From 2 to 7 June, I visited the British Library in London to examine biblical and liturgical Coptic manuscripts held there. These manuscripts belong to three different projects ongoing at the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Lower Saxony. 

• CoptOT

As a member of the Göttingen CoptOT team, I was responsible for performing autopsy on pages containing texts from the books of the Pentateuch, including Exodus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, as well as Old Testament lectionaries. Nowadays, autopsies are not performed on every page, given that the quality of coloured photographs has improved immensely since the start of my academic career in the early 1990s. Nevertheless, autopsy remains an important method when working with ancient manuscripts. Consequently, the statistics of the Göttingen Virtual Manuscript Room now include the number of pages autopsied by a team member.

At the British Library, I consulted Coptic manuscripts in the ‘Asian & African Studies Reading Room’ section on the third floor. There, throughout my research stay, I had the full support of Michael Erdman, the Head of the Middle Eastern and Central Asian Section. He gave me permission to take photos and to use the library’s UV light device. Furthermore, since the British Library does not yet have a special box that can be used as a ‘dark room’ for reading manuscripts under UV light, he also allowed me to build a temporary one using a few book cradles. This practical ‘invention’ served me very well.

In particular, it helped me read the parchment large leaf, bearing the shelfmark Or. 4717, folio 1 verso, which is the single leaf left from a once extensive manuscript listed in CoptOT as sa 2187 containing biblical Odes 2–4: Deut 32; 1Sam 2; Hab 3. The leaf measuring 290 mm x 235 mm has strong darkened areas and therefore using UV light renders the ink visible beneath the dirt and makes a significant difference. Whereas in cases where the ink has faded, but traces remain from the pressure of the calamus while writing, the result would be less satisfactory.  

• DFG project n° 491266891

As the supervisor of the DFG project ‘Digital Edition of the Coptic Holy Week Lectionary’ I needed to photograph two Bohairic lectionaries with the curator’s permission. After studying my photographs, Lina Elhage-Mensching established that one of them, BL Or. 5453.1, folios 1–13, was not a Holy Week lectionary, but rather an Easter Week lectionary. The second lectionary, BL Or. 1242.6, folios 1–3, had not yet been studied in the framework of our project as the photos were lacking. This trilingual Bohairic–Greek–Arabic Holy Week lectionary has the siglum bo 3001L in our project. Its folios are dispersed over various library collections such as Oxford (BL, Copt.c.3, folios 1­­­–4), Hamburg (SUB, Lect. 1, folios 1–40) and Vienna (ÖNB, K 11346, folios 1–3).

• DFG project n° 287993677

Last but not least, as part of the third project, ‘The Hymns in the Coptic Liturgy of the White Monastery in Upper Egypt,’ I had to take care of typikon leaves from the codices MONB.WC, MONB.WK, and MONB.WP. I measured the new typikon leaves and compared my transcriptions with the manuscript. While this work was mostly routine, I was able to identify a few difficult words that were not found in the other typika from different library collections.

It is always a pleasure to visit the British Library and I look forward to my next research stay, as there is still much work to be done in the area of Coptic biblical and liturgical manuscripts.