Universal History

...with the spirit of Yohan the scribe, I beseech you to remember in your prayers before Christ me, and my parents, and my brother, and the bambkots a specific type of monastic/ecclesiastical relative or associate..."¹:

The scribe Yohan, as we have mentioned, preserved the colophon of the archetypal manuscript, separating it from his own new colophon with lines. Apparently, the name of the scribe of the previous parent manuscript was not preserved in the colophon of the manuscript he copied.

If Yohan had intended to erase his name, he would not have separated his colophon from the one he wrote with lines. One of the proofs of this is the preservation of the parent manuscript's colophon in manuscript N 1482 (page 89b), without the notation of its scribe's name. In that manuscript, there is neither the name of the scribe Yohan nor his colophon. From this, one might conclude that manuscript N 1482 was copied, either directly or indirectly, from the parent manuscript of N 2865, where the previous scribe’s name was also absent.

Later, the scribes who copied from manuscript N 2865 not only failed to preserve the lines separating the previous scribe's and Yohan's colophons, but there are even cases where they erased Yohan’s name and wrote their own in its place, creating confusion for some "researchers." For example, the scribe Grigor of the volume MM N 3070 (dated 1669–1674), while copying this colophon from the parent manuscript, wrote "Grgr" in place of the name Yohan (page 159a). However, lines were drawn over the latter by another hand, and "Yohan" was added above it; this is a restoration of the name of Yohan, the scribe of manuscript N 2865, and not the addition of another scribe's name. The name of Grigor, one of the scribes of this new manuscript, was also preserved on page 159a.

M. Abeghyan’s opinion regarding manuscripts N 2865 and N 869 is noteworthy. Abeghyan first divided the manuscripts of Khorenatsi’s History of Armenians into unpublished and printed groups, and later, when it became clear that there were printed versions among the unpublished ones, he rearranged these groups. The Amsterdam print manuscripts belong to group A, while the Venice print manuscripts belong to group T. There is also an "X" (mixed) group, whose parent he considered to be the oldest manuscript (13th century) now held as MM N 2865. According to Abeghyan, there were effectively two parent manuscripts for groups A, T, and X. According to Abeghyan, the general parent of the mixed group is the current MM N 2865 manuscript, from which originate the manuscripts of the same repository NN 1482, 1883, 3160, 3502, 4856, and Venice N 1156. If we add to these N 3070, St. Petersburg B-129, and other manuscripts, it would appear that the eight manuscripts of Asoghik that have reached us, and perhaps even more, have descended from the same N 2865 manuscript. However, because of our preferred groupings of the mentioned manuscripts—based on the integrity of the content of the Universal History, the presence of missing sections, and the presence of the colophons of both the author of the archetype and Yohan in the N 2865 manuscript—the creation of such a broad grouping of variants in the source text does not become definitive, as it is difficult to prove which of the noted manuscripts was copied directly or indirectly from the ancient manuscript N 2865. There is also another important circumstance here. M. Abeghyan finds that Venice manuscript N 869 belongs to the T (printed) group, not the X (mixed) group. It was copied by the scribe Davit Chnchghuk...

1 G. Manukyan, op. cit., pp. 234–255.