The Album of Armenian Paleography provides a comprehensive selection of some 200 definitively dated, handwritten texts, sampled from among the 30,000 manuscripts preserved in the major public collections of Europe, the Middle East, the former USSR and North America. Selected specimen pages from these manuscripts are presented in chronological order, and span the period from AD 862 to 1911. Each text is illustrated by a high-quality colour facsimile of a typical page, and is accompanied by an alphabet table for the folio in question and a sample transcription. All photographs are new, taken...

After the Council of Chalcedon in AD 451, churches using the Syriac language came to represent the unorthodox. Before this epoch-making Council, 150 years had past in which the church language in Syria had been primarily Greek, but at the same time the diversity of languages, cultures and theologies had been huge - sometimes creating tension, especially when biblical texts were to be translated or interpreted. This early period and the many different sources that contribute to its understanding (in Greek, Syriac, Latin and Armenian), have been the subject of a great part of Henning Lehmann's...