Catalogue of Coptic Manuscripts in the Pierpont Morgan Library: (oriental Series 2)

This album of photographic plates is a companion volume to the descriptive Catalogue of Coptic Manuscripts in the Pierpont Morgan Library. It presents a visual record of the Morgan Coptic collection. The Morgan Coptic collection is unrivaled in wealth of Coptic manuscript illumination dating to before AD 1000, including a near monopoly on early Coptic frontispieces. Following a brief introduction and a few images of the desert location near the town of al-Hamuli, where the bulk of the Library’s Coptic manuscripts were unearthed in 1910, the body of the album presents the collection for codicologists, art historians, and paleographers under the two categories of Decoration and Script. The album contains a comprehensive record of frontispieces, headpieces, tailpieces (including what may be the oldest Christian illumination), a sampling of marginal ornaments and ornamental initials, specimens of the scripts of most literary manuscripts, and selected documentary texts and bindings. Full concordances between call numbers, plate numbers, and catalogue numbers are also provided.