‘The hand that once wrote…’: The Journey of a Colophon Formula from Greek into Armenian

‘The hand that once wrote rots in a grave, but the writing remains until the end of time’: this famous epigram or one of its variations adorns many Greek colophons. Verses revolving around the same idea also occur in colophons from the Coptic, Arabic, Persian, Syriac, Armenian, and Georgian traditions. Whilst the Greek material has already been studied rather intensively, the Armenian version of this pattern still awaits proper investigation. Tracing the various guises under which it appears yields about 250 occurrences across the whole timespan of Armenian manuscript copying—a larger number than has been recorded in Greek. This paper aims to provide a first appraisal of the Armenian material and to give some clues as to how and under what circumstances the formula was adopted and adapted by Armenian copyists. Eventually, it will be seen how this phenomenon is relevant for the study of Byzantine-Armenian intellectual and material contacts