I was looking for tools to help identify Syriac manuscripts, and was surprised to find how diffused the resources were. I’m putting them together with some short annotations in this blog post partially in order to ensure that I will be able to find them again the next time I need them, although hopefully it might help someone else find something new as well. I will try to keep the list updated as and when I come across more. My thanks to my colleague Simon Brelaud, who is a fellow Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies “Migration and Mobility in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages” in Tübingen in the spring of 2020, who helped me find a couple of these.
The Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures at the University of Hamburg has made available online their volume Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies: An Introduction (COMST). Syriac codicology is only one section within the larger work which also looks at Arabic, Armenian, Coptic, Georgian, Greek, Hebrew and other traditions, but its comparative nature is a benefit as well, since book traditions are related across these languages. I found it especially useful for information on writing materials and bindings.
Hatch’s study from 1946 is available to read on Archive.org and provides a quick introduction to Syriac paleography and codicology. I also found S.P. Brock, Catalogue of Syriac Fragments (New Finds) in the Library of the Monastery of Saint Catherine, Mount Sinai (Athens: 1995) useful as well, but I had access to a physical copy of this volume, so I’m unsure if it can be found online.
The Digital Analysis of Syriac Handwriting (DASH) is a project hosted by Stanford University. It’s a tool which allows direct comparison of letterforms, displaying examples culled from a sizable corpus of digitized manuscripts. Its major limitation is that it exclusively focuses on examples securely dated to before AD 1100.
The Hill Museum & Manuscript Library’s online coursebook breaks down Syriac paleography in ten lessons, each of which is well-illustrated with examples from their digital collections. Covers the entire history of Syriac paleography through to the 21st century, as well as a lesson on Garshuni (Arabic text written with Syriac characters). Worth noting that they have built lessons for Latin and Arabic book hands as well. The rest of vHMML, one of the world’s largest digital manuscript libraries, has a robust set of search tools once you get used to the site’s idiosyncratic controls. Note that access to their virtual reading room requires (free) registration.
A site aiming to provide a comprehensive annotated bibliography of all online Syriac resources. I found its search tools useful to trying to identify works of literature if you only have partial information to hand – an author’s name or an incipit which doesn’t seem to match what you expected.
Likely on of the first online resources anyone learning Syriac will have found, the searchable version available from Dukhrana Biblical Research is still very useful tool for checking whether that string of marks you think you’ve deciphered actually forms a word or not.
March 23rd , 2020 by DC Whalin