volume 2 - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian History Workshop

370 Syriac Manuscript from the Nitrian Desert.
two large wooden figures from the screen of anotherj
and a censer, bells and other objects which were used
during the administration of the Sacrament. The Coptic
collection in the British Museum is now the largest and
finest in Europe, and it overfills a room at the east end
of the Second Northern Gallery.
Those who have read Wright's preface to his Catalogue
of the Syriac MSS. in the British Museum, London,
1872, will remember the story of how the monks of
St. Macarius and the other monasteries in the Nitrian
Desert tricked Tattam and Pacho, and thus managed
to keep possession of several of the MSS. which they
had sold to these collectors. In 1906 I had the good
fortune to search out and acquire a volume which had
formed part of the library of the famous monastery
of St. Mary Deipara, which stood in the Nitrian Desert
to the west of Cairo. Wright told me in 1888 that he
had heard that four fine volumes from the monasteries
in the Nitrian Desert had been seen recently in Egypt,
and he begged me to make inquiries and to try to get
them. According to rumour one volume was large
and contained the Greek version of the Bible—in short,
a second " Codex Alexandrinus " ; another volume, also
large, contained commentaries on the Old Testament, also
in Greek; the third volume contained the Old Testament
in the Peshitta Version, and the fourth a series
of miscellaneous works in Syriac. For several years
I inquired about these manuscripts everywhere, but
no one seemed ever to have heard of them. In 1905
I met in one of the small towns in the Western Delta a
Coptic priest who remembered Pacho, and who gave
me the name of the man who had acted as a broker
for him with the monks of the Monasteries of Macarius,
Baramus and Bschai, when he bought manuscripts
from them for Tattam. I spent several days and nights
in trains and canal boats going to various parts of the
Delta in search of this man, and when I at length found
his village it was only to learn that he was dead. But
I saw one of his kinsmen, who took me to a friend of his
father's, who used to send manuscripts from the monks