Runiform Ligatures in 10th Century Greek Manuscript

    In 1628, Sir William Roe, British ambassador to the Ottoman court, donated to Bodleian Library 10^th century Greek manuscript Roe 27, which contains Homilies on Genesis by John Chrysostom. There is a short description of the manuscript in H. Coxe’s catalogue, which was accidentally switched with the previous Roe 26 manuscript (Coxe, H. 1853). Slavic notes in Roe 27 were mentioned by Hutter in 1982 (Hutter I, 1977). Six years later, Ralf Cleminson published 27 of them. He dated the notes to the 13 -14 century (Cleminson, R. 1988). In 2005, A. Granberg published a complete list of the Cyrillic Inscriptions and pictures of some of the ligatures (Granberg, A. 2005a). The same year, in a study on runiform scripts from the Balkans, she defined them as runiform inscriptions (Granberg A. 2005b). In 2014 thanks to the help of G. Georgieva from the University of Veliko Tarnovo and Bodleian Library, the author had a chance to examine Roe 27 and take pictures of all runiform ligatures.  In this article, I will present those pictures and try to establish a connection between them and the Murfatlar Script and understand who wrote them and when it happened.

    Runiform ligatures written on the margins of Raw 27 are 11. Medieval scribes employed about 10 different signs to write them.  All of them also occur among Murfatlar inscriptions. Here I will take a close look at every individual ligature:

    §1. Ligature L1 was written vertically on folio 381v between two bodies of text. Most likely, it contains one or two letters, the second repeated many times. The form of the first letter is not certain. It could be  or. The appearance of the second one is more explicit:  .

 

f 381v  Roe 27 Bodleian Library

    §2. Ligature L2 was written vertically on folio 126 on the right margin, just under the corner. It contains two letters. The form of the first letter could be  or    is the most frequent letter among Murfatlar inscriptions. The second letter of L2 is repeated many times, as was the case with L1. Its form resembles the Cyrillic letter "ж" : .

f 126 Roe 27 Bodleian Library

§3. Ligature L3 was written vertically on folio 134v. It is not very clear what is depicted on it.

f 134v Roe 27 Bodleian Library

§4. Ligature L4 was written vertically in three columns on folio 235. According to the form of the letter , the direction of the writing of L4 is confronting with neighbouring Cyrillic inscription.   It starts from the right end of the margin to the Greek text. The letter was repeated a few times in the first column, and from left to right was repeated a few times. It is not very clear what letter starts the second column. Perhaps . This letter is followed by a letter   repeated a few times. The third column begins with the letter    and continues with few 

letters . It ends with a single letter  .

f 235 Roe 27 Bodleian Library

§5. Ligature L5 was written vertically on folio 238v. It starts with a picture of a house and continues with a single letter    repeated three times with three lines. In this case, the picture and text match perfectly. As I proposed in my work on Murfatlar script (Ovcharov, N. 2014), letters    had the phonetic value "w, u" and, when written separately, read "ew" (a house).

 

f 238v Roe 27 Bodleian Library

§6. Ligature L6 was written vertically in two columns on folio 242. It is tough to tell which letter is repeated a few times in this ligature. It could be   or  . The second choice is more likely as we have written a single letter⠀nearby .

f 242 Roe 27 Bodleian Library

§7. Ligature L7 was written vertically on folio 238v. It contains а picture of three rows of horses tied in a complicated pattern. With the enlargement of ties, under the horses, was written a letter: possibly  or  .

f 238v Roe 27   Granberg, A. 2005a

§8. Ligature L8 was written vertically on folio 250v. Here the motive of the tide is executed with more detail. The picture is finished clearly with two letters:  and  . In inscription M 38 from Murfatlar, these two letters form an expression: Boïy ew (Lord's (God's) home):

f 250v Roe 27 Bodleian Library

 In iscription M 38 from Murfatlar, these two letters form an expression : Boïy ew (Lord's (God's) home) (Ovcharov, N. 2014):

 

For L8, we can assume the same meaning:  Ew boïy  (Lord's home). Apart from the meaning of the ligature content of the picture with rows of tied horses is interesting by itself. In the Cyrillic inscriptions, few times was mentioned a religious holiday, "tudoritza",, on which, in Bulgaria, horse races are held. This fact suggests that it might be the same person who wrote Cyrillic inscriptions and Runiform ligatures.  

§9. Ligature L9 was written vertically on folio 256v. Its contents are not very clear. 

f 256v Roe 27 Bodleian Library

§10. Ligature L10 was written vertically on folio 298v.  Its contents are not very clear.

f 298v Roe 27 Bodleian Library

§11. Ligature L11 was written vertically on folio 184. The form of the first letter from the top is:   or . The second letter is  or . The third letter is . It is followed by  . The subsequent two letters are  interwoven a few times, a combination    interwoven a few times, a combination that we already met at L8. There might be another letter somewhere between the second and third, but its form is unclear. Above the ligature was depicted a drawing of the Ladder of Divine Ascent.

f 184 Roe 27 Granberg, A. 2005a

       Among eleven  ligatures from the Greek manuscript Roe 27, we found 10 graphemes:

They were all used in the Murfatlar script and are written repeatedly on many of Murfatlar's inscriptions (Ovcharov, N. 2014). This undoubtedly establishes that Murfatlar inscriptions and Roe 27 ligatures were written with the same alphabet.

     But with this, similarities between Murfatlar and Roe 27 are not limited. As A. Granberg noticed, dragons drown along with the Cyrillic inscription on one of the pages of Roe 27 corresponding with dragons carved at  Murfatlar.

Drawings from Murfatlar

Dragons from Row 27 Granberg, A. 2005a

     One of the drawings from Roe 27 is depicted as a boot. The boot symbol has quite a limited area and time of occurrence among the material remains of Early Medieval Bulgaria. According to R. Kostova, depictions of the boot are known from North West Bulgaria and Northern Dobruja. The only exception from this area is a depiction of a boot from Kherson. They were drawn between the 9th and the 11th century. 

Drawing of a boot f  93v Roe 27 Bodleian Library

      In addition, V. Beshevliev mentioned in his work on Murfatlar inscriptions an exciting future of some Runiform inscriptions. They are written in long single lines (Beshevliev, V. 1977):

Inscription from Murfatlar

Inscription from Murfatlar

At Murfatlar, this future is not limited to the Runiform inscriptions. We have Cyrillic inscriptions inscribed in long single lines:

Cyrillic inscription from Murfatlar

Some of the Cyrillic inscriptions written on the margins of Roe 27 are also executed in a single long line:

Cyrillic inscriptions from Roe 27 Granberg, A. 2005a

    As shown above, ligatures from Roe 27 are usually written vertically and in a linear style. Why did scribes do this? The material used to carve Runiform inscriptions might be responsible for this: long wooden sticks, called in Bulgarian "rabosh". Although there is no surviving evidence of this writing practice in Bulgaria, we have examples of runiform inscriptions from other regions. One is the famous Achiktash inscription found in 1932 near the river Talas. A short runiform inscription is carved on four sides of a wooden rod. Another one is the Szekely calendar, copied by Luigi Marsigli from a wooden stick, which needed to be recovered. Although non-wooden objects, such as two bone needles from Vratsa, can shed light on what would look like an inscription on a tally rod. According to P. Ivanov, the first bone needle dated 7-11 century bears a Runiform inscription (Ivanov, P. 1997). 

Needle with inscription #1 (Ivanov P 1997)

The second needle has a contemporary inscription on one of its sides and should be modern. The inscription on the other side of the needle, however, resembles remarkably runiform ligatures found on the margins of Roe 27. P. Ivanov has the right that it might result from an older tradition of tally carving.

Needle with inscription #2 (Ivanov P 1997)

      As can be seen from the material presented, sometime between the 10th and 11th century, perhaps monks who knew the Runiform alphabet similar to one used at Murfatlar churches had drawn pictures and written Runiform ligatures Cyrillic inscriptions. At the moment is impossible to say what is expressed through those Runiform ligatures, but the images drawn on the margins of Row 27 may give an idea of their hypothetical meaning. Among the scenes of ploughing and hunting, there is a possible scene of horse racing for Saint Tudor's Day (as some Cyrillic inscriptions talk about Saint Tudor's Day). The depiction of dragons and a boot was already mentioned. 

 Drawings  from Row 27 Granberg, A. 2005a

    Thus we seen covered a significant amount of secular and relilivess live of medieval people. In the future, the contents of those drawings can help unravel the meaning of the Runiform ligatures.  

Bibliography

       Barnea I., Bilciurescu V. 1959, Şantierul arheologic Basarabi (reg. Constanţa), Materiale şi cercetări arheologice, Bucureşti, 6, 1959, pp. 541-566;

       Beshevliev, V. 1977 , Beobachtungen uber die protobulgarischen runeninschriften bei Basarabi (Murfatlar), IIMV , Varna, 13 (28) 49 55 ;

       Cleminson, R. 1988, A union catalogue of Cyrillic manuscripts in British and Irish collections, London, 1988;

       Coxe, H. 1853, Catalogi codicum manuscriptorum Bibliothecae Bodleianae pars prima recensionem codicum Graecorum continens, Oxford, 1853; reprinted with corrections, 1969;

       Hutter I, 1977, Corpus der Byzantinischen Miniaturenhandschriften. Oxford Bodleian Library, vol. 3, Stuttgart, 1977;

       Granberg, A. 2005a, Pictures and Bulgarian Cyrillic Inscriptions in a Greek 11th-century manuscript, Нѣстъ оученикъ надъ оучителемь своимь. Сборник в чест на Иван Добрев, член-кореспондент на БАН и учител, София, 2005;

       Granberg A. 2005b, On Deciphering Medieval Runic Scripts From the Balkans- cultural texts of the past: media, symbols and ideas , III, Sofia, 128-139 ;

       Ivanov, P. 1997, Иванов П.  Костена игла с рунически надпис, Annuary of the National Museum of Archaeology, 10, Sofia, 266- 272;
        Kostova, R. 1994, Костова, Р. За библейския смисъл на един ранносредновековен символ. – В: Българите в Северното Причерноморие. Изследвания и материали. Т. ІІІ. Велико Търново, 81-99.
        Kostova, R. 1996, Костова, Р. Една хипотеза за поклонничеството в България през X век. – В: Българите в Северното Причерноморие. Изследвания и материали. Т. V. Велико Търново, 149-173.

       Ovcharov, N. 2014, Murfatlar Script, http://murfatlar.blogspot.co.uk/