This album of photographic plates is a companion volume to the descriptive
Catalogue of Coptic Manuscripts in the Pierpont Morgan Library. It presents a
visual record of the Morgan Coptic collection. The Morgan Coptic collection is
unrivaled in wealth of Coptic manuscript illumination dating to before AD 1000,
including a near monopoly on early Coptic frontispieces. desert location near
the town of al-Hamuli, where the bulk of the Library´s Coptic manuscripts were
unearthed in 1910, the body of the album presents the collection for
codicologists, art historians, and paleographers under the two categories of
Decoration and Script. comprehensive record of frontispieces, headpieces,
tailpieces (including what may be the oldest Christian illumination), a
sampling of marginal ornaments and ornamental initials, specimens of the
scripts of most literary manuscripts, and selected documentary texts and
bindings. Full concordances between call numbers, plate numbers, and catalogue
numbers are also provided (Peeters 1993)
