A massive challenge of the project has been to ascertain how the drastically different manuscripts of Kalīla wa-Dimna extant from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century hang together, and what can be uncovered about the silent agents of that textual change. These questions are approached from two angles.
The first angle consists in assessing how the manuscripts relate to each other. Here a majority of the manuscripts have turned out to form continua, meaning that short near-verbatim passages of text recur through the manuscripts of one group (or continuum), alternating with passages of rewriting. This has made it possible, for instance, to assign approximate dates to manuscripts that are not explicitly dated, by locating their textual structure and content between other dated versions. Conversely, the passages that “continue” across the manuscripts of one such group can be contrasted in a second step with changing passages that were added, rewritten, or cut in individual manuscripts of a continuum.
Such individual intervention constitutes the second angle of approach, namely, manuscript redaction. At times, redaction can be shown to be substantial. A continuum thus establishes a trajectory against which the departure of single versions can be measured. With regard to rewriting, a “trigger” seems to be the reading of the text ungoverned by any sort of scholarly transmission, aided by the indeterminacy of the Arabic script, and compounded by the fact that copyists’ (re)interpretations were not bound by the givens of classical Arabic grammar. Reinterpretations of the consonantal frame (rasm) led in certain cases to the addition of new passages, when copyist-redactors’ creative rereading evinced ideas substantially different from what was contained in any Vorlage, and they needed to embed the new or altered passages into that context. Nonetheless, such intervention is still incremental.
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Another phenomenon that we analyze is the combination of several Vorlagen by one copyist- redactor. By comparing these “cross-copied” versions with the manuscripts from which they take their parts, a spectrum of compilation techniques can be observed, from large blocks combined from different Vorlagen to an iterative and serial combination of very small pieces at every step of the action. Manuscripts exhibit this phenomenon from an early date (around the fourteenth century). But other manuscripts then reuse these cross-copied Vorlagen and recombine them with others—a practice which may be described as “cross-copying in the second degree.” This compositional intervention proves that the copyist-redactors 1) were aware of the textual proliferation; 2) felt entitled to contribute to it; and 3) pursued goals of their own, be it comprehensiveness or a focus on the plot. Most of them did not sign their names in the colophons.
Beyond the manuscripts’ relationships within a continuum, verbatim copies occur, though they are small in number. These aid in solving textual puzzles in their Vorlagen. It is remarkable that cross-copied versions of Kalīla wa-Dimna received a disproportionally large number of verbatim copies, as if those “optimized” texts were especially popular
