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Most of what is known about the scribes who wrote the manuscripts
are recorded in side margins on the manuscripts themselves. In
these they expressed their thoughts and feelings, wrote verse
or drew themselves kneeling at the feet of a famous scholar or
poet. These memorials are often profound and sometimes witty.
They also bring the medieval world alive.
 The
poorest in the monasteries, subsisting on bread and water and
suffering from cold, damp and disease, going blind working in
dark cells, scribes rarely described the hard work involved
in preparing parchment, making dyes and inks or the years and
decades required to write a single manuscript. But they did
not write about this. Instead they wrote about the reward for
all their hardship the book. And they commented on their times.
During the Mongol
invasions, one scribe wrote in the margin, "It is better to
die with a clear conscience than live with lowered eyes."
Describing how an
Armenian peasant murdered the Seljuk Khan, notorious for his
atrocities, the scribe adds his own comment: "He who kills a
rabid dog is innocent."
They were also remarkably
human in their views. In one of the more than 300 Armenian translations
of Aristotle, one suddenly reads in the margin alongside deep
philosophical thoughts: "On fleas: pour the blood of a goat
into a large shallow bowl and place it by your side. In this
way you will rid yourself of fleas."
Another scribe, who
described how poor peasants drowned their sorrows in drink after
handing over their harvest to princes and monasteries, drew
a list of twelve "harmful effects of drunkenness" for their
benefit. Realizing this would have no effect, he resorted to
more practical advice how to drink without getting drunk: "Chew
seven almonds on an empty stomach and then after every glass
chew two quince seeds."
In another manuscript,
the scribe made a mistake, crossed it out, corrected it and
added the following remark: "If one starts talking to a scribe,
such errors occur."
In still another
a frustrated scribe, copying complex terminology from a book
by the 5th century Armenian neo-Platonic philosopher
David Anhaght, writes in the margin, "Oh philosopher David,
couldn’t you write a little more simply, so that we, too could
understand something?"
And there was the
scribe, who in copying a translation of Grammar by Dionysius
Thrax, which took up dozens of pages of the manuscript with
pedantic and obsolete formal conjugations of the verb "to forge",
suddenly stopped his copying to write in the margins, "O, brother
reader. I am tired of forging; forge on yourself if you want
to," and then moved on to another section of the manuscript.
 Poignantly,
a testament to the scribes who gave so much to create and preserve
these remarkable works of art, is the tale Hovhannes Mangasarents,
who, at age eighty-six, held his trembling right hand with his
left so he could complete his last manuscript in crooked letters.
He died before he was able to sign the manuscript. This was
done by his apprentice Zakaria who wrote: "For seventy-two years,
winter and summer, day and night, he copied manuscripts. He
completed one hundred and thirty-two. And in his old age, when
his sight had deteriorated and his hands trembled, he with great
difficulty completed St. John’s Gospel and afterwards could
no longer hold a pen."
Ignoring their health,
their lives, their own selves, scribes were interested only
in the fate of their manuscripts. In most comments in the margins,
they pleaded with their readers to look after their "offspring".
A fitting tribute to their devotion is the following example:
O readers, I beg
you,
Attend to my word;
Take my book with you, treat it with care and read it.
If it is captures by enemies, retrieve it.
Do not leave it in a damp place it will mould,
Don’t let candle wax drip on it
Do not moisten your fingers leafing it through,
Do not shamelessly tear its pages.
We live in a fortunate
age where cyber bytes and entire libraries can be scanned, catalogued
and sent across the globe in mere seconds. We do not worry about
candle wax, or moistening the tips of our fingers as we leaf through
web pages. It is very hard to tear a page on the Internet. But
in our race to catalogue all the information of the universe on
one computer chip, we forget the wonder of the word itself. We
forget the joys of holding a book in our hands, of examining the
care with which it was written, the beauty of the inscription,
the inspiration that caused it to be.
For our readers,
we offer the following Internet version of the Manuscript world.
Read it, share it, and let the traditions of 20,000 years of
the art of writing come alive yet again.
Better yet, visit
the Matenadaran in Yerevan and see the glories of writing for
yourself. Nothing is as good as the real thing, and books remain
the most portable computers on earth.
Primary source for
this article was Gevorg Emin’s Seven Songs About Armenia
(translated from the Armenian version by Mkrtich Soghikian,
edited by Jan Batler, 1981, Progress Publishers, Moscow). The
book is currently out of print, but should you find a copy,
do buy it: it is one of the most poetic and beautiful descriptions
of the manuscript tradition I have read.
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