The Georgian Manuscripts of the Cambridge University Library, described below, might properly be called Georgian manuscript fragments. They are without exception individual leaves of different codices which have come into the possession of the Library at different times and from various sources. The date of the documents varies over a wide range, from the earliest period of Georgian literary activity down to the last century, and the type of scripts employed is equally varied.

Among the innumerable fragments and scraps of manuscripts which have percolated through to Western Europe from the renowned Rümpelkammer at Cairo, there have been found not a few palimpsest leaves bearing the marks of other milieus and having traced upon them characters in tongues other than Hebrew. Chance brought the writer on the trail of one such vagrant parchment during a visit to Oxford in the summer of 1921; an investigation of the hand-list of Georgian MSS. at the Bodleian Library showed that this institution possessed a “fragment of Jeremiah in capitals.” As soon as I glanced at it, I realized that a perplexing puzzle had been solved. In 1902 Professor P. K. Kokovtsov of the University of St. Petersburg published a facsimile and collation of the Hebrew text on a Hebrew-Georgian parchment palimpsest leaf, a photograph of which had been sent anonymously to Professor N. Ya. Marr. The Hebrew text proved to be a portion of the Jerusalem Talmud; from the photograph it was difficult to tell which was the original writing. The late Sir A. E. Cowley kindly informed me that the fragment had been acquired in 1894 along with several others from Rabbi S. Wertheimer in Jerusalem, and that its provenance from the Genizah collection was almost certain. Professor F. C. Conybeare had already identified the Georgian text as a fragment of Jeremiah, and presumably had at the same time sent the photograph to Professor Marr, the covering letter probably having been lost.

In a joint article on the Koridethi Gospels, published by K. Lake and the writer some years since, attention was called to the eclectic character of the Greek alphabet employed in the Koridethi codex, and emphasis laid on the mechanical and unnatural ductus of the writing. I there advanced the hypothesis that these peculiarities, when taken in connection with certain others, tended to show that the scribe was not a Hellene by birth, but probably a foreigner, and that the presence of a Coptic word in one of the adscriptions would show that the MS. was written in an area not too far removed from Egypt. Sinai was suggested as the possible place of origin. My arguments were attacked by J. de Zwaan and, although on certain fundamental points I felt obliged to differ with his interpretation, I could at the time adduce no further data in support of my contentions.