The History of Sebeos

copy is compared with manuscript No. 26399, and he also fills in the four- and seven-line omissions by extracting them from that older manuscript which has not reached us. From that same manuscript, he also extracts the other, more accurate readings.

When compiling the original text, he consciously deviated from the manuscript (reporting this) and divided the History into three "books," which the manuscript does not have. The first two books include the Anonymous's passage, and the third includes the "History of Sebeos." The publisher titled the preface of the latter "Prologue of the Author of the 3rd Book," by which, it seems, he showed that he distinguished the author of this part from the predecessors.

He divided the entire original text into 38 chapters, providing each with headings he composed himself10 (the manuscript has only sparse headings). He attached 7 notes to the first book and summarized his conclusions about that book. He also made notes in the section of variant readings at the bottom of the page. At the end of the book, he placed the scribe's colophon, which, however, is copied verbatim from manuscript No. 2639, although the sentence printed by Mihrdatyan in italics, "Now, this was written in the year (of the Armenians) 1221 in Baghesh in the monastery of Hovhannes Karapet," is missing in the manuscript11.

In Mihrdatyan's publication, a number of important textual units are restored, such as "asylum" (in the manuscript: "rebel"), "gives him" ("to him"), "to Modestus" ("to the emperor"), "every" ("says"), "severely wounded" ("Khor Kamsarakan" Note: The OCR says "Khor Viravoreats" vs "KhorKhoruneats," likely referring to the correction of a misread family name), "Ghykurgos" ("Zi Kurdos").

As a result of censorship, some words were shortened in this publication in a couple of places, which were restored in subsequent publications.

Mihrdatyan's publication played a great role in its time. It is through it that the first information regarding the 6th–7th centuries, which no other historian wrote about, penetrated Armenian studies.

9 After comparing the copy he possessed with manuscript No. 2639, Mihrdatyan, unfortunately, remained faithful mainly to his own copy. For example, he writes: "In the original, there was Chapter A, but we placed it as Book A." In reality, however, manuscript No. 2639 does not have the reading "Chapter A." Mihrdatyan simply repeated the data of the copy he possessed. He acted the same way in other cases.

10 These headings were sometimes mistakenly perceived as headings written by the author. For example, based on the word "prologue" used by Mihrdatyan in the title "Prologue of the Author of the 3rd Book," N. Adontz ("History of Armenian Literature," 1970, Beirut, vol. 4, p. 448) made judgments about the language of the author of the "History of Sebeos."

11 The colophon containing the date of the copying of manuscript No. 2639 is not within the boundaries of the "History of Sebeos," as Mihrdatyan presented it, but at the end of the "Letter of Union" (p. 142a). The year 1221 is extracted from this page in the colophon printed by Mihrdatyan. N. Akinyan in 1923 (when he had not yet seen manuscript No. 2639) thought, based on Mihrdatyan's publication, that the indicated year was in the colophon of the "History of Sebeos" itself. He writes: "Grigor the Priest elsewhere (at the end of Sebeos's History) explicitly indicates the year of writing as 1672" ("Bibliographic Researches," vol. B, p. 7).