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in the usual order, without the Epistle to the Hebrews; which last doubtless came at the end and completed the codex. Except two long omissions, and in places where a leaf is gone, the lacuna are inconsiderable. The missing leaves, besides those gone from the beginning and end, are usually those at the beginning or end of a quinio, or both; as the outer folio would soonest wear through at the back. The first leaf is a mere fragment, containing portions from Matt. xii. 20-48. The lacuna of one leaf or more are the following: Matt. xiii. 28-57, one leaf; xvii. 20-xix. 12, one leaf; xxv. 11 -xxvi. 31, one leaf; Mark iv. 2-35, one leaf; Luke xix. 38-XX. 21, one leaf; John viii. 31 (20 of Syriac numbering)-ix. 31, two leaves; 2 Corinthians xiii. 8-Galatians ii. 17, two leaves; Philippians ii. 15 -Colossians i. 8, two leaves; 1 Timothy iii. 3-2 Timothy iii. 5 (except that a fragment preserves a few words in 1 Timothy ii. 1019; iii. 1-3), two leaves and a large fragment.

The other two important lacuna by omission are 2 Corinthians x. 1-14, and Galatians iii. 15-29. In addition to these defects, the passage Acts xi. 2-19 is transposed with the next one, Acts xi. 19-39. In this case the scribe copied one church-lesson out of its order by mistake, and supplied the defect as soon as he came to the end of the lesson first written. He also marked the place by leaving a space of four lines, and writing the vermilion lesson-note therein more conspicuously than usual. The other two defects mentioned had an origin nearly similar. That in Galatians omits a church-lesson, giving its rubricated title, but skipping over to the matter of the following lesson, and omitting the title to the latter.

An easy computation shows that the end of the twenty-fourth quinio would have just included the whole of the Epistle to the Hebrews, with part of a page for subscription and colophon. The Apocalypse would have required two quiniones in addition to that; and I cannot believe that so much could ever have been removed without leaving the evidence on the binding at the back. It seems beyond a doubt that the Apocalypse was never there. It should be stated here that not every quinio was originally full. Quinio 5 never contained but 9 leaves, and quinio 16 only 8.

A word is proper here with regard to the deciphering. The age of the codex alone would cause some difficulties; but time alone, apart from other agencies, has dealt tenderly with its legibility, though it shows its work abundantly upon the firmness of the material. But at some time or other the upper portion of the codex had been soaked in water, so that nearly throughout the whole manu

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script the upper half of each page is difficult to read, requiring the greatest patience and a skillful use of light. Sometimes a word requires hours to make it out. In damp weather some portions are illegible which can be read when it is dry. For this reason much of the codex is easy to read in this country, which could not be read in winter at Beirût. Sometimes writing set off on an opposite page helps the decipherment; at other times it hinders it. Sometimes the ink is entirely gone, but has left the letter etched into the surface. In many places the writing is hygroscopic, and becomes plain for a few seconds when the surface is dampened; in such cases appearing either instantly or after the lapse of half a minute to a minute. other places a roughened surface conceals the ink which has penetrated to the interior of the membrane, and shows the writing when the surface is rendered transparent by moisture. But the artifices of deciphering are numerous, and perhaps as tedious in the full recital as the work itself has been. It needs only to be added that every letter, and most of the vowels and points, of the text are decipherable. A few of the section-numbers which belong in the margin I cannot find. They may have faded out, or they may never have been written. Sad work has been often made with the rubricated portions, which wash away readily with water; but, after all, most of them are decipherable. The vermilion title to Timothy is almost the only important one that has been wholly obliterated.

After the soaking in water mentioned above, which made so many holes, and took off a number of upper outer corners by decay, a very late second hand has re-written a few spots, and re-inked a few vowels, besides adding here and there a new vowel not in the first writing. But the aggregate of such re-writings is insignificant, and nowhere interferes with the deciphering of the first hand. This second hand writing is of the more recent Jacobite style, but doubtless a century old, at least. To a similar period belong a few scrawls on the margins, made by some unthinking idler.

But, still later, the codex had some usage that may have been even rougher. It was this time soaked in muddy water; and when I found the codex there was so much absolute mud-earth and water-within it, caked on the leaves, that quinio 22 could not be read at all without first a scaling off and then a washing. (But in the six years since that process its writing has come out plainer than in most other portions of the codex, though the parchment shows a yellower color.) To this day some caked mud remains in minute spots, for I have not ventured to wash except where absolutely necessary in order to

read it. Indeed, in order to decipher it, the whole codex had to be taken apart; and the mass of rotten cord and cloth and mud, which represented the remnant of the ancient binding, had to be removed. Mixed in with the latter were sundry grains of wheat and barley—as if the book had stood cornerwise in the mud of a grain bazar. This rotten back was washed out, and proved to be a curious fabric of twine and cloth, wrought by the binder's needle. It would have been preserved; only the moths and roaches of the East soon put it beyond hope.

In addition to all that, the damp climate of Beirût - rain in winter and the sea in summer-had started the decay anew along the edges, especially where the former visitation of water had left it ragged. And as if that were not enough, a great fat moth, one of the very juicy kind common in Beirût, had been squeezed between two leaves as the MS. stood in the library, leaving the impression of his wings to this day, along with a fearful decay of membrane over nearly the whole of two pages, seriously damaging the substance of the parchment itself. I was kindly permitted indeed the suggestion came from Dr. Bliss to bring the MS. to America, in order to finish my work with it. It had to be watched and kept from damp on the sea voyage, or the old spots would show dissolving edges. The climate of this country is more favorable to both its legibility and its preservation, than the climate of Beirût.

II. Internal Description.

As to the style of the writing, it is of the transition from Estrangela to Jacobite, but not yet progressed so far as to have lost entirely a resemblance to the old Nestorian. The pure Estrangela style and letters are perhaps more conspicuous in the Gospel of Mark than elsewhere, but they occur throughout the whole codex. The Jacobite style which it resembles nearest, is altogether the Mesopotamian, not at all approaching the Palestinian or the Maronite. It is easy to read to one who is familiar with the Estrangela; but not very easy for one who knows only the common Jacobite of the printed books. It is pretty well supplied with diacritic points, which belong mostly to the simpler and older systems; such as the sign of the plural, the sign of the feminine in the suffix pronoun, the points which distinguish between two nouns with the same spelling, between a verb and a participle, between the first personal pronoun used as the subject of a sentence and the same used as the substantive verb, and so on.

The sign of the plural is commonly, but not always, used with numerals. * The pointing is simple, and easily learned and followed. Sometimes as in all Syriac MSS., the points are wrongly used; a thing at which no one will wonder who tries to write or copy Syriac. The rare mistake of writing a rish for a dolath occurs a few times in the MS.; twice or more in the case of proper names, and a few times in the case of the particle. A few cases also occur in the rubricated matter, where the points were regularly added in black, after the body of the lines was written, and might easily go astray. The famous example in Luke xxiv. 32, and the less famous one in 2 Cor. iv. 18, occur in the MS. with a rish for a dolath, but are not to be considered mistakes

The vocalization is neither rare nor very frequent. It is effected, not by points, except in some apparent, but altogether rare instances, but by the well-known characters of Greek derivation. Several instructive examples (e. g., some in Acts ii.) seem to show that the Arabic damma was derived from the Syriac zeqofo (), or, originally, from the Greek omicron.† (It is well known that the Arabic medda (~) was derived from the Estrangela aleph ().) In the interjection ), the Greek vowel omega is used to vocalize, as also to distinguish it from the word of the same letters with a diacritic point (J), which means or. But throughout the MS. the vocalization ist chiefly met with in the case of the less frequently occurring proper names, or with foreign words, or with Syriac words when convenient so to distinguish them from others formed of the same letters.

Punctuation is generally used with moderate care. The four points in diamond shape (usually in vermilion about a central black loop) mark either a larger division, or a smaller one of importance, even if the importance be one of sentiment merely, and not grammatical, nor a logical division of the discourse. A lesser point of the same nature is the diamond composed of two black dots horizontal and two red dots vertical, without the central loop or dot. A sentence usually ends with a single dot, like our period, but sometimes with a double dot. The double dot is sometimes upright, sometimes inclined to the right or to the left; but it is not always

* I have not been careful to note whether this presence or absence of the plural points follows the rules laid down by the native grammarians. †This peculiarity is sometimes imitated in print; e. g., in the Syriac Grammar of Henley, London, 1723, a book which seems to be unknown to the bibliographers.

easy to determine whether it leans (virtually; for it often merely follows the slope of a letter-stroke), or whether any difference of meaning attaches by reason of its inclining one way or the other, or standing vertical. It is the rule for the lower one of this double to coincide with the heavy end of an unjoined final nun- that is, when placed after a word with such final. Thus these cases have the appearance of a single dot placed at the top of the line, like a Greek colon. But there is no other case, at least no clear one, of this single dot at the top, in the Gospels. In the Acts and onward, it does occur, and not infrequently. The double dot, also, often has its lower

one under the final letter, especially in case of an aleph. In this case, sometimes, the upper one is omitted; though it sometimes seems to have been thus omitted designedly. These two cases pre

sent the only difficulty in copying the MS. in printed type.*

The ambiguities in reading are the usual ones; viz., the difficulty of deciding whether a shin or an 'ee is preceded by a yud or a nun, or by neither; whether a letter is 'ee or kaf; or whether another is yud, nun, or shin; which last again is sometimes farther complicated by the liability of one of them to be confused with one stroke of a hhath.

The punctuation seems to vary with the scribe. Both that and other indications seem to show that the latter part of Luke and all of John were written by a different hand from Matthew and Mark. In the Epistles, also, the variations in punctuation, together with a more modern shape given to the aleph when the writing is crowded, and (a very few times) to a mim when made by correction from a waw, seem to indicate still another scribe.

Sometimes a punctuation mark, especially in the case of the quadruple dot, is transferred from the end of one line to the beginning of the next.

In the Acts and Epistles, quotations from the Old Testament are frequently marked by a short oblique stroke in red, at the beginning of the lines throughout the quotation. Sometimes a black angular mark makes an arrow-head to the inner end of this red mark. The MS. is too much decayed and faded to show whether all quotations from the Old Testament were originally so marked.

The evidences of both carefulness and competency on the part of the scribe are abundant in every part of the MS. The errors that

*A difficulty which I observe is overcome in the later printed Syriac books.

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