The Demonstrations of Aphrahat

...so that we might present the various readings of all manuscripts of any importance which are preserved, whether in Paris at the National Library, in Rome at the Vatican, in London at the British Museum, and not neglecting those of greater importance present in other public libraries, namely in Florence and Milan, Munich and Berlin, Saint Petersburg, Oxford and Cambridge, and also in some other cities.

All the various readings that we will be able to collect from these various manuscripts, you will find placed at the end of the pages. However, all those that pertain to orthography will be referred to in the description of the manuscripts themselves, as is fitting, since they cannot truly be called various readings. Among the Syriac manuscripts, many are devoid of vowel signs; they provide only diacritical points by which various names that have the same consonants and differ only in vowels are distinguished. But the rule and force of these points is not always and everywhere the same, wherefore, as regards various readings, they must not always be read in the same way. So that our explanation may become simpler and more easily understood, we will give specific notice of these for individual manuscripts in the description of each one.

And since a view of the manuscripts themselves often helps greatly in understanding all these annotations, we will place before the reader's eyes samples of at least the principal manuscripts in which the works of each author are contained, using what they call heliotype a photomechanical printing process.

At the end of each page, we have placed the sigla of the manuscripts so that it may be indicated which manuscripts were available to us to present such a text.

To those Syriac texts, we will add a Latin translation. The reason why we have translated all these texts into Latin is evident in itself: all who devote themselves to ecclesiastical sciences have studied the Latin language. Furthermore, since those texts pertain to ecclesiastical matters, they can be translated into Latin without any difficulty, since the Roman Church itself uses the Latin language.

So that we may provide greater utility from the publication of these Syriac texts to those who study the Syriac language, at the end of the works of any author you will find a lexicon, where all names are appended with all their forms used by this author, together with the places in which they are found. Lest the size of this lexicon grow too large, we omit the Latin meaning, since it is found in the translation itself.