Complete Extant Works of Hero of Alexandria, Vol. 2

XIX

INTRODUCTION.

the collation of the Hagia Sophia codex, Salih Zéky Bey, Director of the Observatory at Pera, stepped in for him, for which we are very indebted to this gentleman. Regarding the Cairo manuscript, the administration of the Royal Library in Berlin very liberally and gratefully had a copy made, now Berlin Ms. Orient. qu. 840, which I was able to use alongside the Leiden manuscript at the Bonn University Library.

The value of each of the four mentioned manuscripts used for the present edition is quite similar. Not a single one is completely intact; all have larger or smaller omissions, which, however, can fortunately almost all be supplemented by one or more of the other manuscripts, so that a complete text could indeed be obtained. Furthermore, B is incomplete at the beginning and only starts with I, 4 p. 11 of this volume. The text of K has suffered the most from omissions, but these are not noted everywhere, as only the aforementioned copy of it was at my disposal, and I could not decide whether the gaps were the fault of the scribe of the present Berlin copy or the Codex Cairensis itself. The four manuscripts seem to go back to a common original, as I believe I can conclude from the frequent similarity of corruptions, for example in Chapter 15 of the first book, and to be independent of each other, which may be why it happens that in many places only one codex has the correct reading while the others are all miswritten or show a gap.

From the collations of B and C kindly provided to me by Baron de Vaux, as well as from my own of L and K, I have attempted to compile a readable text, but despite the rather rich material, I was often enough dependent on conjectures, to justify which I would only refer to the textual critical notes and my translation.