The Early Stages of Restoration of Two Judeo-Persian Medieval Manuscripts

Abstract

The article is devoted to two manuscripts written in Judeo-Persian and stored today in two different collections in St. Petersburg. Both books contain text of Shahin medieval poetic compositions, a major Jewish poet of the 14th century from Shiraz (Fars, Iran). A comprehensive study of both manuscripts revealed two types of “historical” restoration works. In the first case, there is a cer- tain medieval “core” of the book, to which separate folios or more were added. This was done by a scribe, who goes under No. 2 in the article, his work is considered to be the first layer of the restoration (presumably the beginning of the 19th century). Another, the upper restoration layer passed nearly a century later, and the restorer paid attention to the physical parts of a book, not to the text. In the second case, one can talk about the parallel existence of several manuscripts written before the 18th century, fragments of which came to the master No. 2 hands in the 19th century. As previously he restored only the lost text. Later separate folios were added to the manuscript (to fill the lacunas) and apparently, this process took place during the entire 19th century. In 1904 the manuscript was bought by the Asian Museum of St. Petersburg.