Manuscript art is one of the most unique examples of Armenia’s medieval culture. Due to her turbulent history many of the large Armenian cultural monuments (monasteries, churches, palaces, fortresses, etc.) were destroyed or plundered, and few other examples have reached us in their original forms.

But manuscript art which was portable enough to be smuggled out of harm’s way, has left the world a legacy of some 30,000 known Armenian manuscripts. How many more perished we can only imagine. Within the margins of surviving manuscripts side notes describe the loss of entire libraries of manuscripts at the hands of Seljuks, Mongols and Turkish Ottomans as many as 10,000 at a time.

Large collections of Armenian manuscripts are housed at libraries or museums in Jerusalem, Venice (St. Lazaro Island), New Jhulfa, Moscow, Paris, London and Los Angeles. The largest collection by far is that housed at the Matenadaran (or Manuscriptorium) in Yerevan with almost 17,000 manuscripts in total. Of that more than 13,600 are complete manuscripts, fragments of Armenian manuscripts, Armenian talismans and new manuscripts.

Most of the history of the Armenian people is concentrated in the Matenadaran, beginning from the Hyksos invasion of Egypt in 1600 BC through the genocide in 1915 to the modern era. Each one holds a small part of that history. The oldest written memorials of the Armenian people at the museum are parchment remnants from the 5^th-6^th centuries, complete manuscripts from the 7^th century, and later, fossilized manuscripts and parchment fragments found in caves. The oldest surviving complete Armenian manuscript is a 7^th century Gospel copied on parchment.

The manuscripts vary in size and design, from a 5^th century ivory bound Gospel, the weighty Homilies of Mush, down to a minute Calendar weighing 19 grams, which can only be read with a magnifying glass. There are luxuriously bound editions of ecclesiastical books, and there are plain looking but priceless editions of songs, chronicles and philosophical treatises.

Another 2,800 manuscripts are in Arabic, Farsi, Greek, Latin, Georgian, Hebrew, Assyrian, Old Slavonic, Ethiopian, and other languages.