History of Armenia

as well as the numerous deficiencies and misplacements of V., are explained by the only possible assumption—insofar as the available materials allow at present—that copy V. is a deliberately distorted and forged transcription of Z. Such intentional distortions are not an unusual thing. It is sufficient to recall the first, deliberately distorted transcription of the Chronicle of Eusebius of Caesarea by the hand of Gevorg Hovhannisyan of Palat ¹. In the present case, the copyist was likely guided by a false love for the library of Etchmiadzin, not wishing to diminish or degrade the value of Z. as the only manuscript, he issued the transcription with adjustments. Perhaps other calculations are involved, which it is unnecessary to dwell upon, since we do not have precise information about when, by whose hand, and by whose commission V. was copied.

G. Ter-Mkrtchyan, who did not have this copy (W) in hand, but knew it only through H. Tashyan’s description—having before his eyes its source’s scribe, the priest Grigor, and the time, 1642—assumed that another manuscript (B2) existed, similar to Z. (B), written by the same priest Grigor in 1642, from which V. originated. However, he himself is doubtful about the existence of B2 and his own assumption. Because, assuming that the priest Grigor copied P'arpetsi's Letter twice, it would be improbable that he would know where the actual Letter begins and copy the actual Letter without the Preface the first time, while the second time he copied it, he would confuse the Preface with the Letter, and attach the Preface to the Letter continuously. To this well-founded doubt of G. Ter-Mkrtchyan, it must be added that it would be very improbable to assume that in the span of time separated by more than thirty years, two persons (Bishop Vardan and the priest Grigor) were alive, in the same office, in the same relationship one to another, and with the literally same colophon.

¹ Zarb., Library of Armenian Translations, pp. 435–7.

Summarizing all the above mentioned, we see that Z. (=B) is currently the only parent manuscript that has served as a source for all printings performed so far of both the History and the Letter, as well as the other existing transcriptions (to the Etchmiadzin MS No. 1688, the Venice copy, and the Vienna copy). It served as a source for the printings not directly, but through the mediation of careless transcriptions.

In the present publication of Gh. P'arpetsi's History and Letter, this parent manuscript has been used for comparison for the first time. Thanks to the research of G. Ter-Mkrtchyan, we deemed it unnecessary to compare the second manuscript and bring its variant readings. That would be purely bibliographic, without any benefit for the orthography of the source text; not to mention that the unnecessary clutter of notes only complicates the work for a critic in the case of studying the source text with these notes. Following this, we also left out the readings of V.; but I hesitated to do this, considering that no examination had yet been made regarding the origin of that copy, and I felt it was a responsible act to remove from comparison—only by my own agreement—a copy that at least provided external evidence for examination regarding the arrangement of the material. The effort put into the comparison of this copy will be sufficiently rewarded by the fact that philologists will have the opportunity to form an accurate understanding of that interesting copy through the notes of the present publication.

G. Ter-Mkrtchyan and I compared the first printing of the History and Letter with Z. And I performed the comparison with the second and third printings with the help of my three students—Sarg. Yesayan, Kar. Mikayelyan, and Art. Hovhannisyan. The comparison of V., as I mentioned, was performed by H. P'ilezikchyan in Vienna on the G. printing.