Album Of Armenian Paleography

Beskrivelse

The Album of Armenian Paleography showcases around 200 precisely dated handwritten texts taken from a vast collection of 30,000 manuscripts held across Europe, the Middle East, the former USSR, and North America. These manuscript pages, arranged chronologically, cover a time span from AD 862 to 1911.

A detailed visual and analytical study of Armenian manuscript lettering across centuries.

This volume presents carefully chosen specimen pages from Armenian manuscripts, each featuring a high-quality color facsimile of a typical page. Alongside each facsimile, you’ll find an alphabet table specific to the folio and a sample transcription to help you understand the text.

All photographs included are newly taken exclusively for this album. Thanks to the book’s large format, almost all manuscript pages are shown at their actual size, except for the very largest ones. Additionally, every facsimile page includes a color enlargement of several lines, allowing readers to examine the lettering in even finer detail.

In a dedicated section, computerized tables illustrate how individual letter forms have evolved over time. This approach enables a more nuanced understanding of the development of Armenian scripts than the traditional classification into types like erkat'agir, bolorgir, nôtrgir, and ðùagir. As a result, the album offers more accurate datings than previously available to scholars.

By tracing the changes in letter shapes, this work lays the groundwork for a clearer grasp of the chronology of Armenian manuscripts, as well as the literature and art they contain. It is an essential resource for anyone deeply engaged in studying the Armenian language, literature, and art, while its innovative methods will also appeal to paleographers and codicologists alike.

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