Memory of the World: The treasures that record our history from 1700 BC to the present day. UNESCO
the Naxi people, the only system of pictograms still in use today.
Mashtots Matenadaran ancient manuscripts collection
Inscribed 1997
What is it
A collection of around 17,000 manuscripts from every sphere of ancient and medieval science and culture in Armenia.
Why was it inscribed
The Matenadaran collection is one of the foremost and most important sets of ancient and medieval manuscripts in the world. The collection covers a broad subject range.
Where is it
Mashtots Institute of Ancient Manuscripts, Yerevan, Armenia
The Matenadaran (which in Armenian means ‘manuscript repository’) holds a collection of priceless medieval manuscripts that are rare in themselves and are exceptional in the scope of their subject matter. The collection covers religion, history, geography, philosophy, grammar, law, medicine, mathematics and literature, as well as manuscripts in Arabic, Persian, Greek, Syriac, Latin, Ethiopian, Indian and Japanese.
The Matenadaran was founded at Etchmiadzin at the start of the 4th century AD by the first catholicos (the supreme patriarch) of the Armenian Orthodox Church. It was a centre for the preservation of Greek and Syriac manuscripts and, from the 5th century onwards, the main translation centre in Armenia.
Its position in the Caucasus left Armenia vulnerable to invasion and the country suffered repeatedly. By the start of the 18th century, what had been a rich manuscript collection was reduced to a small percentage of its previous size. Greater stability came when Eastern Armenia was incorporated into Russia in the early 19th century and the collection began to grow again. In 1939 the Matenadaran was transferred to Yerevan where research work is still a major activity today. The treasures of Armenian culture, spread around the world, are still being actively sought and donated to the immense collection.
The oldest relics of Armenian literature date back to the 5th and 6th centuries. Only fragments from this period have survived, often as flyleaves to the bindings of manuscripts. Medieval bookbinders often sewed in leaves of parchment of older or no-longer-used manuscripts between the cover and the first page of a book to protect the writing from coming into contact with the binding. Thanks to this practice, specimens of those earlier works have been preserved. Other pages have been found in caves, in ruins or buried in the ground.
The collection contains the work of the church fathers and other Armenian translations from Greek or Syriac of the 5th century AD, the originals of which have disappeared. These include Six Hundred Questions and Answers about the Book of Genesis by Philo of Alexandria; a body of works of spiritual revelation by Hermes Trismegistos; writings by Basil of Caesarea; and the Chronicon by Eusebius of Caesarea, a vital source for the history of the first three centuries of Christianity.
The oldest binding and miniatures in the Matenadaran date back to the 6th century. The oldest complete manuscript is the Lazarian Gospel, written in AD 887 on parchment, while the oldest extant Armenian paper manuscript is a collection of scientific, historical and philosophical work dating back to AD 981.
St Mesrop Mashtots, after whom the institute and its collection are named, devised the Armenian alphabet in AD 405.
Saiva manuscripts in Pondicherry
Inscribed 2005
What is it
This collection of 11,000 palm-leaf and paper manuscripts in Sanskrit, Tamil and Manipravalam focuses mainly on the religion and worship of the Hindu god Siva in southern India.
Why were they inscribed
It includes the largest collection in the world of manuscripts of texts of the Saiva Siddhanta, a religious tradition whose primary deity is the god Siva, which spread across the Indian subcontinent and beyond, as far as Cambodia, but which, from the 12th century, became restricted to southern India.
Where are they
French Institute of Pondicherry and the École française d’Extrême-Orient, Pondicherry, India
The Sanskrit scriptures of the Saiva Siddhanta were widely spread over the whole of the Indian subcontinent ten centuries ago. The influence of the Saiva Siddhanta can be found in Cambodia and Java and in the ritual traditions of all the Tantric and subsequent theistic traditions in India. After a period of wide-reaching influence, this religious tradition fell into abeyance everywhere but in Tamil-speaking southern India: there is no evidence of adherents of the Saiva Siddhanta outside that area after the 12th century. Surviving post-12th-century ritual treatises, commentaries and other religious literature of the school all appear to have been written in the Tamil-speaking area.
Two large collections of palm-leaf and paper manuscripts of Sanskrit, Tamil and Manipravalam texts are preserved in French research institutions in the south Indian town of Pondicherry. The 1662 palm-leaf bundles at the Pondicherry Centre of the École française d’Extrême-Orient belong to a single collection from the Tirunelveli district in the south of India. More than a third of this material (about 650 bundles) relates to the cult of the Hindu god Visnu and at least sixty of these Vaisnava manuscripts transmit texts that have never been published. The major collection, however, is that of the French Institute of Pondicherry, which includes 8187 palm-leaf bundles and 360 paper codices. The manuscripts have been collected from every area of the Tamil-speaking south of India and the collection contains texts of every branch of pre-colonial Indian learning. Nearly half of the material relates to the worship of the god Siva. The surviving texts, the majority of them unpublished, were originally written from the 6th century to the colonial period.
Although some of the texts are of very great antiquity, these South Indian manuscript copies belong for the most part to the 19th century. Palm-leaf manuscripts kept in South India can perish extremely rapidly and no surviving examples are known to be older than three centuries. As for the paper manuscripts of the collection, they have tended to be much more regularly consulted, being much easier to read, and the most used are now very fragile.
An example of a palm-leaf manuscript showing how the text is written on to palm leaves and how the bundles of leaves are joined together.
Codex Argenteus – the ‘Silver Bible’
Inscribed 2011
What is it
The Codex Argenteus – the ‘Silver Bible’ – is a remnant of a liturgical book of the four Gospels written in the Gothic language for Arian Christian Church services in the early 6th century.
Why was it inscribed
The ‘Silver Bible’ contains the most comprehensive extant text in the Gothic language and is one of the world’s best-known remaining artefacts from Gothic culture. Its historical value lies in its contribution to the spread of Christianity.
Where is it
Uppsala University Library, Uppsala, Sweden
The Codex Argenteus is a book for use in religious liturgy that contains the selected portions of the Gospels to be read during church services. The book was written in the early 6th century in northern Italy, probably in the city of Ravenna.
At that time, Ravenna was the capital of the Ostrogothic Kingdom which stretched from modern-day southern France across to Serbia and took in all of Italy. However, in AD 553 the Ostrogoths were defeated after a long and costly war by the forces of the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire which was then at almost the greatest extent of its power. As a result, Gothic language and culture largely disappeared.
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