The History of Sebeos

THE PREVIOUS EDITIONS

1. History of Bishop Sebeos on Heraclius. Published in the light... in Constantinople, in the printing house of Hovhannes Miuhintisean, 1851 = 1300 [Armenian Era].

The publisher is Tadeos Mihrdat Ter-Astvatsatryan Mihrdatyants, who signed his name under the "Pre-speech" attached to the book.

In the "Pre-speech," the publisher deems it worthy to rank his newly discovered manuscript "second after the Father of Rhetoric reference to Movses Khorenatsi for the sake of desirable learning, because of the antiquarianism regarding the Inscription (he means the Agathangelian inscription extracted by the Anonymous—G. A.), and because of other histories." In his opinion, the information about Hayk and Bel in the book he published is extracted from sources older than the sources of Khorenatsi; "in terms of content and ancestral truth, it is not lacking in anything, but rather exceeds it." He makes assumptions about the sources of the "History of Sebeos" and laments that "a complete copy did not reach our hands in order to understand its colophon."

6 It is evident from the colophon of manuscript No. 86 of the Vienna Mkhitarist library (Tashyan, Catalog of Armenian Manuscripts, pp. 346–347) that Mihrdatyan had another copy, which, however, he did not use in printing because the manuscript was "copied in haste." Tashyan assumes that this copy "must be a new transcription of the Marmashen copy (i.e., the old manuscript used by Mihrdatyan—G. A.)" (p. 347). We learn about this hasty copying from the following lines of the colophon of manuscript No. 86: "he said to me (Mihrdatyan said to the scribe of manuscript No. 86—G. A.), 'The copy you wrote is distorted, as it was copied in haste in Etchmiadzin, and I wrote my copy in Etchmiadzin with great care.'"

7 T. Mihrdatyan indicated these readings in his publication by using the phrase "other copy" next to them, by which he meant the 16th-century manuscript. In contrast to this manuscript, he uses the expressions "in our original," "in our copy," and "in the copy" for the second manuscript. An exception is formed by 7 cases where Mihrdatyan, by saying "other copy," mistakenly referred not to the old manuscript, but to the newer copy he possessed.

The information provided by the publisher about the two manuscripts he used, especially the old manuscript, is extremely important6. The first of the manuscripts was incomplete at the end, but having been copied in the 15th century, it contained very important readings7 that are now not present in any manuscript that has reached us. For more details about this lost manuscript, see below, in the section on manuscripts.

Regarding the second manuscript, Mihrdatyan reports the following on pages X–XI:

"And in the other copy, which we made our primary text, which we received from the Holy See, as will be seen below, it was written in the year 1221 (=1672) in Baghesh in the monastery of Hovhannes Karapet, placed at the end of the colophon,