One Thousand and One Conjectures

Scribes routinely closed their work with self-deprecating apologies — “forgive the faults of the unworthy scribe” — and the naive reading treats these as confessions from careless copyists. The claim inverts that: such formulae are costly quality signals, the mark of a…

Monastic scribes copied in the gaps left by the agricultural year, bending to the pen most heavily in the dead of winter when the fields demanded nothing; urban professional copyists, decoupled from farm labour, worked to a flat year-round rhythm driven by…

Medieval Armenia memorialized the dead in two media: manuscripts with dated colophons, and khachkars — carved cross-stones, thousands of which bear dated dedication inscriptions. The claim: the two series are counter-cyclical. When invasion crushed scriptoria — which need parchment supply chains, endowments,…

Geʽez began, like its Semitic relatives, as a consonant-only script, and then — uniquely among Semitic scripts — acquired obligatory vowel marks in the fourth century, the same generation as King Ezana's conversion to Christianity. The standard explanations invoke Christian scripture or…

The Ethiopian computus (Baḥrä ḥassab) fixes Easter through tables written in Geʽez numerals, themselves derived from Greek letters. If scribes actually recomputed the tables, copying errors would be caught and residual errors would be arithmetic — off by one within a cycle;…

Geʽez colophons date manuscripts by several concurrent eras — Year of Mercy, Year of the World, Era of the Martyrs — often stacked two or three deep. This conjecture says the choice among them was not free variation or fashion but a…