It's a well-known fact that Théophile Lefort's famous photographic archive was destroyed when the Leuven University Library burned down in 1940. Also lost in the fire was the library's manuscript collection, together with many invaluable Coptic fragments. Fortunately, by the time of the fire disaster, Lefort had already finished his publications of the Coptic material.¹  Perhaps not so known is the fact, that Lefort also owned a private collection of Greek, Coptic and Arabic manuscripts, that he acquired after World War II and donated to the university. In the 1970s, following tensions between Flemish and Waloon members of the university, the library was split between the KU Leuven and the newly founded UC Louvain. While the major part of Lefort's manuscripts, as well as his correspondence and papers went to Louvain-la-Neuve, a few Coptic and Arabic manuscripts remained at Leuven._² The collection is now available online on the library's website. The Coptic fragments have the call numbers Ms. 1162–1172. Of particular interest to the Göttingen Old Testament project is Ms. 1171, a set of two small parchment fragments, one of which contains Genesis 42:38 (recto) and 43:5-6 (verso) in unimodular script. I find it surprising that Lefort never published this, even though he had edited the same passage from Genesis before in his Coptica Lovaniensia. 

¹ Lefort, L.Th., "Coptica Lovaniensia", in: Le Muséon 50 (1937) pp. 5–52; Le Muséon 51 (1938) pp. 1–32; Le Muséon 53 (1940) pp. 1–66. Republished in: Les manuscrits coptes de l'Université Louvain. I Textes littéraires, Louvain 1940.

² It should be noted that the famous Akhmimic papyrus codex containing the Shepard of Hermas was split between the two universities. For details see now: Batovici, D., "Some Observations on the Coptic Reception of the Shepherd", in: COMSt Bulletin Vol. 3, No. 2 (2017), pp. 81–96.
 

Old Resources ... Modern Methodology: Athanasius of Alexandria in the Memory of the Copts

Dr. Ibrahim Saweros, Sohag University

DAAD Postdoctoral Fellow at the Seminar for Egyptology and Coptic Studies,
Georg-August-Universität Göttingen

2pm Tuesday 16 July 2019

Library of the SFB 1136, Nikolausberger Weg 23, 1st Floor

Computerizing Handwritings: Current Approaches on Historical Documents

On a really warm day in Basel a group of doctoral students from Suiss universities met to discuss and share recent developments in Digital Humanities. The Digital Humanities Lab represented by Gerhard Lauer and Lukas Rosenthaler and the d-scribes project represented by Isabelle Marthot-Santaniello had organized the event.

At center stage were past and present efforts in digital handwriting recognition. I was seriously struck by the wealth of young and creative minds at display that engage in pushing the limits further and further. By comparison, my own contribution felt fairly old-school. In any case, I left the event with a lot of food for thought and thankful for the opportunity to attend.      

In 1962, the Franciscan scholar Gabriele Giamberardini (1917-1978) published two Sahidic parchment folios which contain Genesis 23:18-20; 24:1-24.¹  The previous year, the heirs of a “well-known Coptic scholar” (notissimo studioso copto) offered for sale to the Franciscan Center of Christian Oriental Studies in Musky, Cairo, a large casing containing 35 Coptic parchment fragments, including the Genesis leaves that Giamberardini eventually edited. The scholar to whom Giamberardini refers in his article must have been Yassā ‘Abd al-Masīḥ, who passed away in 1959.

The Franciscans were not able to purchase the manuscripts because the price requested by Yassā ‘Abd al-Masīḥ’s heirs was prohibitive, but they were nevertheless allowed to photograph them. After this, the fragments disappeared and, for several decades, Giamberardini remained the only source of information regarding to two Genesis leaves. However, while the fragments were not available for inspection anymore, Peter Nagel realized on the basis of the photos published by Giamberardini in his article that they were part of a White Monastery codex which contained the Sahidic version of Genesis.²  Other codicologically related fragments are kept today in Berlin, Paris, Vatican, Vienna, and London. In his Biblia Coptica, the late Karlheinz Schüssler assigned to this manuscript the siglum “sa 1.”³  During the reorganization of the material inventoried, often chaotically and incorrectly, by Schüssler, our Sahidic Old Testament project in Göttingen gave to the same codex the siglum “sa 2020.”

Notably, all previous publications relied exclusively upon Giamberardini’s paper, mentioning that the Genesis fragments edited by him would be kept in an unknown private collection in Cairo. However, it appears that all the fragments seen by Giamberardini in 1961, including those of Genesis, are kept today in the Vatican library under the call number Vat. copt. 111. Although the pope received them in 1972, they were finally integrated into the papal library in 1974.⁴  As they do not belong to the well-known Borgia collection, they have flowed under the radar of Coptologists interested in the reconstruction of the Sahidic Bible.

Color photos of Vat. copt. 111 are now available online over at the Vatican Library’s website.  They allow us to establish with certainty that the two Genesis leaves published by Giamberardini in 1962 are ff. 96-97 of this miscellaneous manuscript. The recovery of the fragments will offer us the opportunity to collate them again in the near future and, hopefully, to obtain a better edition. 

1. G. Giamberardini, “Testo copto ṣa‘idico del Genesi 23,18-20, 24,1-24,” Studia Orientalia Christiana. Collectanea 7 (1962) 207-220.
2. P. Nagel, “Fragmente eines sahidischen Genesiskodex der Nationalbibliothek zu Paris (BN copte 1291 fol. 8-13),” Zeitschrift für ägyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde 116 (1989) 71-90, at 72 n. 4.
3. K. Schüssler, Biblia Coptica. Das sahidische Alte und Neue Testament vol. 1/1 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1995) 20-26.
4. D.V. Proverbio, “Additamentum Sinuthianum. Frammenti dal Monastero Bianco in un codice copto della Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana,” Rendiconti Accad. Lincei, Sc. Morali, s. 9, vol. 12 (2001) 409-417.

Am 26. Juni war unser Projekt zum Berliner KOHD-Tag eingeladen, ein jährliches Treffen mit Vorträgen und Berichten aus den Arbeitsstellen des Projektes Katalogisierung der Orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland (KOHD) und seiner Partnerprojekte. Das Treffen hat sich mittlerweile als eine feste Institution etabliert und bietet den Rahmen um Berichte,  Neuigkeiten sowie kleinere und größere Entdeckungen aus der täglichen Arbeit der Projekte präsentieren zu können. Die Vorträge der Teinehmenden, die sich im gut klimatisierten Brugsch-Pascha-Saal des Berliner Archäologischen Zentrums an diesem Nachmittag eingefunden hatten, reichten von den alttürkischen Turfantexten und den persischen Handschriften der Staatsbibliothek über Materialaspekte koptischer Papyruskodizes bis hin zu neu entdeckten koptischen Handschriften. Wir danken den Mitarbeiterinnen und Mitarbeitern der Berliner KOHD-Arbeitsstelle für ihre großartige Unterstützung unserer Arbeit am koptischen Alten Testament und freuen uns schon auf ein Wiedersehen beim KOHD-Tag 2020.