SSCN Voumes 1-10, 1994-2004

St. Shenouda Coptic Newsletter

are in English and German plus one written in Italian. Most of the articles deal with grammatical topics, which was Prof. Polotsky's main work. Other articles included editions of Coptic manuscripts, and a comprehensive bibliography of St. Shenouda the Archimandrite. This publication had only 480 copies printed, and it is currently out-of-print, which make this gift that more generous. It will be made available to our members, especially young Copts, for a discounted price of $15. The Society would like to thank Prof. Young for his generosity and his appreciation of its work. It is worthy of mention that he has furnished us in the past with offprints of all his work on St. Shenouda's writings over the past few years. 17. Digitized Coptic and Christian Manuscripts from Bani Suief: Through the good offices of our colleague in Melbourne, Australia, Dr. Youhanna N. Youssef, the Society acquired a CD of digitized images of the preserved library of St. Mary Church at Bayad al- Nasara in Bani Suief. This church was probably served by monks from St. Antony Monastery in the Eastern Desert, judging by several of the manuscripts having names of monks of that monastery that either owned the manuscript or was its scribe. The collection included 46 manuscripts, having over 6800 image files with nearly 12,900 pages. The majority of manuscripts are liturgical service books as is usually the case. The non-liturgical manuscripts were

seven: Biblical 3, Literary 2, and Epact Calculation Manuals 2. Coptic Bohairic text is found in 31 of the 46 manuscripts, and it has some interesting variant spelling that could be of interest to Coptic linguists. Only 15 of these manuscripts were dated. These dates ranged over a hundred-year period from AM 1507 to AM 1607, approximately corresponding to the period from AD 1791 to 1891. Aside from the Epact Calculation Manuals, the collection had other interesting manuscripts like a Bohairic-Arabic Difnar for the enti e year, Euchologions with only the Coptic prayers of the priest, and a copy of the 13 th century Coptic encyclopedia of Youhanna ibn Sabaa: "al-Gawhara al-Nafisa" or "the Precious Jewel". Also there was a directory of Synaxarium commemorations in the back of a manuscript of the Coptic Office of Unction. The collection was scanned by Mr. Ayman Samir, with Dr. Youssef acting as the observing coptologist. The scanning was apparently done with a flat bed scanner with low resolution color, JPEG format, judging by the small size of the graphic files. Currently the Society converted the collection into a pdf format files to facilitate their use. A more detailed article about this collection will appear in the upcoming issues of the Coptic Newsletter.

St. Shenouda Coptic Newsletter

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