Ce que révèle la page de l’Exode
The Armenian translation of the Bible had circulated in manuscripts for centuries. What changed in Amsterdam was the availability of both Testaments in a complete printed Armenian edition. Voskan of Yerevan directed the project. Its title page gives 1666, while printing continued until 1668. A catalogue date and a historian’s date range can therefore describe the same book.
The surviving manuscript behind the edition was copied in 1295 for King Hetum II of Cilician Armenia. It is now kept in the Matenadaran. A medieval scribe prepared that copy for a royal patron. Voskan’s editorial decisions, by contrast, would be repeated in thousands of impressions. He drew on the Latin Vulgate for passages including the Prayer of Manasseh. Comparing the printed text with a manuscript therefore means comparing distinct editorial histories.
The Museum of Printing dates production from 11 March 1666 to 13 October 1668. There are 1,462 pages set in two columns. The short measure of each line helps the eye find the beginning of the next, while headings and images have to fit the same page architecture. The museum records 159 illustrations and estimates a print run of 3,000–5,000 copies. That estimate concerns production; the number surviving is a different question.
In the Library of Congress copy, two woodcuts introduce Exodus. One shows the infant Moses being set on the river by his mother. The other depicts the burning bush. Both are attributed to Christoffel van Sichem. The page brings two kinds of work into view: the Armenian editor’s establishment of the text and a European printmaker’s sequence of images.
Financial support from Armenian merchants, notably from Julfa, linked an Amsterdam workshop to a readership scattered across borders. The gallery shows the Exodus page at two scales. The whole page reveals the arrangement of type; the detail shows how a woodcutter used lines to distinguish water from flame.