The present volume is the second catalogue containing the detailed description of Persian manuscripts preserved in the Near Eastern collection of the Royal Danish Library (Det Kongelige Bibliotek). The first volume was also compiled by Irmeli Perho and it contained the description of several subsections of the holdings: manuscripts and lithographs purchased by Arthur Christensen (1875–1945) during his first field trip to Iran in 1914, manuscripts purchased in 1832 from the collection of David Simonsen (1853–1932) and additional manuscripts and lithographs that were acquired from various sources from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. A detailed in-depth review of the first volume was published by Jan Just Witkam in Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies Bulletin (3, no. 1 (2017): 65–9).
The second volume of the Persian catalogue that is the volume under review here, gives the description of two further sub-collections and a single manuscript (altogether 157 items) and in a way it might be partly considered a reply to Witkam, who missed a modern description of those manuscripts in the first volume that were included in the 1857 catalogue, written by August Ferdinand Mehren (1822–1907) in Latin (A. F. Mehren, Codices Persici Turcici Hindustanici variique alii Bibliothecæ Regiæ Hafniensis, Hafniæ, 1857). Besides manuscripts with the shelfmark Cod. Pers., the volume includes the description of the manuscripts donated by Johan Stockfleth Eyser (1879–1947) originally to the University Library in 1912 and a manuscript purchased in 1956. A review of the present volume has already been published by Elham Etemadi (Persian Literary Studies Journal 6, no. 9 (2017): 81–6). His critical remarks will not be repeated here.
The second volume of the catalogue, titled Catalogue of Persian Manuscripts: Codices Persici, Codicis Eyseriani, Codex Persicus Add., starts with a very short introduction containing the most essential information on the collections, followed by a detailed description of individual manuscripts. The template used for the descriptions is the same the author used previously and, as Witkam pointed out (pp. 65–6), a serious flaw of this template is that it does not include headings indicating the places where manuscripts were copied. This important piece of information is thus relegated to the rubric “Notes,” where it appears in almost every case if the place of copying is given in the scribe’s colophon. It’s quite surprising, however, that in some cases Perho gives only an expurgated version of the geographical location mentioned by the scribe.
Cod. Pers. 99, for example, is an Indian copy of Niẓāmī’s Iskandar-nāma (p. 427). Perho gives the place of copying as Bihar, which is only partly true as the manuscript was copied in Patna, a city situated in the province of Bihar. It seems that Perho could only decipher the geographical name Bihar in the colophon and as the place name Patna ( پتنه ) was unfamiliar to him he read بینه instead. He was also unable to interpret the names of two Mughal administrative units, ṣuba ( صوبه ) “province” and sarkār ( سرکار ) a division of a ṣuba. The very same colophon contains a further misinterpretation. The scribe gave the name of the governor of the province as well, which was read by Perho as Buzurg Amīr Ḫān. With the date of copying and the locality given it would have been quite easy to identify the governor’s real name as Buzurg Umīd Ḫān (for his life see Nawwāb Samsām-ud-daula, Shāh Nawāz Khān and Abdul Hayy, The Maāthir-ul-umarā, trans. by Henry Beveridge, New Delhi: Low Price Publications, 1999, 428–9). Generally speaking it can be stated that the author, who is quite apparently not an expert on historical issues pertaining to Mughal India, faced serious challenges when he tried to make sense of the often hardly legible colophons scribbled by Indian scribes. Perhaps with the help of a scholar well versed in Indian Persian codicology these mistakes could have been avoided and an expert’s involvement in the project might have also facilitated the decipherment of scribes’ names and place names deemed illegible by the author.
A further serious defect of the template that should be mentioned here is that it does not contain a separate rubric for scribes’ colophons and thus these texts, often carrying essential information, do not appear in print systematically in each case even if they are available in the manuscript. The publication of these short texts might have helped to avoid several bothersome mistakes.
The name of the scribe who copied Cod. Pers. 8, for example, appears in the template as “Ebn Ḥorūf ʿAbd al-Nabī vāled-e Eskandar” (p. 28). A quick glance at the text of the colophon is enough to see that the first word can be read as īn “this” and together with the second word it is part of the noun phrase kātib-i īn ḥurūf “scribe of these letters” (p. 31).
The template of Cod. Eyser III:10 claims that the scribe’s name is not mentioned in the manuscript (p. 655). The colophon, however, says that it was copied by “the poor Fażlī who is [also] known as Lauḥī, the wretch” (p. 658).
The present reviewer thinks that Witkam’s critical remarks regarding the serious shortcomings of the previous catalogue are applicable to the volume under review as well. In certain cases an annoying carelessness can be observed in the way the author gives the dates of copying. Though wherever the scribe’s colophon makes it possible Perho provides the reader with an exact date of copying including the day, the month and the year, in some cases parts of the information given in the colophon simply do not appear on the template. According to the colophon, Cod. Pers. 13 (p. 53) was copied on a Tuesday (yaum al-sulāsaʾ) in the month Ẕū al-qaʿda but the template contains only the name of the month (p. 50). A very similar omission happens in the case of Cod. Pers. 56. The date of copying for text A is given in the template as Šavvāl [1112 H] (p. 232) in spite of the fact that the colophon contains the day as well (“šānzdahum-i Šavvāl”; p. 235). The date for text B is also given simply as Šavvāl (p. 232), though the colophon explicitly says “dar māh-i Šavvāl bi-tārīḫ-i bīst u duyyum.” The template of Cod. Pers. 123 explicitly states that the date of copying is not given in the manuscript (p. 518). The colophon, however, mentions a partial date: “rūz-i jumʿa bi-vaqt-i namāz-i maġrīb” (p. 520).
The interpretation of partially written years also seems to cause problems. According to Adam Gacek’s seminal compendium on Arabic codicology “from the 17th century onwards dates are sometime shortened to two or three digits, e.g. 36 or 99 = 1036 or 1099; likewise, 157 = 1157 and 212 = 1212” (Adam Gacek, Arabic Manuscripts: A Vademecum for Readers, Leiden: Brill, 2009, p. 87). In the description of Cod. Pers. 122 Irmeli Perho applies this principle (91 = 1091; pp. 512, 513). Nevertheless, Perho interprets the digit 10 in the colophon of Cod. Pers. 114 in the following way without supplying the reader with an explanation: “The year given in the colophon presumably refers to the tenth year of the reign of a Moġūl ruler, but the name of the ruler is not given.”
Although it is quite natural that in the case of works such as catalogues that abound in data, printing errors and typos occasionally occur, the number of such mistakes in the present book makes the reviewer agree with Witkam who, seeing the abundance of mistakes in the previous volume, wrote that “it should never pass the editorial phase in this shape let alone printed” (Witkam’s review, p. 68).
A scrupulous editor would have spotted all the missing letters or the inconsistencies in writing the name of the month Ẕū al-ḥijja that sometimes occurs as Ẕū heğğeh (p. 216) and sometimes as Ẕū al-ḥeğğeh (p. 400).
It should be stressed, though, that despite its many shortcomings and its unreliability, as far as the texts of colophons are concerned, the catalogue is a useful work because through the detailed descriptions of the manuscripts’ physical appearance and the unusually large number of photographs included in the volume, Irmeli Perho successfully makes a lesser known but valuable collection more accessible to scholars interested in Persian codicology and manuscript studies.
