Szirmai, John - The Archaeology of Medieval Bookbinding

Chapter 3 Late Coptic codices
3.1 INTRODUCTION
The codices described in this chapter date to the period from the seventh to the eleventh
centuries, when the Coptic Church, already alienated from Byzantium, suffered increasing
oppression by the Arab rule. Initially tolerant towards the Copts, the new rulers later
repeatedly subjected them to severe persecution: not surprisingly, some of their scriptures
were found hidden in the Egyptian soil, often on sites of ancient monasteries or rubbish
dumps. These circumstances explain the damaged state of many of the finds, often aggravated
by neglect and carelessness on the part of the finders. Usually these codices aroused
interest mainly because of the texts; their bindings were considered noteworthy only if decorated,
but in fact some of the 85 Coptic 'bindings' listed by G.D. Hobson (1938-9) had
rendered nothing but scraps of detached covers.
Most of the finds were made in the 1890s (Upper Egypt, the area of Sohag, Esna
and Edfu) and in 1910 (Monastery of St Michael of the Desert near Hamuli, in the Fayum
region). The latter was the more important find as many of the more than 50 codices
(dated from AD 827 to 999) were still in their original binding. Religious texts mostly in the
Sahidic dialect prevailed (lives of Saints, homilies, synaxaries, parts of the Old and New
Testaments and apocryphal works); the majority was written on parchment, some on
papyrus and a few on paper. They found their way into major collections like those in
Vienna, Berlin, London and Cairo, but for the most part went into the Pierpont Morgan
Library in New York. Unfortunately most of these bindings were separated from their contents
without any particulars of their construction being recorded. 1
As no detailed study of the structure of bindings has been made public yet, the
present attempt to gather scattered pieces of information will inevitably contain lacunae and
conjectures. The main source of information concerning the bindings of the corpus of the
Hamuli codices goes back to Father T.C. Petersen, who studied the c. 50 detached covers
in the Pierpont Morgan Library and recorded his detailed observations in his unpublished
typescript (Petersen 1948), which also holds data on another 50 Coptic bindings or fragments
in other collections. In a fundamental article of 1954 Petersen published at least
some of his data on this material as well as on Islamic bindings. Some technical details of
the Hamuli codices are given by Miner (1957 pp. 15-18), Needham (1979 pp. 12-23) and
Depuydt (1993). Little pieces of information on covers in the Berlin collections are to be
found in articles of Ibscher (1911) and Adam (1912b; 1914; 1923-4); data on material in
Vienna are given by Gottlieb (1910), on material in the British Library by D. Cockerell
(1932) and G.D. Hobson (1939). The following description is mainly based on these data,
supplemented with some of my own observations. 2