Ricerc@Sapienza

Early Christianity was heir to the archival practice and discourse of Greek and Roman societies, in which public and private archives enjoyed a great deal of consideration. Even before creating their own archives, Christian congregations, when becoming a structured society, adhered to the archival discourse of their times, and the mention of archives in their writings served apologetic and theological aims.

The theme section of this issue of Adamantius collects the proceedings of the international conference The Coptic book between the 6th and the 8th centuries: codicological features, places of production, intellectual trends (Rome, “Sapienza” Università di Roma – Academia Belgica, 21-22 September 2017)1, organized within the scientific activities of the ERC project “PAThs - Tracking Papyrus and Parchment Paths: An Archaeological Atlas of Coptic Literature.

L'articolo intende prendere in esame, per la prima volta in modo sistematico, le componenti chimico-fisiche degli inchiostri utilizzati per i manoscritti copti, allo di tracciare prassi scribali di diverse aree di produzione libraria.

This article is dedicated to the structural and stylistic analysis of the titles of Vat. copt. 57. Observing the graphic and decorative aspects of the titles of Vat. copt. 57-69, and of Vat. copt. 57 in particular, one can reasonably deduce that the scriptorium of Dayr al-Anbā Maqār involved the activity of different specialists of the making of the book, including persons charged with the specific task of the decoration . This impression is confirmed by internal and external evidence. The comparison with the, more or less coeval, codices of the White Monastery it is very striking.

The modern volume called Vat. copt. 57 represents a re-bounding of the ancient codex that has lost only a few leaves compared to its original structure. On the contrary, all the other volumes

We present here our methodological approach applied to the study of Egyptian inks in Late Antiquity. It is based on an interdisciplinary strategy, bringing together a variety of disciplines from humanities and natural sciences, and it aims at systematically collecting a statistically relevant amount of data regarding the composition of the inks.

The Privilegium maius is one of the most famous and spectacular forgeries in medieval Europe. It is a set of charters made in the 14th century upon commitment by Duke Rudolf IV, a member of the Habsburg family, to elevate the rank and the prestige of his family. These five charters, now kept at the Österreichisches Staatsarchiv in Vienna, have been subjected to a thorough interdisciplinary study in order to shed light on its controversial story. The charters are composed of pergamenaceous documents bound to wax seals with coloured textile threads.

Until the early twentieth century, this corpus was housed in a dome in the courtyard of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus. This “Qubbat al-khazna” (the name is far from straightforward, as will be shown in this volume) and its con- tents became known to scholarship from the late nineteenth century, having been “discovered” at around the same time as its famous sibling, the Geniza of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo.

The Introduction illustrates the principal aim of this volume that is as simple as it is ambitious: to take a first step in placing a large set of (often fragmentary) documents and manuscripts on the map of Middle Eastern history as a corpus. Moreover it provides with a brief story of the Genizah-like deposits like that of the Qubbat al-khazna in the Omayyad Mosque in Damascus; an overview of the scattered materials published so far coming from this deposit; the account by G.

The seminars entitled Palaeography Between East & West, which I convened at Sapienza University, aimed at offering a forum, a place of sharing knowledge and debate, to scholars who deal with manuscript materials in