Speaker
Description
Armenian manuscripts are a particularly rich corpus when it comes to their premodern “metadata” - the addition of a colophon, usually naming the scribe and often giving the date as well as circumstantial information about the production of the manuscript, was a strong element of the copying tradition. Moreover, when it exists, this metadata is usually reproduced in the manuscript catalogue entries. While there do exist models for HTR transcription of classical Armenian, in this project we are interested in what can be modelled without the time-consuming process of HTR analysis and correction. We attempt to identify approximate dates of copying for manuscripts that are missing a colophon, and use the results of this analysis to revisit the timeline of Armenian script development.