PREFACE

Among the brilliant stars of ancient Armenian classical literature, there is one author of whom we can say with full confidence that he has been one of the most beloved by the Armenian people. That author is the famous Yeghishe, the immortal eyewitness historian of the 5th-century Armenian heroic struggle, the Vardanian War.

Our goal here is not to provide a biography of Yeghishe, to illuminate various circumstances related to his life and activities, or to address the critiques published until now regarding his person, his writing, and his era.1

This preface of ours aims only to clarify philological issues.

Four asterisks arranged in a diamond pattern used as a section divider.

Yeghishe’s "History of Vardanank" has had numerous editions (see below and the complete bibliography at the end of this book), but none of those editions took into account all the manuscript readings or provided the necessary apparatus for a scholarly edition. This publication of ours is the first attempt in that direction, and in carrying out this work, we have taken into account and used: a) all manuscripts and collections of homilies charantir homiliary/lectionary located in the State Matenadaran of the Armenian SSR; b) the Venice manuscript and 5 homiliaries; c) printed editions that have manuscript significance (the first and second of Constantinople, the first of Venice, the Venice edition of 1852, and the one following the Anzevatsyats exemplar).

We must say from the very beginning that Yeghishe’s text is not like the texts of other writers. Yeghishe’s text acquired a kind of canonical nature, and the changes within it are so few that his manuscripts are divided into groups with difficulty. Previous editions, carried out based on various manuscripts, were already proof that one could not expect much that was new. Nevertheless, the original text is corrected in many places and becomes more defined.

1. Those who wish to learn about all of this can find information in the introduction to the modern Armenian translation of the book "History of Vardanank" by Yeghishe; see: Yeghishe’s History of Vardanank, with translation, introductory study, and notes by Prof. Dr. E. Ter-Minasyan, Haypetrat, Yerevan, 1946, pages 16—95.