The History of Sebeos

We have proceeded in this way only for important errors. We have not noted unimportant ones, but merely corrected them.

Some variants found in the oldest manuscript might seem unimportant at first glance, but we have noted them, considering their consistency. For example, the word "katolikos" catholicos is written everywhere as "kataghikos." We find the same spelling also in fragment No. 1343, which is older than manuscript No. 2639. This means that this spelling is not accidental. The numerous cases of the use of the vowel "e" instead of "i" in the middle of words (arewts, gewgh, mews, erkewgh) could have dictated that we adopt this spelling, but in the Mihrdatyan edition, we find the "i" spelling (ariwts, giwgh, miws, erkiwgh), from which it must be assumed that this is the spelling of an ancient manuscript that has not reached us.

Often the initial "h" is not written in the manuscript ("anderdzagins" instead of "handerdzagins"). This is also not an accidental error, but an interesting phenomenon of phonetic elision. Such are the cases of the elision of several other sounds (gnain, hramae, aramk, kume, ordoy, asorots, zorots, etc.).

Names are sometimes written in several different forms (Grigor — Grigorios, Duin — Dwin, Herakl — Herakgh — Hayrakl — Heraklios, etc.). We have left them as they were, because we did not know which one belonged to the author. Besides that, certain forms of names could have been copied exactly from the sources used in the "History of Sebeos" and differed from the author's own usage. If we had made all names identical, we would have lost the traces of the possible sources. We have made corrections only in cases where we found the correct form in the manuscripts.

In order not to overload the original text, we have not noted in the footnotes those manuscript variants that occur in almost all medieval manuscripts and are well-known; for example, the absence of the letter "y" at the end of words (Hayka, Ararada, Kadmea, Demetrea), cases of the redundant use of this letter (say, day, dmay, znay), irregularities in the use or omission of the definitive article "n" (arkayi, arkayin), cases of mixed orthography (aw—o, gh—l, ov—o), etc. We have followed the orthography adopted by Malkhasyants and predecessors.

We have not moved to the footnotes and have not corrected "numerous grammatical errors which were very easy to correct, but we did not touch them, because we were not convinced whether they were the errors and distortions of the scribes" 1.

1 Malkh., Preface, p. DA. On this page, Malkhasyants points out a number of examples: "i sovu" (instead of "i sovoy"), "azd lini eghreal irkn", "khanzi voch uner hastatutiwn", "elin irawuns i veray nora", "hnazandetsan amenayn bnakichk... lernakans ew dashtakans", "ein noka erek hazar sparazen-s", "ar mahun erkiwghi", "merdz kaghakawn", "hateal nman zkapans", etc. Colloquial forms: "hasaw", "dipaw", "zhoghove", "hramaye", etc.