Читать книгу The Book of Travels - Hannā Diyāb - Страница 13

There is only one known manuscript of Ḥannā Diyāb’s Kitāb al-Siyāḥah (Book of Travels), preserved in the Vatican Apostolic Library’s Sbath collection under the class mark 254. The first ten pages of the manuscript are missing, judging from the numbers handwritten in brown ink on the first forty folios. In the absence of the opening pages, both Paul Sbath in his Catalogue and Georg Graf in the Geschichte der christlichen arabischen Literatur categorized the text as anonymous. This erroneous designation may explain why the text was disregarded until the early 1990s, when Jérôme Lentin identified the author as Ḥannā Diyāb.⁵³

The binding of the codex is typical of Ottoman codices. It contains some fragments, including a page in Syriac script. Aside from the missing pages, which were evidently torn out after the book was first composed,⁵⁴ and some water stains, the codex is relatively well preserved. Although it has some of the features characteristic of professionally prepared codices, it also shows signs of being a work in progress. As was typical for Diyāb’s time, the text is laid out in black ink interspersed with red for decorative and structural purposes. The first six chapter headings are centered and followed by a short subtitle in red. The subsequent chapters lack rubrication. The last sections seem to have been planned as chapters but are not marked as such, nor is there any room left for large chapter headings. On nearly every page, letters and words have been struck through or replaced. Most of the strikethrough lines are colored in red ink. Red ink is also used for scribal marks, such as the pilcrows that indicate the ends of episodes. Some of the lines bearing paragraph marks at the end are indented, as can be seen frequently after folio 45 of the manuscript. Another structuring device is the use of dots to mark the end of syntactic units such as interrogative sentences and to mark a change of speakers. With its subdivision into paragraphs and its proto-punctuation, The Book of Travels is in some respects reminiscent of a modern book. The manuscript text, which ends on folio 174, is followed by a few names, such as the mention (given also in Roman script on the same page) of the book’s owner, Anṭūn Yūsuf Ḥannā Diyāb, probably the author’s son. On the bottom of the page that describes Diyāb’s journey from Marseille to Paris, a great-grandchild left an ownership note: “This account of the voyage of my father’s grandfather entered the possession of Jibrāyil, son of Dīdakūz Diyāb, of the Maronite community, on the 19th of April in the year 1840 of the Christian era.”