek abbreviation for "man" (anthropos)., page 70, column 2, line 11, the ō in autō to him, and especially the inscription of the chapters. These chapter headings might seem to have been written by a different hand for that very reason, were it not certain that similar things were done elsewhere in inscriptions or additions of that kind. We observed a notable example of this in the other Wolfenbüttel palimpsests A palimpsest is a "recycled" manuscript where the original text was scraped off to make room for a new one. mentioned above. But we do not wish to pursue these matters too minutely now. Taking into account everything relevant here, the codex in question seems to me to be no later than the sixth century; however, I think it was written in the sixth rather than the fifth.

The punctuation of the text is done with a simple dot. This does not have a varying meaning, whether it is placed at the top of the preceding letter (which is what usually happens) or—as we have rarely observed (see the example in the stone-engraved plate)—occupies a slightly lower position; for this reason, it is placed in the same spot everywhere in our edition. Often, however, a dot is not placed even where it is most customary to do so, especially where a section ends and is followed by an initial letter; just as the chapters displayed in the index sometimes have a dot added, but more often do not. Since this matter often leaves no doubt, in those places where we could not clearly identify a dot, we did not...

*) We ourselves will repeat the remains of both Gospel palimpsests in the third volume of Unpublished Sacred Monuments, not fearing that we misuse the name "unpublished." For Knittel clearly did not read many pages, and left even more with gaps; furthermore, in those pages which he did publish as having been read by himself, there are many things that ought to have been read more correctly and edited more accurately.