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This article discusses a little-known Tibetan bound-book format, using examples from a unique collection of manuscripts, named Drangsong, belonging to the Bon religion of Tibet. Despite the fact that Tibetan sewn books are rare compared to other formats, they are common in Mustang. This study of sixteen sewn Drangsong manuscripts explores the technical details of their binding, the interdependence of the format and function of these manuscripts, as well as their manufacturing materials in the context of the provenance of these books and the social history of the region. A comparison will then be made between the books’ individual vs. collective features.

Manuscript and Text Cultures is published in collaboration with the Digital Clay Sanskrit Library (eCSL). The Clay Sanskrit Library is a book series initiated by John P. Clay covering a wide spectrum of Classical Sanskrit literature spanning two millennia. Today, the list of published volumes encompasses fifty-six works. Bound in the convenient pocket size (4.5″×6.5″) in an elegant design, each work features the original Sanskrit text in transliterated Roman letters on the left-hand page with its English translation on the facing page. John P. Clay’s vision came to life in the late 1990s, when he began to put the people and resources together for what would become the Clay Sanskrit Library. Since the publication of the first volume in 2005, fifty-six volumes have been published. The selection represents the richness and wide variety of Sanskrit literature, covering works of drama, poetry, satire, and novels, as well as the two famous epics, the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa. The Clay Sanskrit Library titles are in the process of conversion to digital format at the Digital Clay Sanskrit Library (eCSL). In eCSL, the editions retain the facing page translations and they provide additional search and navigation features, thus making it an immediate and practical platform especially to students of Sanskrit. Visit the website of eCSL for more details.

This is an investigation of character-naming expressions in early Greek (ca. eighth–sixth c. BC) and Old Babylonian Akkadian narrative poetry (ca. nineteenth–seventeenth c. BC). It compares the mentions of Zeus and Enlil (the Babylonian chief god) in Iliad Book 8 and OB Atra-hasis, and proposes a three-layered classification system based on degrees of traditionality. The system involves metre and repetition parameters, and accounts for the techniques through which poets in both traditions made the mention sound venerable and ancient. Control cases include other characters in the Iliad (Diomedes, Hector) and OB Akkadian poetry (Isthar, Ea). The resulting figures are commensurate for the two traditions, supporting the hypothesis of a similar degree of orality-literacy interaction. The article seeks to offer a model for fine-grained cross-cultural literary criticism and verse study.

Since the invention of the Indian writing system around the third century BC, Sanskrit literature was no longer exclusively oral. However, not all genres immediately adopted the new possibilities. In order to fully understand the orality and writing of Sanskrit literature, I will first define a threefold division of what I call ‘the compositional complex’, the totality of processes involved in the creation of texts and their subsequent usages. The first stage is the composition of the text, the second is its preservation for the sake of future generations, and the third is its transmission to the audience. Each stage can be oral or written. After a brief discussion of secondary literature on the compositional complex of the Vedas, the Mahābhārata and the Purāṇas, I look for text-internal evidence for the compositional complex of Purāṇas in the Bhaviṣyapurāṇa, ‘the Purāṇa of the future’. On the basis of this single Purāṇa, it is possible to make a reconstruction of the composition, preservation, and transmission of Purāṇas, where orality and writing intertwine.

This paper investigates how Konan Bunzan 湖南文山 confronted the issue of oral effects in the 17 th-century translation Tsūzoku sangokushi 通俗三國志 , a widely-read Japanese serialization of Luo Guanzhong’s 羅貫中 14 th-century Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Despite being a famed written work, belonging to the ‘Four classic Chinese novels’ (si da qishu 四大奇書 ), Luo’s novel contains numerous oral elements which emulate domestic storytelling culture. The fecundity of the text for orality studies is thus apparent. In examining how the oral effects in Luo’s text were changed in translation into Japanese, I first use Idema’s model of the six markers of ‘the storyteller’s manner’ to evaluate how oral effects are mostly lost in translation, paying attention to certain aspects which are omitted over others. Second, I prove that certain oral elements, such as the inclusion of poems in parallel prose into the narrative, undergo less significant changes. Finally, I assess the usefulness of Idema’s framework beyond its original Sinological context, evaluating its applicability to Tsūzoku sangokushi.

Geoffrey Chaucer’s (1343–1400) repeated phrases are a conundrum. Nancy Mason Bradbury has referred to them as ‘formulas’; Derek Brewer has described Chaucer’s poems as having a ‘traditional formulaic style’. But why would a literate poet make use of a device that tends to be associated with orality? This paper offers an alternative comparandum for Chaucer’s repeated phrases: the refrain. As well as writing narrative poetry, Chaucer acknowledges at the end of The Canterbury tales that during his career he has written ‘many a song and many a leccherous lay’ (‘many a song and many a lascivious ditty’). Few of these songs survive, but one in particular—a ballade known as ‘To Rosemounde’—shows Chaucer to have a keen facility with the paradoxical potential of the refrain. ‘To Rosemounde’ survives in only one manuscript copy, paired with Chaucer’s narrative poem Troilus and Criseyde. This manuscript pairing, and Chaucer’s frequent presentation of Troilus and Criseyde itself as a ‘song’, invites a comparison of the poem’s repeated phrases to the refrains of a song lyric. In Troilus, phrases that are repeated at crucial moments—such as ‘I can no more’ and ‘without more’—emulate refrains by holding repetition and closure in an unstable synthesis.

Sermons are a type of text ideally suited for analyzing historical methods of writing orality as a rhetorical technique, illustrating the rhetorical techniques employed to invoke the spoken word on the written page and the responses that the impression of orality was intended to elicit from a sermon’s envisioned audiences. Artes praedicandi, guides to composing and performing sermons, flourished during the High Middle Ages; reading them alongside contemporary sermons allows us to explore how the advice that they gave was carried out in practice. By combining this theoretical approach with the study of the material text—looking at cues particular to the manuscripts in which these works were found, such as punctuation—we can consider how, why, and for whom these texts set out to construct themselves as oral, and perhaps learn something about the methods and intentions of writing (or, perhaps, ‘feigning’) orality in the process.

Poetry in early Germanic vernaculars exhibits variations on a metrical form predicated on a pattern of alliterating stressed syllables linking two halves of a line (in contrast to syllabic metres in which scansion requires a fixed number of syllables per line). This gave rise to the phenomenon of recurring alliterative collocations: the repeated combination of alliterating words or word-roots within a given poetic corpus. It is likely that such collocations originated, like formulae in oral-formulaic theory developed by Milman Parry and A.B. Lord, as building blocks for extempore composition during performance. However, there is strong evidence that Old Norse poetry was composed deliberatively and memorized for performance. Recurring collocations in Old Norse verse therefore reflect conscious artistic design rather than compositional expediency. This article focuses on one such collocation—the adjective vreiðr (angry) and the verb vega (to fight, to strike)—as a case study of the way in which composers of Old Norse eddic verse exploited the traditional resonances of certain collocations to shape audience understanding of character and plot.

This paper aims at broadening the scope of what the term ‘formula’ encompasses by studying a written context of formulaic applications and their complex connections to ritual performance. More specifically, it examines the interplay between the oral and the written in the language of the late Shang 商 (ca. 1230–1046 BC) oracle bone inscriptions (OBI). Drawing on the study on ‘formulaicity’ by Wray and Perkins, I propose a definition of formulae based on the OBI evidence and identify the structure-based formulaic types as found in the divinatory records. I then discuss the functions that formulae perform in the divinatory record. I suggest that formulae should be considered a scribal device, a set of stock phrases and technical words used by the scribes to record divination results. They formed a toolkit which was meant to facilitate the composition of written records on hard media. The writing act occurred after (and separately from) the oral divinatory act. Therefore, the oral and written coexisted but were independent from each other within the context of divinatory performance.

Substantial textual variation found across manuscripts of a Demotic Egyptian novella, The prebend of Amun, bears upon closer examination the features of mouvance, a kind of textual impermanence found in written versions of literature for which performance contexts are not only ongoing but are constitutive of their very textual shape. Alongside this mouvance, manuscripts of this work also maintain a high level of similarity and coherence down to the phrasal and word level. I argue that this unique combination of sameness and mouvance points to the desire of performers who possessed libretto-like copies of The prebend of Amun to tweak their texts in order to match their understanding of this work of prose fiction.

Visually complex texts emerge as a response to complicated cosmological, social, or ontological phenomena in reality, and different pre-modern cultures came up with their own unique ways of re-presenting this reality in textual form. Today, with the help of digital media, it becomes possible to discuss visually complex texts from different cultures in a way that facilitates the exchange of research ideas between specialists working with different regions and languages.

The Karlevi runestone, on the island of Öland, off the south-east coast of Sweden, is inscribed with the only known full stanza of Old Norse skaldic verse in Viking Age runes (that is, from approximately AD 750–1100). It is generally dated to the end of the tenth century, making it the oldest existing record of such verse. This piece outlines the origins, distribution, and chief features of the runic alphabet; contextualizes the inscription on the Karlevi runestone and the location of the stone itself; analyses the lettering and layout of the inscription in relation to the metre, style and cultural context of the verse it holds; and finally describes the character of skaldic verse and interprets the stanza.

The Mukhtaṣar al-ʿAyn of Abū Bakr Muḥammad al-Zubaydī (d. AD 989) is the earliest Arabic dictionary to have survived from the medieval Islamic West. This article discusses an early manuscript of the work that was copied and illuminated in AD 1124, most likely in Valencia, for the library of a wealthy patron or institution. The manuscript’s colophon casts new light on its transmission history, and a close analysis of its ‘page architecture’ reveals both how the book was used and the symbolic and aesthetic functions it fulfilled.

Spanish priests burned hundreds of images of idols, cult objects, and manuscripts with Mayan hieroglyphs following the conquest of the Yucatan Peninsula, convinced that this would encourage the indigenous population to renounce their ancient beliefs and turn to the Christian God. In so doing they destroyed the memory of a written culture that had existed for over two thousand years. Only four Maya manuscripts—the so-called codices—survived this missionary zeal and the tropical climate of the Yucatan, and these are today kept in museums and libraries in Mexico City, Madrid, Paris, and Dresden. Unlike hieroglyphic texts on stone monuments they do not relay historical events, but instead are mainly divinatory and related to the 260-day Tzolk’in calendar, holding predictive information about the success or failure of everyday activities on favourable or unfavourable days. The author uses a farmers’ almanac from the Dresden Codex to explain the function of Maya calendars, to discuss the significance of time, and to reconstruct how Mayan calendar priests would read daily predictions in the correlated images and texts and apply them to daily practice.

MS Parma (Italy), Biblioteca Palatina, Parm. 3852, is a twentieth century manuscript comprising a collection of texts related to Saint King Lālibalā, known as the Gadla Lālibalā collection. This manuscript was produced by a scribe named Walda Giyorgis, who was probably a member of the Catholic Church of the Ethiopian Rite. This paper focuses on a single page from that manuscript, f. 118v, which displays a set of elements consisting of ‘titles’—navigational elements that help to structure liturgical readings. The introductory part was developed from an earlier manuscript bearing the same content, produced at the end of the seventeenth century for the church of Golgotā in Roha-Lālibalā in Lasta, Ethiopia. That manuscript was part of a cultural project aimed at strengthening local identity, and which chose Lālibalā as a patron of the region despite the fact that he had been dubbed a usurper by the ruling dynasty. The manuscript contains navigational elements common in Ethiopic manuscripts, but it is unique because it was produced between 1939 and 1940, when Italy declared the Impero, the Africa Orientale Italiana.

This contribution considers the context, textual content, and means of textual division in a trilingual sales contract from Roman Arabia. The text, P.Yadin I 22, formed part of the so-called Babatha archive, the family papers of a Jewish woman who later took refuge in the Judaean Desert, where the documents were later discovered. Despite the absence of formal punctuation marks or word division comparable to modern conventions, the writers of this papyrus used various subtler means to highlight divisions in sense and content, related also to their choices among the three languages at work in the contract (Greek, Nabataean Aramaic, and Jewish Aramaic). This highlighting will have served in the first instance to ease future reference in a document meant to achieve maximum legal precision and authority, but the interplay of languages may also be seen to have ideological implications in the history of the region.

Papyrus Berlin 8345, which comes from the Roman-period Fayum (Egypt), contains a Demotic astrological treatise aimed at foretelling an individual’s future based on the positions of the seven celestial bodies known in antiquity (Sun, Moon, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, and Mercury) in the twelve places or compartments of the zodiac known as the dodecatropos. This paper briefly outlines the contents of the text and considers the conventions of textual division demonstrated in the papyrus. Since Demotic lacks modern punctuation, the scribe employed a host of other techniques to highlight and differentiate the various parts of the text. The manual was intended as a reference work, and the copyist therefore attempted to facilitate comfortable navigation through its different sections.

In Early China, ‘daybook’ (rishu 日書) divination manuals were consulted to determine auspicious times for a variety of life events. Recent discoveries of daybook manuscripts written upon bound bamboo strips have revealed much about how these manuals were compiled in the first centuries BC. Multiple different divination systems appear on the same manuscript, resulting in a confusion of running text, lists, and diagrams. In order to navigate these manuscripts efficiently, daybook compilers utilized certain strategies to aid their users. Taking the Han period Zhoujiazhai 周家寨 daybook as a case study, this article surveys the strategies employed in this manuscript to differentiate textual units. Attention is given to the materiality of the writing support, judicious framing with empty space, features of the calligraphy, punctuation usage, indexing, and the presence of both explicit titles and embedded identifiers.

Copper-plate grants were issued in large numbers by pre-modern South Asian royal courts as legally binding documents recording ownership over land revenue. The textual layout of an inscription, and the positioning and size of certain elements, was linked to ritual dimensions inherent in the transaction and to ancient techniques of legal validation. Using the grant now known as IO-19 as an example, the author shows how textual layout can also reveal the complex and multi-stage processes involved in the production of such grants.

MS Cambridge, Trinity College, B.5.4, folio 135v, is a page from a twelfth-century Latin manuscript of the commentary on the Psalms by Peter Lombard, in a version produced by Herbert of Bosham, secretary to Archbishop Thomas Becket. The page displays many of the techniques developed during the twelfth century for linking text and gloss, as well as a unusual and detailed referencing system. Luxurious but also highly scholarly, the book employs a stunning variety of techniques to aid the reader in deciphering its complex pages. Seven texts appear simultaneously on each page, and yet the use of ruling, placement of text, hierarchy of script and decoration, colour, and images mean that the reader is always able to distinguish them.

While the earliest attested Chinese manuscripts date only from the late fifth century BC, bronze inscriptions cast between the tenth and eighth centuries BC provide abundant evidence of the administrative use of manuscripts at the royal court, especially during the appointment ceremonies in which the royal secretaries read out the king's command to the aristocratic elite. These command documents were sometimes quoted at length in inscriptions cast on the ritual bronze vessels by these appointees, who had them displayed in their ancestral shrines and used them in ancestral sacrifices and ensuing feasts. Based on the epigraphic evidence, this paper explores various aspects of manuscript production in the Western Zhou administration (1045--771 BC) and investigates the complex editorial process behind the textual transfer from the command documents onto bronze ritual paraphernalia. Through an analysis of various editorial approaches to the composition of bronze inscriptions, the value and status imputed to manuscripts by Western Zhou aristocracy has been further discussed. Such reconstruction of lost manuscript practices can enrich our understanding of textual production not only during the Western Zhou period but in Early China in general.

Most surviving runic inscriptions from early medieval England were produced in an ecclesiastical context, and the influence of manuscript writing practices on the runic tradition can clearly be discerned. The manuscript record of runes or runica manuscripta that flourished particularly in the context of Anglo-Saxon missionary activity to the Continent has, however, usually been regarded as a late antiquarian development, largely detached from the epigraphical tradition. In this paper, I argue that not only did manuscript practice clearly influence epigraphy, but also that several uses of runes in manuscripts can be considered as extensions of the epigraphical tradition. Some runica manuscripta also seem to evoke pointedly the monumental tradition, including associations with permanence, public display, and memorialisation. Through the case studies of decorative uses of runes, scribal signatures, and textual interventions in runes, I argue that there is a relatively consistent association between the runic script and monumental epigraphy that can be transposed onto the manuscript page for particular effects, which rely on received knowledge of the epigraphical tradition long after the use of runes in monumental contexts had ended.

The Bar-Rakib Palace Inscriptions from Zincirli have received relatively little attention from philologists and archaeologists alike because of their predictable and derivative content. However, these monuments provide an unparalleled insight into the monumentalization of text in the Iron Age Levant. As might be expected, Bar-Rakib's Aramaic inscriptions and reliefs repeat themes and tropes from other monuments. They also were strategically deployed at the site so as to interact with nearby monuments left by earlier rulers. What has received less attention is the fact that Bar-Rakib's monuments also shared many artistic tropes with small finds from Zincirli, including letters, incantation plaques, seals, and amulets. These correspondences suggest that monumental texts functioned by appropriating aspects of personal artifacts to be used on a communal scale. By projecting not only prestige but also intimacy, Bar-Rakib's inscriptions invited their audience to interact with them in imaginative ways. As the audience related to the monumental texts through acts of reading, viewing, and ritual, they would in turn reconfigure their own relationships to other communicative media, places, each other, and the polity as a whole. It was this ability to relate to communities and thus reshape them that made a text monumental in the Iron Age Levant. This was accomplished through the strategic juxtaposition of text with visual and performative media in particular spatial contexts.

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the discussion of the relationship between manuscript and epigraphic traditions in premodern cultures by addressing aspects of the monumentality of writing in the context of Ancient Egyptian tombs near the end of the third millennium BC (the late Old Kingdom). Ritual texts inscribed on the walls of subterranean chambers of kings' and queens' pyramids at Saqqara are known as 'The Pyramid Texts', the earliest known mortuary corpus of any civilization. The texts, which are inscribed in hieroglyphs, are carved, decorated, and painted in green. They are laid out in columns and cover surfaces up to three metres high in the main chambers and in the passages leading to the entrances of the pyramids. While the texts were performed during rituals and recorded in writing in contexts that are now lost, the carved hieroglyphic forms in the pyramids make it possible to glimpse the extent of manuscript culture and scribal practices of this period. The process of inscription involved not only reconfiguration from manuscript to wall, but also reinterpretation of the texts in terms of the spatial, architectural, and symbolical context of the tomb. This paper investigates the idea of monumentality in relation to the way these texts were reconfigured in the pyramids.

Reconfigured and recontextualized several times, the ten contracts inscribed on the walls of the monumental tomb of the regional governor Djefai-Hapi I at Asyut (c. 1920 BC) are a particularly striking example of how different material and different contexts generate new meaning. Originally written on papyrus or leather, the ten contracts between Djefai-Hapi and the priests of the main deities of his city and the necropolis staff ensured that Djefai-Hapi would be able to participate in the local cult(s) on a regular basis after his death. Put in a new context, the 'tomb edition' of the ten contracts went beyond Djefai-Hapi's insistence on later successors honouring his agreements. It exercised a powerful effect on Djefai-Hapi's deification in a dynamic interplay of monumental tomb-architecture, high-quality statues, elegant language used in the tomb-inscriptions, and Asyut's local cults. After more than two millennia, the contracts were stored in a temple more than 200km away from Asyut and did not have legal meaning any more. Instead, they had changed to a commemorative text written on papyrus. Defining and reconstructing actors, institutions, materials, and working processes provides insight into the colourful history of knowledge transfer in Ancient Egypt.

At Tulum, as well as other Maya sites in the Yucatan Peninsula, mural painting traditions are related to the style and symbol-set associated with Central Mexican manuscript cultures. The murals reflect the widespread Postclassic Mesoamerican manuscript cultures lourishing from the twelfth to sixteenth centuries AD, during which iconic and logosyllabic scripts were used in the construction of regionally distinct manuscript forms. The murals at Tulum relate to manuscript culture not only in their style and symbol set, but also in their use of metaphorical dualisms, in which significant iconic elements are contrasted as an indicator of a more abstract concept. Recognizing metaphorical juxtaposition as an underlying principle of Mesoamerican ritual language, this paper discusses the process by which manuscripts become monuments and considers the sacred metaphors painted on the temples of Tulum as mechanisms for reinforcing political power.