Robert Curzon and the Levant (, 1972)

After a long and painful illness he died on 2 August 1873. 'He had been master of Parham for just over three years; he had been the heir for over half a century.' Curzon's travels and collections In terms of distance Curzon's travels in the Middle East were on a comparatively modest scale. They took him from Mount Sinai to the Meteora, from Wadi'n Natrun to Beirut, through the Aegean to Constantinople and Mount Athos, and eventually, under different circumstances, to Erzerum. As a bibliographer he examined the remains of many monastic libraries and saved from almost certain destruction a number of important manuscripts. These have now been in the British Library for over one hundred years. In terms of literary fame, he described his adventures in Visits to Monasteries in the Levant. Ruskin considered it the most delightful book of travels he ever opened. It went through three editions in its first year (1849) and the ninth edition was published in 1983. Inscriptions in two of Curzon's manuscripts in the British Library show that he was already collecting when he was at university, an unusual taste in a young man of wealthy parents. One of his earliest acquisitions was a mid-13th century Bible, in which he inscribed in Latin 'Dominie miserere animam Roberti Curzon de Parham in comitatu Sussex. 1830'. Curzon's familiarity with the Bible gave him an interest in the art, architecture and culture of the Middle East. His motive was not only sheer love of things ancient, but also the express intent of studying and illustrating 'the rise and progress of the art of writing... the ... alterations of different ages and nations, both in the materials in which they wrote and the manner in which the original drawings and heiroglyphs gradually assumed the form of perfect alphabets'. His plan for a large work on this topic is known from a letter written to Walter Sneyd in 1847. But only two parts seem ever to have been written; both were published as monographs within a decade of the second visit (1837-8). A descriptive catalogue of his collection, entitled Catalogue of Materials, was published in 1849 in an edition of fifty copies. The more popular part, an account of where the Oriental and Greek manuscripts were preserved and how they were acquired, became Visits. A third analytical part ('a treatise on writing') seems never to have been written. Robert Curzon has been described as 'perhaps the most attractive figure in the annals of book-collecting in England'. Other more learned and linguistically more gifted men travelled in the Levant not long before Curzon, notably Claudius James Rich (1786-1821), George Cecil Renouard (1780-1867), William Richard Hamilton (1786-1869), Lord Byron's friend John Cam Hobhouse (1786-1869), Alexander Kinglake (1809-1891), and Lady Hester (1776-1839) but what endeared Curzon to the Victorian reading public was his bibliomania and dedication to the advancement of biblical knowledge. In a letter to Sneyd about his efforts to persuade the monks of a monastery to part with their manuscripts he joked T offered all my money and my other coat and my old hat and my little finger for these literary wonders, but alas to no purpose ...' He even suggested to John Ponsonby, the British Ambassador, that war might be declared on the Sultan if the books were not sold to him, wishing 'Queen Victoria would send for them' and added 'it really is a shame to leave them where they are, rotting in a monastic library where no one cares about them. If I do not get them they will fall into the hands of the first Russian who cares to have them, for they do not stick at a trifle when they find anything worth having in these regions'. After Curzon's death his son Robin, 15th Baron Zouche of Haryngworth, deposited his manuscripts in the British Museum. They were given to the Museum on 13 October, 1917 by Darea Curzon (1860-1917) 16th Baroness On 9 February 1838 in a letter to Sneyd, Curzon expresses delight in having secured 'a Coptic M.S., a folio on charta Bombycina, in bad condition' which he described as being 'Gospel of St. Matthew. Modern MS. Folio. Charta bombycina. 22 inches by 16'. Curzon also recorded the circumstances of this acquisition in his Visits (Chap.6), and entered it into his Catalogue as no. 8. This manuscript never came to the British Library. The Wellcome Library acquired it in March 1935, then sold it in the spring of 1948. It was later bought by Hans P. Kraus, and in 1966 donated to the Beinecke Library. Ethiopian Manuscripts Twelve of the most precious Ethiopian manuscripts acquired after 1877 were also part of Curzon's collection. All of these had been collected through his supplier the Arabist Rev. Rudolph Theophilus Lieder (1797-1865). In one of the Ethiopian manuscripts The Beauty of Creation and Treasury of the Faith a double leaf of blue paper has been bound in which contains a letter from B.R.T. Lieder to Curzon, then in the Embassy at Constantinople (1 February 1842) concerning manuscripts (mainly Ethiopie) supplied by him from Egypt. Armenian Manuscripts A few years after the publication of the Catalogue of Armenian manuscripts (1913), the Armenian collection was enriched with ten Armenian manuscripts, nine of which Curzon described in his Catalogue. He probably collected most of these while he was at the Embassy in Constantinople, for in three of the manuscripts he has recorded 'the Ms was acquired by Lord Curzon in Pera, on August 30th, 1837'. He concludes the description of his Armenian collection of manuscripts with the following passage: 'With the exception of the library of the Patriarchate, in the great Monastery of Echmiadzin, near Mount Ararat, which I have not visited, the largest collection of Armenian manuscripts is in the Convent of St. Lazarus at Venice; but neither there, nor in the monasteries at Constantinople, Jerusalem, Erzerum, nor any of the smaller monasteries of Armenia, which I have seen, have I met with any Armenian manuscript so finely written or so splendidly illuminated as No. 4 [ Psalter, 16th century] and 8 [Bible, 1646], in the collection of Parham; nor have I met with any other on silk paper, like No.l [Lives of Saints, 14th century]'. Among the collection of letters bound with the annotated copy of Curzon's Catalogue that accompanied the collection, there are two letters in Italian describing Armenian manuscripts numbers 8,1,10/4,3,5,6,7, and 9. These descriptions Curzon requested and received from Father P. Leonde Dr Alishan (1820-1901) and Father Eduard Hyurmyuzian [Hurmuz] (1799-1876), both members of the Armenian Mekhitharist Congregation at Venice on the Island of St Lazzarus. Syriac Manuscrip ts About nine years after a similar visit by Percy Prudhoe, 6th Duke of Northumberland (1792-1865), in March 1838 Curzon visited the monastery of Deir Sudani (the Monastery of the Syrians, St Mary Deipara), an account of which he gives in Visits (chap. 7-8) and in a letter to Sneyd in which he says T brought from thence some old Syriac volumes, bigger, older, and more grim than any thing concievable in these days ... As for the Syriac MSS., I have no notion what they are about,... the big one is as fine a specimen of a stately old rebuilding the family house at Parham, Sussex, in 1871. Ethiopian Miracles of Our Lord Jesus Christ, 18th century. The fish stolen from a fisherman of Tiberias by his companions. Or8824f.29b Zouche of Haryngworth, Robert Curzon's daughter. On the 10th of October, 1917 Mr. D. Barnett, Keeper of the Department of Oriental Books and Manuscripts entered into the British Museum's Donation Reports the following record: 'Mr. Barnett has the honour to report to the Trustees that the Zouche manuscripts ... include a large number of oriental manuscripts [128 MSS] which from a preliminary inspection appear to be as follows: Arabic 16; Armenian 10; Chinese 2; Coptic & Coptic Arabic 42; Ethiopie 10; Georgian 2; Hindi 1; Hindustani 1; Persian 6; Sanskrit 1; Syriac 6 [4 only]; Turkish 6. These manuscripts are mainly, but by no means exclusively, works on the teachings and rituals of the Eastern Churches, and several of them are remarkable for their antiquity or beauty. The collection is altogether one of great value and interest, and fully deserves a special acknowledgment on the part of the Trustees, which Mr. Barnett accordingly begs to suggest'. The bequest also included eighty-nine Greek manuscripts of great interest and importance from the point of view of palaeography and content which were deposited in the Department of Western Manuscripts. Cop tic Manuscrip ts The British Library's most important single acquisition of Coptic manuscripts, comprising forty-nine volumes, came with the Curzon bequest. These manuscripts are chiefly in Bohairic dialect, usually with an Arabic version, and a few in Sahidic. The manuscripts cover a number of genres: Bibles, lectionaries, Biblical catena, Liturgies, Patristics, and modern transcripts of the Coptic texts. The Sahidic manuscripts, though of considerable interest, are not ancient. But in the Bohairic domain nine manuscripts predate the year 1500 - an early date for documentation of Bohairic. Of these the venerable Exegetical Catena of the Gospels, is dated 888/89, making it virtually our earliest attestation of the standard Bohairic version of the Gospels. Robert Curzon probably collected most of these manuscripts in 1838-9, during the second of his visits to Egypt, which included his celebrated visit to the Syrian Monastery of the Wadi" 'n Natrun in 1838. Prof. Bentley Layton, in his study of the Coptic manuscripts acquired by the British Library since 1906, has been able to ascertain the exact place of acquisition of only half the Curzon manuscripts.

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