The manuscript of the Leiden Riddle

Abstract

In April 1970 I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to examine Leiden, Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit, Vossius Lat. 4° 106, 25v, the page containing the text of the Leiden Riddle (see pl. I), under extremely strong early morning sunlight. Strong sunlight combines the advantage of ordinary light with, to a much lesser degree, the advantages of both infra-red and ultra-violet light whilst permitting a prolonged and close scrutiny of the manuscript. In sunlight some of the applications of reagent appear as opaque white, whereas in a photograph they appear as dark stains because the opaque white does not register adequately on the negative. In these conditions I was able to distinguish in the damaged parts of the text of the Leiden Riddle between traces of ink left upon the surface and stains left by the various reagents as well as other marks in the substance of the parchment itself. The following day I made an independent examination of the manuscript under ultra-violet light. Later by way of experiment a series of very hard prints was produced from photographs taken in ordinary light. Subsequently I compared the various readings and as a result of these examinations I offer a new transcription and notes on the more difficult passages.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 41 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.