Psalterium Sinaiticum


The Psalterium Sinaiticum is a 209-folio Glagolitic Old Church Slavonic canon manuscript, the earliest Slavic psalter, dated to the 11th century. The manuscript was found in Saint Catherine's Monastery in Egypt, after which it was named and where it remains to this day.

Discovery

The major part of the psalter was discovered in 1850 by the Russian archimandrite Porphyrius Uspensky, and additional 32 folios with the exact continuation turned up in 1968.

Editions

It was published by L. Geitler, S.N. Severjanov and by Moshe Altbauer in 1971, in a facsimile reproduction. The manuscript is also extensively discussed with facsimile reproductions in Ioannis C. Tarnanidis: The Slavonic Manuscripts Discovered in 1975 at. St. Catherine's Monastery on Mount Sinai.

Linguistic analysis

Paleographic and linguistic analysis shows that the writing of some letters is very inconsistent. Therefore, it is assumed that several scribes worked on the manuscript. Especially inconsistent is the writing of yers and nasal vowels, and very obvious is the tendency of the vocalization of jers and the omission of epenthetic l.