By Victoria Gray, Library Assistant
Narratives of early printing in the West inevitably focus on the publication of western texts, yet from an early date printers were experimenting with eastern languages and scripts. Syriac was the third main language of Biblical scholarship behind Hebrew and Greek, since it bore similarities to Aramaic (Jesus’ mother-tongue) and was the language of some of the earliest New Testament manuscripts, making it invaluable for Biblical criticism. It is still the main liturgical language in several eastern denominations.
Adapting the western printing press for Syriac was no mean feat: like Hebrew, Syriac is a pointed language, using diacritics to represent most vowels. It also has three distinct scripts (eastern, western, and estrangela), all of them cursive, making it difficult to adapt for moveable type where each letter was printed individually. Two recently catalogued items in Lambeth Palace Library can offer us a small insight into the challenges of printing in Syriac.
FIG. 1: This forme, used to print the title page of the New Testament in Scots, shows how each letter was printed from a separate piece of type. This suited the Latin alphabet well, but type-makers and printers faced several challenges adapting this method for Syriac. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letterpress_printing#/media/File:New_Testament_in_chase.jpg (Creative Commons).
17th Century: Sion A21.3W/C86
Sion College Library A21.3W/C86 is T.S. Bayer’s copy of Christoph Crinesius’ Meturgemānā sūryāyā, commonly known by its Latin title Lexicon Syriacum.[1] It was published in 1612, in a period of significant intellectual and religious change when scholars paid increasing attention to Semitic languages, and Biblical hermeneutics collided with the burgeoning genre of lexical reference works like dictionaries, grammars, and concordances. It has recently been catalogued as part of the ongoing Sion College cataloguing project.
FIG. 2: Title page of Crinesius’ Lexicon Syriacum (1612). Sion A21.3W/C86
The Lexicon Syriacum was published and printed by Johann Gormann (d. 1628), Crinesius’ main printer in Wittenberg. Although it was not his specialty, Gormann already had some experience printing with Semitic alphabets, having published seven books in Hebrew.[2] Gormann would also have gained experience with Hebrew printing under the highly-experienced Johann Krafft, whose foreman he had probably been from 1605 until he established his own workshop.[3] Northern European workshops rarely employed Jewish staff to assist with books in Semitic scripts, but Gormann and those under him had at least a basic understanding of the languages they were using. As in most western books, each folded gathering in the Lexicon is signed with a Latin letter to help the binder assemble them in the correct order, but the compositor has also included the equivalent letter in Hebrew starting at Sig. A, and in Syriac when the alphabet restarts with Sig. Aa (FIG.3). Signatures were not printed for the readers’ benefit, but to aid collation. Gormann’s whimsical use of these alphabets therefore reveals his staff’s confidence working with them.
FIG. 3. Sig. B1r, signed with the Hebrew bet (ב), and Sig. Bb1r, with bet in Syriac serto script (ܒ). Sion A21.3W/C86
Nevertheless, this combination of alphabets in signatures created one immediate problem: the Latin alphabet has twenty-four letters, while Hebrew and Syriac have twenty-two. How could they be paired up neatly? The compositor’s solution is not particularly tidy, with Hebrew and Syriac letters being duplicated towards the end of the Latin alphabet. S and T are both accompanied by qof (ק). V and X are both represented by the Hebrew shin. (However, in this case, shin is distinguished by its diacritics, with V being accompanied by שׂ, and X by שׁ.) Although they use different scripts, Hebrew and Syriac have the same alphabet, but the Syriac letters have not been paired up with the same Latin letters as their Hebrew equivalents. The compositor also manages to skip the Hebrew letter nun (נ) entirely, knocking subsequent letters out of sequence (Sig. O1r). That this was a plausible mistake suggests that the compositor was not working from a table that told them which letters to pair with which, but possessed their own understanding of alphabetical order in Hebrew and Syriac.
Their linguistic sensitivity is also shown through their use of catchwords. In the hand-press era, catchwords were printed at the bottom of a page and matched the first word at the top of the next page, to help binders check that the pages had been gathered up in the correct order. In the Lexicon Syriacum, the compositor clearly knew that Hebrew and Syriac are read from from right to left and chose the correct catchwords accordingly (FIG. 4).
FIG. 4 – The Hebrew catchword on p.106 correctly identifies the first four characters on p.107, reading from right to left (זאטמ). Sion A21.3W/C86
Gormann’s compositors mostly knew what they were doing, but Syriac’s cursivity also placed demands on type-designers and founders. Latin humanist type was inspired by the detached letter forms found in classical inscriptions rather than manuscripts, while western type designers knew Syriac principally from cursive manuscript material. This meant that Syriac type needed more than just detached letter forms: it needed to account for how letters connected, and how they might be written differently depending on where they are positioned in the word.[4] Sig. Ii (“ ܛ ܛ “) demonstrates the difference between the letter tet in its initial and final positions (FIG. 5).
FIG. 5 – The same letter required different pieces of type, depending on where the letter was positioned in the word. Sion A31.3W/C86, Sig. Ii1r.
Another conundrum would have been the use of points. Like Hebrew, Syriac uses diacritics to represent vowels and some consonant sounds. Every letter needed to be able to accommodate a point above or below it. Scholarly debate about the antiquity and usefulness of points was at its peak in the early seventeenth century, hinging upon whether they were a post-Christian development and therefore irrelevant for studying Old Testament Hebrew.[5] How Gormann and his contemporaries approached points was therefore a legitimate scholarly concern, not just a question of ease for the printer. One solution was to set the points on separate lines above and below the letters. This meant fewer pieces of type overall, but it did make it harder to set and justify the text. Gormann appears to have compromised: some diacritics were inserted separately, while some come from special pieces of type that could overlap with those around them (FIG. 6).
FIG. 6. An example of points, some set on separate lines, and some overlapping with ascenders (presumably kerned). Sion A21.3W/C86, p. 344.
19th Century: G3200.A8Q7 1889 [P]
This kind of experimentation and compromise in Syriac printing continued at least up until the late nineteenth century. Our second example, recently catalogued from among the papers of the Archbishop’s Mission to the Assyrian Christians, is G3200.A8Q7 1889 [P], a liturgical calendar printed in Syriac in 1889. The purpose of the Mission was to revitalise the Assyrian Church of the East in eastern Turkey and north-western Persia (modern-day Iran). A manuscript annotation on the calendar in English states that it was “printed with our Press (not our Type) at Urmi [i.e. Urmia]. 4 Aug 1889” (FIG. 7).
FIG. 7. Liturgical calendar printed in Syriac. G3200.A8Q7 1889 [P]
This small statement sheds light on the difficulties faced by the missionaries in Urmia as they sought to print Bibles and liturgical books in Syriac for the use of the Assyrian Church of the East. A Stanhope printing press had been shipped to the mission-house in Urmia back in 1884, but it was sent with a set of type in western Syriac characters rather than the eastern Syriac type that was more generally favoured by the East Syrian Christians.[6] The Mission Committee’s solution was to import typefounding equipment from England and manufacture the type in situ. The equipment was sent over in 1889, and the press was not fully up and running for more than a year after that.[7] The note on the calendar implies that the printers borrowed type from elsewhere in the meantime, though it is unclear exactly where it came from.
These two examples only skim the surface of the range of Syriac works in Lambeth Palace Library, which range from thirteenth-century manuscripts to modern editions of the Syriac Bible. Western efforts to understand this language and adapt it for print offer a small insight into the ongoing (if imperfect) dialogue between western and eastern Churches.
[1] Christoph Crinesius, Meturgemānā Sūryāyā, Hoc Est, Lexicon Syriacum, e Novo Testamento et Rituali Severi, Patriarchae Quondam Alexandrini, Syro Collectum, Tribus Linguis Cardinalibus Expositum, Atque in Illustri Wittebergensium Academia Tredecim Disputationibus Propositum (VVitebergae: impensis & typis Gormannianis, 1612).
[2] Stephen G. Burnett, Christian Hebraicism in the Reformation Era (1500-1660): Authors, Books, and the Transmission of Jewish Learning (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 298-300 <https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004222496> [accessed 29/10/2023]
[3] Christoph Reske, Die Buchdrucker Des 16. Und 17. Jahrhunderts Im Deutschen Sprachgebiet: Auf Der Grundlage Des Gleichnamigen Werkes von Josef Benzing (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2007), p. 1007.
[4] J.F. Coakley, The Typography of Syriac: A Historical Catalogue of Printing Types, 1537-1958 (London: Oak Knoll Press; British Library, 2006).
[5] Aaron D. Rubin, ‘Christian Hebraicists: Pre-Modern Period’, In The Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics, edited by Geoffrey Khan (Leiden: Brill, 2013).
[6] J. F. Coakley, The Church of the East and the Church of England: a History of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Assyrian Mission (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 19, 80.
[7] Ibid, pp. 140, 142.
A Monument of Fame 