“Scribal” Quatrains in Poetry Collections: A General Typology and the Question of Origin

Abstract

Since many East Syriac copyists were also poets, they created a number of poetic texts — mostly quatrains — mentioning scribes and their work that obtained much importance in the both literary life and manuscript production of this Church in the Ottoman period. Some of them were placed in poetic anthologies. The current article discusses the problems of the origin and the general typology of such pieces that have never been studied before.