Coptica 15, 2016

68 Ramez Mikhail

Interesting in this description is the reference to priests wearing the so- called c arḍī [ العرضي ], which will re-appear in the forthcoming discussion of episcopal vestments and seems to have been largely a broad piece of cloth since عرض ‘arḍ is itself the Arabic word for width . This means it most likely resembled the ballīn , an episcopal vestment, or the priestly head covering known as the shamlah .]شمله[ Although largely absent from the sources examined here, the shamlah is well-known in the modern era in its short form (2 m.) that is laid simply over the head and falls down on the chest, and less frequently in its longer form (3.5 m.), which is wrapped around the head first like a turban. 51 Today, the shamlah has essentially disappeared and has been fully replaced by the modern ṭaylasān , and the two names are certainly not synonymous in modern usage. Nonetheless, since both the ṭaylasān from the Order of the Priesthood and c arḍī in the Lamp of Darkness seem to be synonymous head coverings, and since c arḍī itself was likely a broad band of cloth as betrayed by the name, it would seem that at a certain point in time the ṭaylasān was in fact identical in shape to the shamlah . Another interesting detail is that Ibn Kabar’s description does not mention that priests wore a girdle or zinnār . This may have been a simple mistake, or Ibn Kabar may have been recording the actual situation in 14 th - century Cairo. After all, Ibn Kabar’s work – written by a presbyter – was not meant as an authoritative set of rules to follow, but simply as a compendium of the beliefs and practices of the Coptic Church. It is interesting, then, that not long after the appearance of the girdle in The Order of the Priesthood and its mention again in The Precious Jewel , that Ibn Kabar dropped it from his list of vestments altogether. Given that today in the Coptic Rite girdles are almost never used, and when they are, they are worn occasionally by patriarchs and bishops, in The Lamp of Darkness we may be witnessing the beginning of the decline of this short-lived priestly accessory. This decline should be expected to follow on the heels of the multiplication of vestments by the 13 th century. In other words, the movement from simplicity to complexity eventually gave way to a retrograde movement towards simplification. 52 This process could have been made feasible by the absence of any strict rubrics controlling what clergy were to wear for the services, allowing for a more spontaneous situation in which strictness or laxity took place at random. 51 Innemée, Ecclesiastical Dress , 57, fig. 6. 52 This case is a very clear example of Baumstark’s second law of liturgical development, in which liturgical development proceeds from simplicity to increasing enrichment, followed by a retrograde development of abbreviation. On this and other laws of Anton Baumstark, cf. Anton Baumstark, Comparative Liturgy (Westminster, MD, 1958), and a recent treatment of these laws in Robert F. Taft, “Anton Baumstark’s Comparative Liturgy Revisited,” in Robert F. Taft and Gabriele Winkler (eds.), Acts of the International Congress: Comparative Liturgy Fifty Years after Anton Baumstark (1872-1948), Rome, 25-29 September 1998 , Orientalia Christiana Analecta 265 (Rome, 2001), 191-232, here 198-200.