History of Armenia

Remember your reader in your pure prayers, and grant forgiveness of sins to me, a sinner. And may He who is abundant in goodness grant you and us the Kingdom of Heaven. And glory be to Christ the lover of mankind for ever, amen." (The other brief hishatakaran colophons/memorial notes are provided in this publication, among the notes).

This manuscript was called B (=Baghishean) by G. Ter-Mkrtchyan in his study, "The Manuscripts of Ghazar P'arpetsi." In this current publication, we have simply called it Z. (=Manuscript).

Regarding the second manuscript of the History, which G. Ter-Mkrtchyan designated with the letter E (=Etchmiadzin), (and in this publication B.Dz.), he provides the following information: "Leather-bound, 23X15, paper, notragir cursive script. The content is: pages 3a — 156a, History of Ghazar; pages 156b — 167b, blank, likely for writing the Letter of Ghazar; pages 168a — 183b, Koriun. The heading of E is 'History of Ghazar P'arpetsi,' etc. (see in this publication p. 1, note 1). 'There is no other colophon.'"

G. Ter-Mkrtchyan determines the genealogical connection between the two manuscripts as follows: "E clearly testifies that it was written in Etchmiadzin in 1774 from a rapid-script copy, 'from a corrected copy,' meaning from a clean, beautiful copy. B is indeed a quite beautiful bolorgir round script calligraphy, on smoothed glossy paper, in a beautiful leather binding, with various ornaments in the margins, particularly the first part of Z., and with several images. Besides B in Etchmiadzin—as is currently the case, and in all likelihood also in 1774—there was no other Z. of P'arpetsi, therefore B was the only copy from which E could have been transcribed. Although B is not included in the Karinean index, but... it was already in Etchmiadzin in 1829.

"E is a rather careless transcription of B. In some places, B omits words, sometimes entire sentences; it skips a letter or a preposition, makes spelling errors, and other such minor differences; but it does not have any extra word or sentence that would not be found in B and would force us to assume a different exemplar other than B from which E was transcribed."

On this basis, G. Ter-Mkrtchyan concludes that E (or our B.Dz.) was transcribed from B (our Z.). We reached this same conclusion by re-comparing many sections of these two manuscripts together with G. Ter-Mkrtchyan. It is only necessary to add, in completion of the information provided above, that manuscript B has corrections and explanations related to the text in many places in the margins. As a careful examination showed, these were not written with the help of any initial manuscript, but are rather the opinions and conjectures of some philological reader or readers from quite some time after the manuscript was written; from a textual-critical perspective, they are unimportant.

But there is a notable difference between B and E. We give the floor again to G. Ter-Mkrtchyan: "E ... has only one large section that is not in B, but that section is also an interpolation in E... That section is a very well-known piece of Khorenatsi, but it was not taken directly from any manuscript of Khorenatsi, but—as my detailed investigations convinced me—from the 1695 (Amsterdam) publication of Khorenatsi, with all the minor and characteristic variations of that publication. This makes it impossible to assume another Z. of P'arpetsi known to us from which E made its transcription." (Thereafter, G. Ter-Mkrtchyan provides the interpolated section 1) according to B, the 1695 Khorenatsi print, E, and the first Venetian printing, after which he continues). "The Baghesh manuscript (=B) therefore does not have the large 'having learned, they knew' section of Khorenatsi, but immediately continues: 'having received the characters from Abel, they were joyful.' And thus, having happened upon the invention of the characters, the blessed Mashtots put his hand to the work." These lines exist in B in the place on the page without any trace of a flaw, without distortion of meaning or corruption of words... The scribe of E 1, who was familiar with Khorenatsi, supplements the history of P'arpetsi from such a Khorenatsi in which, among foreign proper names, the 'phi' had been changed to 'er'. And the only such Khorenatsi is the 1695 print (or its accurate reprint in 1752 in Venice)... Thus, we know that in 1774 an interpolation was made in the Ghazar E manuscript, that the interpolated section was taken from the printed Khorenatsi...

1) "Ararat", ibid., p. 154: We bring the last words of the colophon from the original manuscript.