Abstract
Over the last few years, the Federal Institute for material research (BAM, Berlin) together with the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC, University of Hamburg) have initiated a systematic material investigation of black inks produced from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages (ca. fourth century CE–fourteenth/fifteenth centuries CE), aimed primarily at extending and complementing findings from previous sporadic studies. Part of this systematic investigation has focused on Egyptian Coptic manuscripts, and the present preliminary study is one of its outputs. It centres on a corpus of 45 Coptic manuscripts—43 papyri and 2 ostraca—preserved at the Palau-Ribes and Roca-Puig collections in Barcelona. The manuscripts come from the Monastery of Apa Apollo at Bawit, one of the largest monastic settlements in Egypt between the Late Antiquity and the Early Islamic Period (sixth–eighth centuries CE). The composition of their black inks was investigated in situ using near-infrared reflectography (NIRR) and X-ray fluorescence (XRF). The analyses determined that the manuscripts were written using different types of ink: pure carbon ink; carbon ink containing iron; mixed inks containing carbon, polyphenols and metallic elements; and iron-gall ink. The variety of inks used for the documentary texts seems to reflect the articulate administrative system of the monastery of Bawit. This study reveals that, in contrast to the documents, written mostly with carbon-based inks, literary biblical texts were written with iron-gall ink. The frequent reuse of papyrus paper for certain categories of documents may suggest that carbon-based inks were used for ephemeral manuscripts, since they were easy to erase by abrasion.
Highlights
Black inks have been used extensively across time and space to record information, the material investigation of their composition has often remained restricted to specific periods and geographical areas
The present contribution is a direct output of the research on Coptic manuscripts, and focuses on the material analysis of writing media used towards the end of Late Antiquity in the Monastery of Apa Apollo at Bawit, one of the largest monastic complexes ever to have existed in Egypt
We addressed mixed inks explaining that near-infrared reflectography (NIRR) is, in some cases, insufficient to identify them as it might reveal only the main component in a mixture [50]
Summary
Black inks have been used extensively across time and space to record information, the material investigation of their composition has often remained restricted to specific periods and geographical areas. This research has aimed to extend and complement findings from a handful of other material studies, which focused mostly on the composition of black Egyptian inks produced between Pharaonic times and the first centuries of the Common Era [3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13] The present contribution is a direct output of the research on Coptic manuscripts, and focuses on the material analysis of writing media used towards the end of Late Antiquity (ca. seventh/eighth century CE) in the Monastery of Apa Apollo at Bawit, one of the largest monastic complexes ever to have existed in Egypt
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