É. Apor (ed.): Codex Cumanicus. Ed. by Géza Kuun with a Prolegomena to the Codex Cumanicus by Lajos Ligeti. (Budapest Oriental Reprints, Ser. B 1.)
L. Ligeti: Prolegomena to the Codex Cumanicus
PROLEGOMENA TO THE CODEX CUMANICl'S 7 binations with Coman calendars, this agreement seems to point to the year 1294. In my opinion, the value of this date is disputable, though a number of eminent Turcologists accept it. It suggests that the date of the original Codex was 1294, its first copy was made in 1303, and the existing copy dates around 1330. The «German part» much more eludes chronological dating. Györffy detected a different kind of paper with three watermarks, but only two of these can be dated more or less precisely. On the basis of the paper and the watermarks, Györffy suggested that this part of the Codex was written between 1340 and 1356. An earlier conception maintained that this part was not a copy, but rather a collection of original texts, glosses and insertions, which were added continuously in the course of a relatively long time. However, it is not difficult to prove that a part of these texts are copies of previous texts, or were written down after dictation. At any rate, the «German part» was compiled later than the Italian, which was earlier believed to have reached German Franciscan friars, accounting for the additional German glosses inserted in the Italian part. The manuscript changed hands again, ending up in Italy. This makes it clear how the Codex, now stitched, got to Venice (and not Genoa) without Petrarca's mediation. The place of origin of the Codex is not independent of the chronology of its separate parts. The first, or Italian, part is today believed to have been made in the Crimea. Kuun firmly attributed this part to a Genoan author. B rati ami (1929) shared this view. Some researchers (Rasovski, Györffy) named Solkhat as the place of origin. Miss Drüll tried to confirm the theory of the Genoan origin by eliminating all other possibilities. the Christian terminology contrasted with it is correct; correcting either of them with the Coman chronology is too risky a venture. Let. us consider one example: after the previously mentioned emendation, the curbá bará ay ( = qurban bayram ày) of the Coman column corresponds to düghia in the Persian; this name did indeed denote (Dü'1-hijja) November in 1292 or 1293. In 1294 the Coman name of November (= muharram) in Bazin's «corrected» list is sor) küz ay, «the last month of autumn». Sor) küz ay and qurban bayram ay of the Coman column refer to two different innths. Bazin attempted to eliminate the contradiction with the 16-item list, while Kowalski (op. cit., p. 25), after much hesitation, tended to regard qurbàn bayram ày as a special name for «the last month of autumn». In such circumstances, the Coman calendar of the Codex cannot be considered a firm chronological ba6e, and the data inferred from the Persian column of the Moslem calendar are at best shaky hypotheses. Monchi-zadeh's date of 1358 (p. 13), based on the legend of the Petrarca-Codex, is totally unwarranted. Relying on the corrected third edition of Mahler— Wüstenfeld, Vergleichungstabellen 3., Miss Drüll tried to modify Malov's dating by identifying the calendar of the Codex with the period of 1292 — 95, in harmony with the Muslim chronology. We have come back to the former dating; 1295 was commonly disregarded as its last two months extend over to 1296; the «emendations» can be ignored as they only affect days.
