The Medieaval Manuscript Tradition of Bal’ami’s Version of al-Tabari’s History

Peacock, Andrew. “The Medieaval Manuscript Tradition of Bal’ami’s Version of al-Tabari’s History.” Theoretical Approaches to the Transmission and Edition of Oriental Manuscripts. Ed. Judith Pfeiffer and Manfred Kropp. Beirut: Ergon Verlag Wurzberg, 2007. 93-105.

Notes

Peacock looks at the chaotic manuscript tradition of Bal’ami’s translation and argues that this “…shows us exceptionally clearly the futility of attempting to establish stemmata in the case of many Islamic textual traditions.” (103)

p.96 Mentions Elton Daniel as “…the scholar who has done most to improve our understanding of the complex manuscript history of this work” but says that his plan to divide the manuscript tradition into three (late, full and abbreviated) fails because within each of these redaction one can find manuscripts that vary amongst eachother more than those in other redactions.

p.97 Argues that a Cambridge University manuscript (Add 836) should be regarded as an accurate.  Is in Arabic and dates from 1471, though the colphon claims it is a copy of a 1229 manuscript which in turn is a copy of a 1050 manuscript.

p.98 Problems of an Arabic copyist dealing with Persian names – ‘Parviz’ becomes ‘Barwin’ and etymology of Jamshid mangled.

p.99 Tabari mentions Dahhak – Vol.1:103 in Rawshan’s edition of Tabari on the origin of the Kurds.

pp.99-101 Demonstrates that when ostensibly ‘copying’ Bal’ami’s work, copyists would draw on other Persian sources if they felt the original was deficient and from Tabari’s Arabic original.

p.101 Copyists probably did not distinguish between Bal’ami and Tabari – blamed the latter for ommissions when it was probably due to lacunae in the former.

p.102 Argument for horizontal transmission – adapted from concepts in Reynolds and Wilson

pp.102-04 “To conclude, I believe that the case of al-Tabari and Bal’ami shows us exceptionally clearly the futility of attempting to establish stemmata in the case of many Islamic textual traditions.  Not only were distinctions between original and translation considerably more fluid in the Middle Ages than now, but even those between translator, scribe and author were blurred.”