Inventory of the Oriental Manuscripts of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
INVENTORIES OF COLLECTIONS OF ORIENTAL MANUSCRIPTS INVENTORY OF THE ORIENTAL MANUSCRIPTS OF THE ROYAL NETHERLANDS ACADEMY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES IN AMSTERDAM COMPILED BY JAN JUST WITKAM PROFESSOR OF PALEOGRAPHY AND CODICOLOGY IN LEIDEN UNIVERSITY INTERPRES LEGATI WARNERIANI TER LUGT PRESS LEIDEN 2006 Inventory of the Oriental manuscripts in the Royal Academy in Amsterdam 2 © Copyright by Jan Just Witkam & Ter Lugt Press, Leiden, The Netherlands, 2006. The form and contents of the present inventory are protected by Dutch and international copyright law and database legislation. All use other than within the framework of the law is forbidden and liable to prosecution. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the author and the publisher. First electronic publication: 12 February 2006 Latest update: 23 December 2006 © Copyright by Jan Just Witkam & Ter Lugt Press, Leiden, The Netherlands, 2006. Inventory of the Oriental manuscripts in the Royal Academy in Amsterdam 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction Inventory of the Oriental Manuscripts of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam Bibliography Index of languages Conversion table for De Jongs catalogue © Copyright by Jan Just Witkam & Ter Lugt Press, Leiden, The Netherlands, 2006. Inventory of the Oriental manuscripts in the Royal Academy in Amsterdam 4 Introduction The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen) in Amsterdam owns a modest collection of Oriental manuscripts. The majority of these are on permanent loan in Leiden University Library. This collection of mostly Middle Eastern Islamic manuscripts has been first described by P. de Jong, Catalogus Codicum Orientalium Bibliothecae Academiae Regiae Scientiarum. Leiden (E.J. Brill) 1862, on the basis of notes made by H.E. Weijers (1805-1844), which notes are kept in the collection as its highest number: Acad. 265. Unfortunately, De Jong gave all manuscripts new numbers, according to his arrangement of the entire collection by subject, unaware apparently of the fact that the only number system worse than a bad one is a new one. Since very few people nowadays read Latin, De Jong’s catalogue is not very much consulted nowadays and the damage of this rearrangement is therefore not too significant, but the odd reference roams around in the footnotes. In the present inventory the order of the manuscripts is given according to their actual numbers, as they are placed on the shelves. The present inventory is derived from three types of sources. First of all, the greater part of the descriptions of the manuscripts has been obtained by my translation from de Jong’s Latin text. Secondly, the description have been made up-to-date from catalogues published after De Jong’s catalogue. Among these are, of course, P. Voorhoeve, Handlist of Arabic manuscripts in the Library of the University of Leiden and other collections in The Netherlands. The Hague2 1980. This work contains succinct references to all Arabic manuscripts in the Academy collection. Recently, references have been included from Koos Kuiper, Catalogue of Chinese and Sino-Western manuscripts in the Central library of Leiden University, with contributions from Jan Just Witkam and Yuan Bingling. Leiden 2005 (Codices Manuscripti 33). Furthermore, it is intended that, whenever in the bibliographical or specialized scholarly literature manuscripts of the Academy collection are treated or mentioned in such a way that new light is shed on the identity or significance of anyone of these manuscripts, references to such publications will be added to the descriptions of the present inventory. Readers are expressly requested to signal such publications. The reader should not, however, use the present inventory as a substitute to the sources from which it was derived. The old descriptions often contain elements which are not repeated here. The third, and most important, source is of course autopsy of the manuscripts. This source of information is of incomparable value, and should always be the bibliographer’s ideal. Those manuscripts which have been fully described by autopsy are provided with a mark indicating this. The collection of Oriental manuscripts of the Royal Academy for the greater part originates from the private collection of Joannes Willmet (1750-1835), and its manuscripts are now numbered after the order of the Willmet auction catalogue of 1837 entitled Bibliotheca Willmetiana. Catalogus Bibliothecae Instructissimae, quam in suos usus comparavit vir clarissimus Joannes Willmet ..., Amsterdam 1837. At the end of the auction catalogue there is a section entitled ‘Catalogus Codicum Manuscriptorum in primis Orientalium’ with a pagination of its own (pp. 1-39) with numbers, which reflects © Copyright by Jan Just Witkam & Ter Lugt Press, Leiden, The Netherlands, 2006. Inventory of the Oriental manuscripts in the Royal Academy in Amsterdam 5 earlier numberings by Willmet himself. A short history of the collection is given by De Jong in his preface to the catalogue (pp. vii-xvii). But the manuscripts were never sold by auction after Willmet’s death. When they were about to be auctioned off, King William I of The Netherlands purchased the entire collection out of auction and donated them to the Royal Institute (Koninklijk Instituut), the predecessor of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. He prevented thereby that Willmet’s life’s work of more than sixty years of collecting the Oriental manuscripts, which came up for sale, would be lost. References to the Arabic manuscripts of the Academy collection have been incorporated in P. Voorhoeve, Handlist of Arabic manuscripts in the Library of the University of Leiden and other collections in The Netherlands. The Hague2 1980 (see for Voorhoeve’s list of references to the Academy manuscripts on pp. 605-608 of his Handlist), and thereby the manuscripts have become known in modern times as well. The present shelf marks are identical to the class marks of the manuscripts as they are placed on the shelves. Cuttings from the Willmet auction catalogue are pasted on the manuscripts. The numbers in the present inventory reflect the way in which the books stand on the shelves. Willmet’s collection comprises the manuscripts with class-marks Acad. 1 – Acad. 257. The manuscripts with class-marks Acad. 258 – Acad. 265 have come to the Royal Academy in a different way. This is not a catalogue, nor a handlist. It is just what is says to be on the title-page, an inventory. As such it is part of a project to compile and publish inventories of collections of Oriental manuscripts in private and public collections in and outside The Netherlands. Earlier I have published a trial volume of part of the collections of Leiden University, Inventory of the Oriental manuscripts in the Legatum Warnerianum in the Library of the University of Leiden and other collections in The Netherlands (Leiden 2001), and I have several more such volumes ready for electronic publication. Those will note come out on paper anymore, however, and the 2001 publication of the 12th volume is by the numerous corrections and additions which have been made severely out of date. I will shortly explain how and why this inventory was compiled. Presently my choice of format is just a list, and the reader will see soon enough how it is structured. It is not a database on purpose, although I have heard, in the past decade, whenever I discussed this project with colleagues and friends, not few suggestions that I compile a database instead of lists. I can understand the implicite criticism, which I reject. For the moment I prefer to come up with lists. One reason is implicit in the material itself. The structure of numerous Middle Eastern manuscript volumes is that of a collective volume. Often there is a rationale behind this, as the owner or compiler may have had a reason to place certain texts together in one and the same volume. In a database this information is largely lost, and text-oriented approach of a database is now generally abandoned among codicologists. But there is a more important consideration in favour of the compilation of lists, rather than the construction of a database. This is the enormous variety of origin in time and space of the material described. For some languages there has been achieved, in course of time, a quite sophisticated level of bibliography. The Hebrew manuscript literature is an example of a relatively small corpus of texts which © Copyright by Jan Just Witkam & Ter Lugt Press, Leiden, The Netherlands, 2006. Inventory of the Oriental manuscripts in the Royal Academy in Amsterdam 6 has received relatively ample attention of bibliographers. A far larger literature, that of Arabic manuscripts, has received much attention from the scholarly world, yet it is, in comparison to Hebrew manuscripts, relatively underresearched, precisely due to its enormous quantities of textual witnesses. Some languages of South-East Asia, such as the Batak or the Buginese languages, or even the far larger Malay and Javanese languages, only have received attention from a relatively small number of bibliographers, and hence remain relatively little known. Now, all these different cultures, with their different outlooks on their own traditional literatures, in their different stages of development of description, ask for different approaches on different levels of detail and sophistication. They cannot be caught in one single system of description without the risk of superficiality or the other extreme, an excess of detail. Such database systems, which would have been designed from a Western point of departure and with non-indigenous requirements, would never do justice to the material described here. That in particular was my main reason for preferring the freedom of a list over the straitjacket of a database.