Or 8857

Five quires (quires 5-9) of a miscellany produced in a monastic context containing Christian prayers, recipes for incenses, calendrical, astronomical, astrological, agricultural, medical and weather lore along with information about Christian feast days.

Contents:

• 1) Fragment of a Christian prayer (f. 18r-18v [37r-37v Coptic foliation], defective at beginning);
• 2) Duʿā mustakhraj min Kitāb Dāwūd al-nabī (دعا مستخرج من كتاب داود النبي, ff. 18v-22r [37v-41r Coptic foliation]);
• 3) Duʿā allafahū ba‘ḍ al-mu’minīn al-muḥiqqīn min al-Naṣārá (دعا ألفه بعض المؤمنين المحقين من النصارى, ff. 22r-28v [41r-47v Coptic foliation]);
• 4) Three recipes for incense (ff. 28v-30v [47v-49v Coptic foliation]);
• 5) Kitāb al-azminah (كتاب الأزمنة, ff. 30v-33v, 11r-16v, 3r-10v, 17r-17v, 1r and 1v [49v-70v Coptic foliation, with two folios missing: 56 and 57]);
• 6) Astrological treatise (ff. 1v-2v [70v-71v Coptic foliation], defective at end).

The folios of the manuscript have been bound out of order, but an earlier foliation in Coptic numerals suggests a different running order as well as the placement of two missing folios. The Coptic foliation begins at 37 (f. 18r) and finishes at 71 (f. 2r), which indicates that 36 folios are wanting from the beginning of the manuscript. The manuscript is defective at the end, since the text at the end of f. 2r breaks off mid-flow. Quire signatures show that the surviving portion of the manuscript comprises 5 quaternions (quires 5-9).

The running order of the folios and placement of missing folios suggested by the Coptic foliation is as follows:

ff. 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 11, 12, 13, [2 folios missing here], 14, 15, 16, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 17, 1 and 2.

Greek majuscule quire signatures executed in red and sometimes also black ink are found in the upper edge corners and Georgian majuscule quire signatures in black ink are found at the centre of the lower or upper margins of the following folios:

• 5 (f. 25v [44v Coptic foliation], Greek red, Georgian lower margin);
• 6 (f. 26r [45r Coptic foliation], Georgian upper margin [beginning of quire]);
• 6 (f. 33v [52v Coptic foliation], Greek red, Georgian lower margin [end of quire]);
• 7 (f. 16v [60v Coptic foliation], Greek red and black, Georgian lower margin);
• 8 (f. 10v [68v Coptic foliation], Greek red and black, Georgian lower margin);
• 9 (f. 17r [68r Coptic foliation], Greek red, Georgian upper margin).

These quire signatures indicate an unbroken sequence of quaternions numbered quire five through nine of which quire seven is missing two folios (56 and 57 Coptic foliation) and quire nine is missing the last five folios. The fact that the quires marked seven and eight in the Greek signatures are marked eight and seven respectively in the Georgian signatures appears to be an error in the Georgian signature and not an indication that the quires were bound in reverse order. This combination of Greek and Georgian quire signatures is indicative of, but perhaps not unique to, manuscripts produced at the Monastery of St Catherine in Sinai (see Pataridze, 'Les Signatures des cahiers unilingues et bilingues dans les manuscrits Sinaïtiques (Georgiens, Arabes et Syriaques)', Manuscripta Orientalia 18.1 [2012], pp. 15-35).

Folio 22v has been left blank.

A much larger fragment (227 folios) of this manuscript is contained in Biblioteca Ambrosiana, X 201 sup. (see Löfgren and Traini, Catalogue of the Arabic Manuscripts in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, 3 vols [Vicenza: Neri Pozza Editore, 1975–95], vol. 1, item XXXIII, pp. 33-35; a digital surrogate of the manuscript can be accessed at https://ambrosiana.comperio.it/opac/detail/view/ambro:catalog:113822). The Ambrosiana manuscript begins with quire 13 and contains ff. 97-337 of the Coptic foliation.