Or 3372

A Syriac lectionary, or anthology of the Four Gospels arranged with notes on reading.

ff. 1v-3r : A table of contents arranged according to the specific readings, illuminated with asterisks on backgrounds of yellow, green, pink and blue inks.

f. 3v : An illustration of the Cross in gold leaf, enclosed within a gold-ruled box filled with geometrical patterns in inks of the full spectrum of the rainbow. The image is accompanied by an Arabic inscription made in the city of Aleppo in 1588 CE.

f. 4r : A series of Garshuni Arabic accounts of the movement of the manuscript from the 16th century onwards. One of the statements attests to the custodianship of the manuscript at the Mar Elias Maronite Church in the new city of Aleppo, patronized (?) by Badr Ibn Ambram (?) from the village of Hasroun. A further listing of donors/patrons from the village of Hasroun is listed in later inscriptions on the same folio.

f. 4v : Illustrations of the Nativity and Jesus'' baptism.

f. 5r : Illustrations of the Jesus'' entry into Jerusalem and the four Evangelists.

ff. 5v-142v : The text of the four Gospels.

Some readings are introduced by rectangular boxes featuring intricate illumination in inks of red, white, blue, green, yellow, orange, purple, black and gold. Some pages include small roundels at the bottom bearing Syriac quire markers and illumination in the same ink.

The manuscript is undated, and the approximate dating of the work is disputed. Although consensus in the scholarly community holds that the work is an example of late 12th or early 13th-century Syriac production, Raby and Brock have proposed that both the text and the images were produced in Turabdin in the late 10th or early 11th century.

The manuscript contains occasional marginalia in Greek and in Garshuni Arabic or Syriac. There are several colophons, including those on 135v (written in Syriac by the monk Emanuel and citing his brothers Petros and Nihe as the illuminators/illustrators, cited by Raby and Brock as the authors of the original text); 141r (written in Garshuni Arabic in 1498 CE by Yuhanna Ibn al-Qasis Ibrahim from Beth Harawas?); and on 142r (written in Garshuni Arabic in 1870 of the Greek calendar, approximately 1558 CE, by Shuhada (?) Ibn al-Qasis Ibrahim in a Maronite monastery).

The primary, original text is written in the estrangelā script, while all marginalia is in serṭā. The manuscript has undergone a number of basic repairs, with text rewritten on the repair paper in serṭā script.