Liber Genealogus

A 9,000-word study of the links between the Liber Genealogus and the Great Stemma more or less completes my detailed research into the oldest stemma diagram known. I have just placed this new article online. I do not pretend it offers any great amusement: it is rather dry stuff. But we need the detail to assemble the case that the Liber is the textual account of someone who had read the Stemma, or something like it. I don't think many people read the Liber Genealogus: it is difficult to see what use it ever was to any reader. Mommsen's edition of the Liber does not help the contemporary reader much either. It is not particularly easy to use, given that the composite Mommsen text overlays the original G recension with material from the Origo Humani Generis and a lot of Donatist disputation. It might have almost been easier for me to just read a manuscript. Unfortunately, the best and oldest one is not online. The excellent Swiss e-codices project has not yet digitized Cod. Sang. 133, which contains the G recension dating from the late 8th or early 9th century. That is quite impressive: this codex was penned less than 400 years after the Liber Genealogus was written in 427. In the absence of this much-needed digital work, one can only consult Plutei 20.54 in Florence, which contains the inferior F recension. This is in fact the same codex that contains the most primitive form of the Great Stemma.

Greek Place-Names

An interesting blog post from last year by Nick Nicholas on old Greek names for a stretch of coast that is much in the news at the moment. Hippolytus's Chronicon comprehensively lists places that a mariner might need to know about on the desert coast of North Africa.

New Revisions

So we now have two new pages on the site: one deals in more detail with Eusebius and the likely debt of the Great Stemma to his Chronological Canons. The other explores in more detail the oddities of the Ordo Romanorum Regum. I have also fully revised the bibliography to make it more comprehensive.

Ordo Annorum Mundi

A new page, dealing with the Ordo Annorum Mundi, has now been placed on the Macro-Typography website. It seems to me that the OAM may be a piece of writing by the Great Stemma's author, but I am still looking for the killer evidence. The OAM seems to appear only in Iberian-origin manuscripts, but has achieved wider diffusion through its incorporation in the Commentary on the Apocalypse of Beatus of Liebana.

Note added in August 2012: No killer evidence found. It seems more than likely that the Ordo Annorum Mundi is not by the Great Stemma author, who probably worked from a chronology drafted by Hippolytus of Rome. However the OAM's history seems intimately entwined with that of the diagram. It could well be the work of someone who revised and altered the diagram at a later stage, altering it to reflect a chronology of world history computed by Eusebius of Caesarea. Professor José Carlos Martín of the University of Salamanca will soon be issuing an editio princeps of the Ordo Annorum Mundi, and we are keenly awaiting this important publication.

The Vetus Latina Hispana of Ayuso

In 1953, Teófilo Ayuso Marazuela published the first volume of his Vetus Latina Hispana. It was an ambitious project, presumably with government funding, to recover the bible texts that circulated in Iberia before the introduction of Jerome's Vulgate. It was in direct rivalry with the Vetus Latina that was being reconstructed at the Abbey of Beuron in Germany, and it was awarded a prize (marked on the title page) in the name of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco.

Ayuso devised his own numbering system for the codices and other manuscripts he used. The numbers seem to have fallen completely out of use, but are still essential in reading scholarly Spanish articles of the period, in particular Ayuso's own writing, about biblical manuscripts. Since the numbers seem to be nowhere on the internet, I am tabulating them online in the hope they can be of service to modern scholars.

The left column comprises the VLH or Ayuso numbers themselves, followed by the abbreviations commonly used and the sequence numbers for each manuscript of the same provenance. For example, Leg² or Legionense² is the Codex gothicus. Burgense¹ is the Burgos Bible, also called Biblia de San Pedro de Cardena. The last column lists the (1953) locations of the manuscripts.

1	Guelf		Vaticano -Guelferbitano	Vaticano
2	Tur		Turonense	Paris
3	Fragm. To		Fragmentos toledanos	Toledo
4	Freís		Fragmentos de Freising	München
5	Palimps		Palimpsesto de León	León
6	Ottob		Ottoboniano	Vaticano
7	Lugd	1	Lugdunense	Lyon
8	Lugd	2	Lugdunense	Paris
9	Escu	1	Eseurialense	El Escorial
10	Ov	1	Ovetense (Desaparecido)	Oviedo
11	Luxeuil		Leccionario de Luxeuil	Paris
12	Ov	2	Ovetense (Desaparecido)	Oviedo. Escorial
13	Cav		Cavense	Cava
14	Cav dpdo		Cavense duplicado	Vaticano
15	To	1	Toledano	Madrid
16	To dpdo		Toledano duplicado	Vaticano
17	Co	1	Complutense	Madrid
18	Co	2	Complutense	Madrid
19	Leg	1	Legionense	León
20	On		Oniense	Salamanca
21	Leg	2	Legionense	León
22	Leg dpdo		Legionense duplicado	Vaticano
23	Leg	3	Legionense supuesto (Desaparecido)	León
24	Emil	1	Emilianense	Madrid
25	Burg	1	Burgense	Burgos
26	Valv		Valvanerense (Desaparecido)	Escorial
27	To	2	Toledano	Toledo
28	Pin		Pinatense	Madrid
29	Moz		Breviario Mozárabe	Madrid
30	Psalt	1	Salterio	Madrid
31	Psalt	2	Salterio	Madrid
32	Psalt	3	Salterio	Madrid
33	Psalt	4	Salterio	London
34	Psalt	5	Salterio	Nogent-sur-Marne
35	Psalt	6	Salterio	Escorial
36	Psalt	7	Salterio	Madrid
37	Psalt	8	Salterio	Santiago
38	Cant		Liber Canticorum	Madrid
39	Com	1	Liber Commicus	Toledo
40	Com	2	Liber Commicus	París
41	Com	3	Liber Commicus	León
42	Com	4	Liber Commicus	Madrid
43	Seg	1	Seguntino	Sigüenza
44	Esc	2	Escurialense	El Escorial
45	Tolos	1	Tolosano	Toulouse
46	Tolos	2	Tolosano	Toulouse
46*	Esc		Escurialense Misceláneo (not a bible)	El Escorial
47	Lugd	3	Lugdunense	Lyon
48	Teod		Teodulfiano	Paris
49	Anic		Aniciense	Le Puy
50	Bern		Bernense	Bern
51	Hub		Hubertiano	London
52	Sang		Sangermanense	Paris
53	Sang		Sangermanense	Paris
54	Sang		Sangermanense	Paris
55	Riq		Saint Riquier	Paris
56	Laud		Laudiano	Oxford
57	Mon		Monacense	München
58	Aur		Aureo	Escorial
59	Cas	1	Casinense	Monte Cassino
60	Cas	2	Casinense	Monte Cassino
61	Cas	3	Casinense	Monte Cassino
62	Cas	4	Casinense	Monte Cassino
63	To	3	Toledano	Toledo
64	Matr	2	Matritense	Madrid
65	Matr	3	Matritense	Madrid
66	Matr	4	Matritense	Madrid
67	Matr	5	Matritense	Madrid
68	Matr	6	Matritense	Madrid
69	Matr	7	Matritense	Madrid
70	Matr	8	Matritense	Madrid
71	Purp		Purpúreo (Desaparacido)	Urgel
72	Urg		Urgelense	Urgel
73	Rip		Ripollense	Vaticano
74	Roa		Rodense	Paris
75	Vic	1	Vicense	Vich
76	Vic	2	Vicense	Vich
77	Vic	3	Vicense	Vich
78	Vic	4	Vicense	Vich
79	Par	1	Parisiense	Paris
80	Par	2	Parisiense	Paris
81	Par	3	Parisiense	Paris
82	Esc	3	Escurialense	El Escorial
83	Mall		Malloricense	Palma
84	Leg	3	Legionense	León
85	Leg	4	Legionense	León
86	Leg	5	Legionense	León
87	Leg	6	Legionense	León
88	Leg	7	Legionense	León
89	Osc		Oscense	Madrid
90	Matr	9	Matritense	Madrid
91	Burg	2	Burgense	Burgos
92	Burg	3	Burgense	Burgos
93	Cal		Calagurritano	Calahorra
94	Emil	2	Emilianense	Madrid
95	Ler		llerdense	Lérida
96	Co	2	Complutenses	Madrid
97	Av		Avilense	Madrid
98	Esc	4	Escurialense	El Escorial
99	Alf		Alfonsino (Desaparacido)	Barcelona?
100	Avig		Avignoniense (Desaparcido)	Avignon?
101	Barc	1	Barcinonense	Barcelona
102	Barc	2	Barcinonense	Barcelona
103	Barc	3	Barcinonense	Barcelona
104	Barc	4	Barcinonense	Barcelona
105	Barc	5	Barcinonense	Barcelona
106	Bil	1	Bilbilitano	Calatayud
107	Bil	2	Bilbilitano	Calatayud
108	Burg	4	Burgense	Burgos
109	Burg	5	Burgense	Burgos
110	Cal		Calagurritano	Calahorra
111	Conc		Concentainense	Concentaina
112	Dar		Darocense	Daroca
113	Esc	5	Escurialense	El Escorial
114	Esc	6	Escurialense	El Escorial
115	Esc	7	Escurialense	El Escorial
116	Esc	8	Escurialense	El Escorial
117	Esc	9	Escurialense	El Escorial
118	Esc	10	Escurialense	El Escorial
119	Esc	11	Escurialense	El Escorial
120	Esc	12	Escurialense	El Escorial
121	Esc	13	Escurialense	El Escorial
122	Esc	14	Escurialense	El Escorial
123	Esc	15	Escurialense	El Escorial
124	Esc	16	Escurialense	El Escorial
125	Esc	17	Escurialense	El Escorial
126	Esc	18	Escurialense	El Escorial
127	Esc	19	Escurialense	El Escorial
128	Esc	20	Escurialense	El Escorial
129	Esc	21	Escurialense	El Escorial
130	Esc	22	Escurialense	El Escorial
131	Esc	23	Escurialense	El Escorial
132	Esc	24	Escurialense	El Escorial
133	Esc	25	Escurialense	El Escorial
134	Esc	26	Escurialense	El Escorial
135	Hisp		Hispalense	Sevilla
136	Mall	2	Malloricense	Palma
137	Mall	3	Malloricense	Palma
138	Matr	10	Matritense	Madrid
139	Matr	11	Matritense	Madrid
140	Matr	12	Matritense	Madrid
141	Matr	13	Matritense	Madrid
142	Matr	14	Matritense	Madrid
143	Matr	15	Matritense	Madrid
144	Matr	16	Matritense	Madrid
145	Matr	17	Matritense	Madrid
146	Matr	18	Matritense	Madrid
147	Matr	19	Matritense	Madrid
148	Matr	20	Matritense	Madrid
149	Matr	21	Matritense	Madrid
150	Matr	22	Matritense	Madrid
151	Matr	23	Matritense	Madrid
152	Matr	24	Matritense	Madrid
153	Matr	25	Matritense	Madrid
154	Matr	26	Matritense	Madrid
155	Matr	27	Matritense	Madrid
156	Matr	28	Matritense	Madrid
157	Matr	29	Matritense	Madrid
158	Matr	30	Matritense	Madrid
159	Matr	31	Matritense	Madrid
160	Matr	32	Matritense	Madrid
161	Matr	33	Matritense	Madrid
162	Matr	34	Matritense	Madrid
163	Matr	35	Matritense	Madrid
164	Matr	36	Matritense	Madrid
165	Matr	37	Matritense	Madrid
166	Matr	38	Matritense	Madrid
167	Oxorm		Oxomense	Burgo de Osma
168	Par	4	Parisiense	Paris
169	Plas	1	Plasentino	Plasencia
170	Plas	2	Plasentino	Plasencia
171	Salm		Salmanticense	Salamanca
172	Segov		Segoviense	Segovia
173	Segunt		Seguntino	Sigüenza
174	Ser		Serenense	Villanueva de la Serena
175	Sor		Soriano	Soria
176	Tar		Tarraconense	Tarragona
177	Tir		Tirasonense	Tarazona
178	To	4	Toledano	Toledo
179	To	5	Toledano	Toledo
180	To	6	Toledano	Toledo
181	To	7	Toledano	Toledo
182	To	8	Toledano	Toledo
183	To	9	Toledano	Toledo
184	To	10	Toledano	Toledo
185	To	11	Toledano	Toledo
186	To	12	Toledano	Toledo
187	To	13	Toledano	Toledo
188	To	14	Toledano	Toledo
189	To	15	Toledano	Toledo
190	To	16	Toledano	Toledo
191	To	17	Toledano	Toledo
192	To	18	Toledano	Toledo
193	To	19	Toledano	Toledo
194	To	20	Toledano	Toledo
195	Urg	2	Urgelitano	Urgel
196	Urg	3	Urgelitano	Urgel
197	Valent	1	Valentino	Valencia
198	Valent	2	Valentino	Valencia
199	Valent	3	Valentino	Valencia
200	Valent	4	Valentino	Valencia
201	Valv	2	Valvanerense	Valvanera
202	Vat		Vaticano	Vaticano
203	Zar	1	Zaragozano	Zaragoza
204	Zar	2	Zaragozano	Zaragoza

You are welcome to copy my list and reproduce it as you wish, though a credit would be appreciated. As far as I can assess, the list in the book can no longer be subject to copyright, and in any case I have modified it to present it here on the web.
There is one peculiarity, perhaps a lapse in attention by Ayuso. Pages 25-6 (IV. Lista de codices espanoles o de origen hispanico estudiados, numeros y siglas correspondientes) list 203 sources only, while pages 347-83 (Los manuscritos bíblicos espanoles) contain a list that is one element longer (204). The extra item in the latter list comes at position number 113, Escurialense⁵, which is inexplicably missed from the summary table, so that every item below it is displaced by one position when the two lists are compared. In the above tabulation, I have followed the numbering on pages 347-83, since this seems to be correct. Perhaps there is an errata page, or a handwritten correction, in a copy in a Spanish library, and I would be grateful to anyone willing to check this. But there is no such correction in the Hamburg State Library copy, which is kept in the city's Bergedorf stack and does not seem to have been much used down the years.
[A later note:] Ayuso's earlier articles use quite different sigla, including A2, A3, A4, A5, A6, 7-8. These are apparently the items in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid (lines 64-69 above). A2 for example is the Bible of San Juan de la Peña, and these are listed in the print catalog (Tomo 1) here. His earlier "Bu" is the Burgos Bible in line 25, as noted above. Ayuso renumbered the León bibles, since 3 Legionense in line 23 is a lost one, whereas the Leg3 he had referred to in 1943 was clearly the Second León Bible which is very much in continued existence. In line 12, 2 Oventense is the lost Gospel Book of Justus which I discuss in another post.

A Latin Counterpart to Eusebius?

Six years ago, Roger Pearse led a magnificent distributed effort to create an English translation of the Chronological Canons of Eusebius. This was a work in Greek, now mostly lost, that we know through a Latin translation by Jerome and through Armenian translations from the Greek. The translation of the Canons is freely available as two (very large) HTML tables, beginning here on Tertullian.org or mirrored at CCEL here. They may take a while to download to your screen. The Latin of Jerome has also been tabulated on the same websites.
The chronological canons explore synchronisms in the histories of the cultures arrayed between Rome and Persia, keyed to biblical history starting at the birth of Abraham.

So what has this got to do with the Great Stemma? Well, it seems that both are essentially about the same thing, synchronisms. Eusebius created what was in a sense the world's first spreadsheet, with a patient scribe doing the autofill of dates in sequence down the left column. Eusebius then filled in events across the rows from the chronicles of the various civilizations he knew, Graeco-Roman and barbarian. Anthony Grafton in Christianity and the Transformation of the Book explores how revolutionary this method of visualizing information was. One point he might have made, but I don't think he did, is the importance of blank space in this content. The blanks are a key to reading the tabulation. There's a certain tension about it, because Eusebius obviously knew a lot of the content was rubbish, but he puts it in and lets the reader judge.

Now, the Great Stemma, in my view, must have done the same thing, but working left to right, and takes another step forward technically by eliminating the scale of years.
I've now posted a hypothetical reconstruction (link) of how the chronographical elements in the Great Stemma might have looked.

How was it progress to simplify Eusebius? The chart shows the reader the various synchronisms in the Bible: the descendants of Seth with the offspring of Cain, the offspring of Nathan with those of Solomon, the kings of Judah with those of Samaria, the founders of Rome with the Persians. But it finds a way to mix the resolution of the matches. In some cases it can state in a gloss to an exact year what is synchronous. In other cases it gives just a rough estimate of synchronicity, give or take a few hundred years. The author was probably teaching his students that the offspring of Cain were wiped out by the Great Flood, but thanks to his page design he does not need to say exactly when Lamech the Boaster lived or when Noema introduced her a capella music: he just draws them as a series of roundels crawling along the foot of the page till they stop. Big fat roundels don't need to be precisely placed. So in a sense, the Great Stemma is the first mind map: information in bubbles. If it had any kind of exactitude, this was probably confined to a separate tabulation. Perhaps the Ordo Annorum Mundi is that tabulation. We'll have to keep looking into this.

Eusebius obviously had the same issue to contend with. In fact he explains that some of his data is less exact, with a resolution in the order of decades only, not years, or at least that is one of the implications I draw from the following remark. Here is Grafton's translation (p. 140) of Chronici Canones, 14:

To prevent the long list of numbers from causing any confusion, I have cut the entire mass of years into decades. Gathering these from the histories of individual peoples, I have set them across from each other, so that anyone may easily determine in which Greek or barbarian's time the Hebrew prophets and kings and priests were, and similarly which men of the different kingdoms were falsely seem as gods, which were heroes, which cities were founded when, and, from the ranks of illustrious men, who were philosophers, poets, princes and writers.

Eusebius's thoughts on this are useful to an understanding of the Great Stemma. Understanding that Eusebius decided to simply ignore what he saw as prehistory, the time before Abraham, suggested to me that the Great Stemma author also probably decided to treat it differently, arranging it in unform arches and not bothering too closely about its possible synchronisms.
It still seems odd that the Great Stemma seems serenely unaware of Eusebius. Still, if the author worked entirely from Latin sources and did not have any of Jerome's translations to hand, neither the Vulgate nor the Chronici Canones, that would be understandable.
The Roger Pearse translation and Latin allows me to hunt and look for any resemblances and I find no matches in the proto-text of the Stemma. Something only shows up in a later recension, Urgell, where we have: Sexaginario Isaac nascuntur filii gemini: primus Esau, qui est Edom, a quo gens Iudamaeorum; secundus Jacob, qui posthea Israhel, a quo Israhelitae, qui nunc Iudaei. This matches Jerome's Latin translation of Eusebius: Sexagenario Isaac nascuntur filii gemini: primus Esau, qui et Edom, a quo gens Idumaeorum. Secundus Jacob, qui postea Israel, a quo Israelitae, qui nunc Judaei.

Now I don't wish to suggest that the Great Stemma is contemporary with the Canons, which were drawn up in the decade or so after 300 CE. The Stemma might have been drawn up 100 or even 150 years later. But in a wonderful way it is a kind of Latin counterpart to the Canons, finding new conventions to visualize a similar kind of content, preferring traditional roll form to new-fangled codex format, devising new ways to mix exactitude and vagueness, yet very successfully getting its message about synchronisms in biblical history across to the student who reads it. Or more correctly, who read it, past tense. By the time the document reached Spain, most of the careful parallelisms had probably been ruined by careless scribes, and the reader was left to guess at what episode above matched which episode in the rows below.

Léon Abbreviations

The great Léon bible known as the Codex Legionensis or Leg² (to distinguish it from Leg³, a copy made 100 years later, and Leg¹, also known as ....) has never been published online as far as I know. I was able to see a facsimile of it in the summer at the Prussian State Library in Berlin: it is brought to you in a suitcase-sized wooden box, and the volume would probably not be transportable as hold baggage without paying a supplement: it weighed over 20 kilograms.

In the end I decided against transcribing its version of the Great Stemma and preferred that in the Facundus Beatus. However the Léon bible is sometimes considered the greater treasure by scholars. I have just been looking at Téofilo Ayuso's 1960-61 article in Estudios Bíblicos which comprehensively describes it. Ayuso offers some useful instructions on how to read it, summing up its abbreviations and punctuation. Most of these features are applicable in the other documents in Visigothic script, and are worth reproducing here:

Nexos y Abreviaturas
No vale la pena insistir. Son los propios de la escritura de la época, sin rarezas.
Son normales los nexos y abreviaturas de at, bis, en, er, es, et, ex, nt, per, re, rtem, rum, se, ti, ter, tre.
Normalmente usa ȩ (e con cedilla) en los diptongos ae, oe: uitȩ, suȩ, quȩ, prȩdicasse, etc. A veces la omite: celum, etc. A veces la pone en falso rȩcedent, ȩgo, ȩnim. En alguna ocasión tiene et diptongo.
Ya hemos insinuado algunas abreviaturas por suspensión:
que: usq^s, neg^s, dixeruntq^s;
y la de bus: trib^s,quib^s, etc.
Igualmente ius, mus, pus, etc.: hui^s, sum^s, temp^s, y la de bis, con una especie de cedilla: noḅ.
En cuanto a las abreviaturas por apócope, en las mayúsculas suele ser una raya horizontal gruesa ( ¯¯ ) con adornos o doble suspensión; y en las minúsculas dos o tres puntos: cü ...dṡ ..., bien para la supresión de una letra uitulü, bien para la contracción aüm.
Para e' relativo (q^ve, q^vem), suele usar una v pequenita, volada.
A base de eso las abreviaturas suelen ser las ordinarias:

apsl	apostolus
aum	autem
dd	dauid
dns	dominus
ds	deus
epla	epistola
gla	gloria
gra	gratia
fr	frater
ihrslm	iherusalem
ihs	ihesus
kmi	karissimi
ms	meus
nmn	nomen
ns	noster
oms,	omnis
ppls	populus
qm	quoniam
ppr	propter
pprea	propterea
scdm	secundum
sps	spiritus
scs	sanctus
srl	srahel
usa	uestra
xps	christus

Signos de puntuación
Valen todas las observaciones que hicimos sobre la Biblia de Oña.
Usa con bastante regularidad los signos correspondientes al incisum o subdistinctio, media distinctio y ultima distinctio o punto final. Estos signos son ^·(punto alto); · (punto en medio de linea); y ., o de .' (punto bajo, seguido de una comita un poco mayor, ya sea al mismo nivel, ya un poco mas elevada). Como es sabido, indican, poco más o menos, lo que nuestra coma, punto y coma, dos puntos y punto final.
[A note of explanation here: this is the medieval system of punctuation as developed by Aristophanes of Byzantium which we generally ignore in transcriptions, since it does not match current notions of grammatical punctuation:
media distincto: midlevel pause (≈ comma)
subdistincto: pause (≈ semicolon)
distincto: long pause (≈ period)]
Después de ., o de .' suele seguir mayúscula. Unas veces a ren­glón seguido, otras comenzando la linea siguiente.
Usa, como dijimos, una cedilla para expresar los diptongos ae, oe,
Usa un puntito sobre 'a y levantada.
Usa corrientemente un signo de interrogación, chie consiste en una pequeña espiral o rayita quebrada, sobre et espacio que signe a la última letra.
Para indicar la división de capitulos, bien en et margen, bien en medio de linea, usa un ángulo recto, alto, dentro del cual incluye los números romanos correspondientes: I, II, etc.