Towards a Structural Analysis of Armenian Colophons

After presenting in schematic format the structural elements that are typical of an Armenian colophon, this article seeks to perform a simple operation: verify their actual presence in three colophons that date to 1266, 1269, and 1432. These colophons were chosen as samples not only because they differ from one another in terms of date, place, context, and personality of the scribe, but also because they represent three different examples of the variegated literary genre of Armenian colophons (the colophon of the copyist-scholar, the colophon focussing on the type of book, and the colophon ‘with external influences’). The positive outcome of this study on the one hand confirms the uniformity that fundamentally unites the Armenian subscriptions, and on the other hand it highlights the adaptability of the scheme to the variability of the contents transmitted by these compositions.