A peek into millenary manuscripts

 The concept of "millenary manuscripts" is a temporal designation that refers to manuscripts that are over one thousand years of age. The thousand-year criterion could be calculated according to both the lunar and solar calendars, both calculations are viable. Seen from this angle, the tenuous discrepancy between the Hegira and Gregorian calendars should not be taken seriously. However, because of the fact that Arabic history is based on the Hegira calendar, we decided that the year 450 A.H. should be the year where the millenariness criterion ceases to be tenable, i.e. millenary manuscripts are those dated from the year 450 A.H. backwards. 

Despite the fact that we do know that there are languages other than the official historical Arabic, such as Turkish and Persian, throughout the long history of Arabic civilization, our coinage of the "millenary manuscripts" term was namely and solely formed with Arabic manuscripts only in mind. Besides, we know of no Turkish or Persian manuscripts as such dated back to that age. Of course, there are myriads of millenary manuscripts written in ancient Hebrew, ancient Greek and Latin, but they are not to be classified under the term "millenary manuscripts". 

But what are the indexes that help us identify and single out millenary manuscripts? The first material sign of the age of a particular manuscript is the date of its copying. However, we should pay special heed to the fact that some scribes did copy the date mentioned in the older manuscript they were copying from, resulting in a falsely dated manuscript. Lack of diligence, disregard for the significance and essentialness of authenticated data were the main reasons for those scribes to do such mistakes. But some of them did this premeditatedly; in order to persuade the potential buyer of the manuscript into believing that the manuscript was older than the way it seemed and thus wring more money out of him, the scribe wrote an older date, usually the date of the original manuscript he was copying from, on the manuscript he was selling. This in mind, we should be aware of the fact that the copying date, in spite of its paramount importance as a primary clue of millenariness, should not be taken at face value. Other criteria should also be seriously taken into consideration: paper quality and material, calligraphical and palaeographical evidence, and other clues that assist in confirming the correctness and exactitude of the copying date usually found in the last folio of the manuscript.

Some manuscripts happen to be undated, but having no explicit date is by no means an impediment toward the uncovering of the millenariness of these manuscripts. We can sidestep this seemingly insurmountable problem by identifying the idiosyncratic handwriting style of the manuscript's author or scribe whose flourishing periods or dates we happen to know of. Other evidence of millenariness could be extracted from such tokens as the existence of draft annotations or commentaries by a well-known author who lived a millennium ago, the existence of ex libris inscriptions whose recorded (millenary) dates are by all means uncontested.