Copying Manuscripts: Textual and Material Craftsmanship UNIVERSITÀ DEGLI STUDI DI NAPOLI “L’ORIENTALE” DIPARTIMENTO ASIA, AFRICA E MEDITERRANEO UNIVERSITÄT HAMBURG CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF MANUSCRIPT CULTURES Series Minor XCIII Direttore Francesco Sferra Comitato di redazione Giorgio BANTI, Riccardo CONTINI, Junichi OUE, Roberto TOTTOLI, Giovanni VITIELLO Comitato scientifico Anne BAYARD-SAKAI (INALCO), Stanisław BAZYLIŃSKI (Facoltà teologica S. Bonaventura, Roma), Henrietta HARRISON (University of Oxford), Harunaga ISAACSON (Universität Hamburg), Barbara PIZZICONI (SOAS, University of London), Lucas VAN ROMPAY (Duke University), Raffaele TORELLA (Sapienza, Università di Roma), Judith T. ZEITLIN (The University of Chicago) UNIVERSITÀ DEGLI STUDI DI NAPOLI “L’ORIENTALE” DIPARTIMENTO ASIA, AFRICA E MEDITERRANEO UNIVERSITÄT HAMBURG CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF MANUSCRIPT CULTURES Series Minor XCIII Copying Manuscripts: Textual and Material Craftsmanship Edited by Antonella Brita, Giovanni Ciotti, Florinda De Simini, Amneris Roselli Napoli 2020 ISBN 978-88-6719-184-0 Tutti i diritti riservati Stampato in Italia Prodotto nel mese di dicembre 2020 Tutti gli articoli pubblicati in questo volume sono stati sottoposti al vaglio di due revisori anonimi Table of Contents Manuscripts and Craftsmanship. An Introduction ................................. ! Acknowledgments .................................................................................... "# SECTION ONE. TERMINOLOGY AND LORE .................................................. "" Wiebke Beyer ‘You, Ask Him for a Copy’: What the Old Assyrian Testimony Tells Us about the Making and Handling of Copied Manuscripts ............................... "$ Gianfrancesco Lusini Scribes and Scholars in Medieval Ethiopia .................................................... $! SECTION TWO. REPRODUCTION AND PRODUCTION .................................... %" Amneris Roselli Greek Illustrated Herbals .................................................. ............................ %$ Karin Becker Between Imitation and Variation: Problems of Terminology in the Case of the Three English Successors of the Utrecht Psalter ...................................... #&# Jochen Hermann Vennebusch Between Adaptation and Accentuation: Negotiating Divine Inspiration in the Reichenau Evangelist Portraits ........................................................... #"" Gianluca Del Mastro Writing and Copying Philosophical Texts: Some Aspects of the παράδοϲιϲ of Ancient Philosophy in the Herculaneum Papyri ......................................... #$# Federica Nicolardi Reading Some Revisor’s Corrections (PHerc. "#$%, Philodemus, On Rhetoric, Book ") .................................................. ................................. #'% Copying Manuscripts: Textual and Material Craftsmanship SECTION THREE. AUTHORITY AND INSTITUTIONS ...................................... !"! Thies Staack From Copies of Individual Decrees to Compilations of Written Law: On Paratextual Framing in Early Chinese Legal Manuscripts ........................ !"# Antonio Manieri Document Production by Low-Rank Officials in Ancient Japan: Notes on Some Public Advisory Texts on Wooden Tablets................................ $%! Ilse Sturkenboom Copying ʿAṭṭār’s Conference of the Birds in Aq Qoyunlu Shiraz: Evidence for Book Production in Sufi Convents ............................................. $&! Nikolas Sarris & Marco Di Bella From Codicology to Book Archaeology: The Case of a Sixteenth-Century Cretan Bookbinding Workshop ..................................................................... #!! Annachiara Raia Between the Lines: Re-citing Qur’ānic Verses in Swahili Manuscripts ............. #$' SECTION FOUR. COPYING AND SCHOLARSHIP ............................................. #&' Vito Lorusso Copying Philosophical Manuscripts as a Practice of Transmitting Knowledge: Remarks from Late Antique and Early Byzantine Commentators on Aristotle’s Organon ........................................................... #"! Sara Fani Arabic Manuals on Ink Making: Between a Technical and Literary Approach .................................................. ............................... %!' Cornelius Berthold Tracing the Imperfect: The Leipzig Copy of Abū Ḥātim al-Rāzī’s Kitāb al-Zīna as an Insight into Copying Conventions in Arabic Manuscripts .................................................. ............................... %&! Stefano Valente Copying for Teaching, Copying for Learning: On Some Renaissance Manuscripts of Nikephoros Blemmydes’ Compendium on Physics (Epitome physica) ........................................................................ %"' Victor B. D’Avella Copying into Print: The End of the Tolkāppiyam Manuscript Tradition . ()& 6 Table of Contents SECTION FIVE. COPYING IN MULTILINGUAL ENVIRONMENTS ...................... ($& Dorota Hartman ‘Verified Exact Copy’: Literacy, Scribes, and Copying in Papyri from the Judaean Desert (First to Second Century CE) .................................... ($' Antonio Rollo ‘Fossil Script’ in the Greek and the Latin Middle Ages .................................... (*! & Between the Lines: Re-citing Qur’ānic Verses in Swahili Manuscripts* ANNACHIARA RAIA ‘As I once heard a maalim say in a speech, even if all poets of the world were brought together and pro- vided with all the ink and paper they needed, they would not be able to produce one verse of poetry of the quality of the Qur’ān’1 ". Introduction Quoting the noble Qur’ān in Swahili tenḏi (sg., utenḏi) narrative poems is a common practice for Swahili scribes, albeit one that has rarely been considered in the study of Swahili poetry and its manuscript produc- tion.2 A considerable number of poems transmitted in Arabic-script * I would like to thank Alessandro Gori, Antonella Brita, and Clarissa Vierke for their helpful and stimulating suggestions, comments, and corrections on the first draft of this manuscript. I am grateful to Kristen de Joseph and Valen- tina Serelli for proofreading the article and checking some of its translitera- tions, respectively. 1 Kresse "##$, %#$. 2 The term, which in Northern Swahili dialects is utenḏi (pl. tenḏi), is derived from the verb kutenda ‘to do, to act, to make.’ The literal meaning is thus anal- ogous to the French chanson de gestes, a form that it also resembles in length (see Allen %&$% and Gerard %&$$). Prosodically, the utenḏi is a metrical and rhymed verse form. The noun utenḏi has a double meaning: it indicates both the verse form composed in metre (Swahili bahari, from the Arabic baḥr, pl. buḥūr) as well the specific compositions in this form. As meticulously described by Vierke, ‘The utenḏi is rhythmically divided into stanzas (beiti, sg. ubeiti) of '( syllables (mizani) each. The stanzas are the biggest independent, prosodically Annachiara Raia manuscripts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries feature Qur’ānic verses (Arabic āya; plural āyāt) quoted between their stanzas (Swahili ubeti; pl. beti). Such works include the moral fables Utenḏi wa Ngamia na Paa (‘The Poem of the Camel and the Gazelle’),3 Utenḏi wa Kadhi na Haramii (‘The Poem of the Lawyer and the Thief’)4 and Kisat Mudhari (‘The Poem from Mudhari’);5 epic poems like the Utenḏi wa Badr (‘The Poem of the Battle of Badr’)6 and the Utenḏi wa Qatirifu (‘The poem of Ghitrif’);7 tenḏi about the prophets, such as Ayubu (‘Job’),8 the Kisa cha Sayyidna Isa (‘Our Lord Jesus’; Dammann %&)#), and the Kisa cha Yusufu (‘Joseph’);9 and didactic poems like the Utenḏi wa Siraji (‘The Poem of the Lantern’).10 In terms of sheer quantity, the presence of Qur’ānic verses in the manuscripts of Swahili utenḏi poems varies significantly. Their abun- dance or paucity in a poem may be due to the author or scribe’s perso- nal style, as well as careful selection based on the content of the utenḏi (be it a fable like the Ngamia na Paa, a didactic poem like the Siraji, or religious verse like the Kisa cha Isa or Yusufu). Why did the authors of such literary texts seek to imbue their works with the political and moral values of these holy verses? and graphologically separate units of the utenḏi. A stanza consists of four lines (vipande, sg. kipande ‘piece’) of eight syllables each. The four lines are divided into two pairs (hemistichs) or bi-colons (mshororo, pl. mishororo), so that an ubeiti consists of two mishororo (which in turn consist of two vipande each)’ ("#%#, "*). 3 Allen %&$%, $$–%"&; Dammann %&(#, ")*–+"$. 4 Dammann %&*$, (+"–()&. 5 Knappert %&'(, %#'–%'+. 6 Allen %&$#, '&; Knappert %&&&, +)–+&; idem %&)*, "(*–*#. 7 Hichens %&+&; Knappert %&')/'&. 8 Werner %&"%–"+, )*–%%*; "&$–+"#; +($–(%'. 9 Knappert %&'( , &–*); Raia "#%$. 10 Miehe and Vierke "#%#, +"&–+&+. 330 Between the Lines: Re-citing Qur’ānic Verses in Swahili Manuscripts &. The Transmission of Knowledge along the Northern Kenyan Coast The ‘talismanic’ power of Arabic11 reaches far and wide: in the world of soccer, for instance, imams recite the Sūrat al-Naṣr (‘Victory’), comme- morating the Ḥudaybiyya treaty, before every match.12 In the Sūrat al- Isrā’ (‘The Night Journey’), verse )" clearly avows the therapeutic power of Qur’ānic recitation:13 ‘and We send down, of the Qur’ān, that which is a healing and a mercy to the believers.’14 During the Kenyan general election of %&&$, the poet Ustadh Mahmoud Ahmed Abdulka- dir opened his political verses—part of his Kimwondo (‘Shooting Star’) collection, recorded on tape and circulated widely—with the Muslim basmalah, accompanied by a Qur’ānic verse