The Book of Splendours

Introduction. XXII

text in these places agrees with what I call in the B. d. Str. the corrected recension, that is to say the text of ms. 𝔏. The ms. D could not, therefore, in its first state, represent this recension for these passages. But it could have been corrected already by the first scribe (see above on p. 155, 7 sq.) to the point of being able to represent it, in a certain number of passages. If it is as old as I am disposed to believe because of its subscription, it would be, contrary to the opinion set forth in B. d. Str., p. XLI, D and not 𝔏 which would be the oldest representative of the "corrected recension." It could not, in any case, represent it except at the moment when it began to form. But now, despite everything, I am disposed to believe that I was mistaken in this regard, cf. below, p. XLVIII and LII. Be that as it may, in its original form ms. D belongs to the uncorrected recension.

Given the way in which I could know D at the moment when I constituted the text which was to serve as a base for my translation in Buch der Strahlen—that is to say according to the variants provided by MARTIN—I had no reason to prefer it to B. Cf. B. d. Str., p. XL. But after having studied the ms. itself, the situation is entirely different. The very intimate relationship between the two mss. that I could highlight then is now explained. The gaps in the text of B show that B is a copy of D, made at a time when this ms. had not been completed by the secondary-hand leaves that are now placed there, but where, on the other hand, it did not yet have all the gaps that are now found there, exposed or filled by secondary-hand leaves¹. If therefore, in the B. d. Str., p. XLII, I indicated FT𝔏 as the principal guarantors and BG(D) as second-order guarantors, currently B becomes useless to the extent that D is accessible to us in its original form, and D deserves to be placed perhaps on the same rank as F𝔏T. I think that these mss. are sufficient for the reconstitution of the text, estimating that one would find nothing es-

1) If, as I think, the secondary-hand leaves were introduced during the restoration of the ms. by Abdallah in 1613/14, this means that B was written before that time, and at a time significantly earlier than that indicated by SACHAU, op. cit., p. 695.