SYRIAC WATCH:
What Syriac scribes chose to keep: A digital dive into 1,000 manuscripts (Hebrew University press release at Phys.Org).
A new study uses digital tools to analyze nearly 1,000 Syriac manuscripts from the British Library, focusing on how scribes and editors selected and rearranged parts of texts—a practice known as excerpting. Researcher Noam Maeir introduces a new measurement called Excerpts Per Manuscript (EPM) to track how often this happened. This approach reveals that the people who copied and compiled these manuscripts were not just preserving texts—they were actively shaping what future generations would read and remember.
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Manuscripts were expensive to copy! Sometimes scribes would just copy favorite passages, even compiling passages from different works into one new manuscript.
Studying excerpting practices in the abundant Syriac manuscript tradition is bound to be illuminating. The digitization of Wright's nineteenth-century catalogue of the Syriac manuscripts in the British Library made the research possible.
The analysis in the article is of Wright's catalogue, not the manuscripts themselves, and it depends on his work for its accuracy. This could be made clearer in both the Phys.Org article and the PLOS ONE abstract. The technical article describes the methodology in detail.
AI isn't up to anything like identifying excertps from other works in a collection of exotic-language ancient and medieval manuscripts. We still need human researchers for that. I suspect it will be quite a while before that changes. Whether LLM AI will ever be up to it remains to be seen.
The underlying article at PLOS ONE is open access:
Material philology and Syriac excerpting practices: A computational-quantitative study of the digitized catalog of the Syriac manuscripts in the British Library
Noam Maeir
Published: March 31, 2025
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0320265
Abstract
This study explores the literary practice of excerpting in Syriac manuscripts through a computational-quantitative analysis, contributing to the emerging field of Syriac material philology. The primary objective is to offer a “big picture” charting of Syriac excerpting as a non-authorial literary practice. Using digitized data from the British Library’s Syriac manuscript collection, the study analyzes nearly 20,000 excerpts, introducing the Excerpts Per Manuscript (EPM) metric to quantify and compare excerpting practices across manuscripts. The results reveal that most manuscripts contain fewer than 20 excerpts, but a small number show much higher levels of excerpting, highlighting the immense intellectual and literary activities implicated in their production. These high-EPM manuscripts appear across multiple genres, indicating that excerpting was a widespread and essential cultural activity rather than confined to specific literary types.
The study also finds that manuscripts with the highest EPM values are concentrated between the 6th and 9th centuries CE, corresponding with a period of intense literary compilation in late antiquity. This pattern reflects the importance of excerpting in knowledge organization, aligning with broader trends in the canonization of texts within Christian, Jewish, and Greco-Roman traditions. The research emphasizes the limitations of earlier cataloging approaches, which obscure non-authorial practices by focusing on authors and texts. By reorienting data through computational analysis, the study provides new insights into the role of excerpting in Syriac manuscript culture. This approach demonstrates the value of digital tools in material philology, uncovering patterns that bridge genres and timeframes, and identifying high-EPM manuscripts as key sites of intellectual and cultural activity in the Syriac literary tradition.
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