The Book of the Ascent of the Mind

Furthermore, the librarians of the Bodleian Library at Oxford were kind enough to facilitate our collation of the manuscript Hunt. dxl. This manuscript (C), in a rather poor Jacobite script, contains errors, a number of which were subject to subsequent correction. M. Payne Smith, in his Thesaurus Syriacus Syriac Dictionary, makes numerous references to it, which led us to indicate its folios with the notes C1, C2, etc.

Finally, we were able to see a fourth manuscript (D) of the same work in Cambridge. This manuscript, uncatalogued and without an indication of origin, is in a rather poor, modern Nestorian script. We noted that it offers the same lacunae as B, which establishes their common origin and has spared us from collating it entirely.

The Jacobite characters used for printing are those that Mgr Graffin had engraved for his Patrologia Syriaca Syriac Patrology. They are well-suited to the author, his era, and the manuscripts used. We only had to, for lack of diacritical points, use the vowels ܝ yod and ܘ waw to distinguish the participle and the pronouns. The other printed vowels already exist in the manuscripts.