The Book of Splendours

Introduction.

2. — The Cod. Borgianus siriacus 132 from the Vatican Library was described by Martin¹. At that time, it belonged to Monsignor Joseph David, a Syrian chorepiscopus from Mosul, but it was subsequently inventoried by Monsignor Addai Scher among the Syriac manuscripts of the Borgia Museum², which were then transferred to the Vatican Library. As this manuscript is among those of greatest importance for my edition, and because the existing descriptions of it are particularly brief, I provide here some details regarding this manuscript.

The dimensions of the manuscript are slightly less than 0.23m × 0.13m. The leaves are numbered using Syriac characters, and the final leaf bears the letter T the 22nd letter of the Syriac alphabet. Each quire contains 10 leaves, and the first and last page of each quire bear at the bottom a Syriac character indicating the sequential number of that quire. We currently lack the original leaves 1, 2, 3, 8, and 9 of the first quire, and of these, only one—folio 3—has been replaced by a leaf in a more recent hand. Despite this, we are missing only a relatively short portion of the text before this leaf, corresponding to pages 2.1–23 of the present edition. Consequently, of the original leaves 1 and 2, only leaf 2 was written upon, and only on the verso. The text that disappeared with original leaves 8 and 9 corresponds to pages 13.3 (tašʿītā history/narrative) – 17.9 (hwā hwā it was) of this edition. The immediately preceding leaf is exactly marked with the letter Y, whereas the following one, originally leaf 10, is numbered with the sign T and the first leaf of the second quire with the sign B. If no error was made in the numbering of the leaves—that is to say, if a leaf was not forgotten during numbering or if two leaves were not marked with the same sign—one of these leaves was already missing at that time. That this was the case is proven to us by a comparison with manuscript B, see below, no. 17. This manuscript is indeed a copy of manuscript D, and this manuscript has, in the middle of a page (fol. 13v), without any break in the

1. MARTIN, Grammatical Works, Tome I, Paris, 1872, Preface, p. 11 sq. Cf. B. d. Str., p. XXII.
2. Journal asiatique X, 13, p. 276, no. 132.