History of Armenia

²) See page 197, note 5.

The publisher, through careful examination, arranged the segments that were placed out of order and distorted into their correct places ¹). In only one place did he not succeed in correcting the distortion ²), and he assumes that there is a missing portion of text there.

The third edition is a reprint of the second. We did not notice any new arrangement that the publishers claim to have introduced in the Letter as well.

I do not consider it unnecessary to characterize the value of these editions in a few words. The first edition of the History was done from one copy, for which the publishers provided neither the date nor any other circumstance. But since, as we will see a little later, it is now known from what source that copy originated, we can say that this edition was quite faithful. Unfortunately, the publishers provided no account as to whether or not they introduced any changes into the base text; therefore, we cannot say whether the changes observed between the source manuscript and the first edition belong to the publishers or the copy they had in their hands; likewise, we do not know whether the obvious typos and orthographic deviations of the source manuscript were already errors in their copy or the work of the publishers themselves.

The second edition definitely has great advantages compared to the first; numerous distortions have been corrected here. The punctuation has been significantly refined, thanks to which several passages have become understandable, which in the first edition, due to incorrect punctuation, were not understood or were misunderstood. The base text of the Vision and its commentary has been restored by comparison with other manuscripts.


The base text has been divided into three parts and one hundred chapters. One must only regret that the publisher considered it unnecessary to account to the reader for the majority of his corrections; in only a few places did he indicate that the first edition had this reading, which he corrected thus. The quantity and quality of the corrections in this edition are clearly visible from the notes of the present edition.

The third edition, with the exception of a fairly successful arrangement of the distorted passages in the Preface of the History, is in the rest a highly careless reprint of the second. Not only did it fail to include several small paragraphs that dropped out of the second edition, but it also omitted new paragraphs on its own; the typos are so numerous that it seems the printing was done without proofreading. The list of proper names is incomplete, and there are countless inaccuracies in the references. This edition is therefore a significant regression compared to the second edition.

The first edition of the Letter is a faithful reprint of the two copies, with very minor deviations for which the publisher accounts. But due to the above-mentioned incorrect arrangement of pages in the source manuscript, this edition is very defective. The second edition successfully restored the distortions by placing the incorrectly arranged segments in their proper places. Beyond this, the same must be said about the second and third editions of the Letter as we said about the second and third editions of the History.

Coming to the base texts from which these editions were made, we see that a copy formed the basis for the editions of the History, for which neither the year nor any other circumstance is known to us; whereas the two copies that were transcribed from the Etchmiadzin manuscript, whose date and other circumstances are again not revealed, formed the basis for the edition of the Letter.—At present,