Kiraz, George A.Schmidtke, Sabine2026-09-112026-09-112026George A. Kiraz and Sabine Schmidtke (eds.), Multilingual Manuscripts in Middle Eastern Manuscript Traditions, Thematic Issue in Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies Bulletin 12/2 (2026), pp. 223–307, https://www.aai.uni-hamburg.de/en/comst/publications/bulletin/bulletin12-2.htmlhttps://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12111/10932George A. Kiraz and Sabine Schmidtke (eds.), Multilingual Manuscripts in Middle Eastern Manuscript Traditions, Thematic Issue in Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies Bulletin 12/2 (2026), pp. 223–307, https://www.aai.uni-hamburg.de/en/comst/publications/bulletin/bulletin12-2.htmlThat the ancient and medieval Middle East was a plurilingual space is, on reflection, unsurprising. Sarah Thomason’s observation that “the idea that monolingualism is the human norm is a myth” should require no special defending. Yet the manuscript record, and the scholarship built upon it, has too often been organized as though each tradition—Sumerian, Akkadian, Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, Persian, Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopic, to name a few—unfolded in isolation, touching its neighbors only at moments of translation, conquest, or crisis. In such accounts, multilingualism becomes the exception that a text must be made to justify, while monolingualism is quietly treated as the default that requires no comment at all. The three papers gathered here, first delivered at the workshop “Multilingual Manuscripts in Middle Eastern Manuscript Traditions” (MeMaT), held at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, in 2023, argue—each from a different corpus, a different millennium, a different linguistic family—for the opposite default. They suggest that plurilingualism, not monolingualism, was the ordinary condition of Middle Eastern scribal culture, and that a text’s monolingual surface is more often an artifact of genre, of scribal choice, or of modern editorial habit than a faithful report of the linguistic world that produced it. Sören Krömer and Szilvia Sövegjártó open the issue in Neo-Assyrian Assur, examining the bilingual lexical composition igi-du8-a = tāmartu. By the first millennium BCE, Sumerian had been all but a dead language for centuries; no scribe compiling this list could have needed it for daily speech. Yet, the Sumerian–Akkadian bilingual format persisted as a curricular and identity-bearing convention, training scribes to “access, navigate, and interpret inherited lexical knowledge” rather than to speak a living tongue. Multilingualism here survives the disappearance of one of its two languages as speech, continuing to structure pedagogy and prestige long after the practical rationale for bilingualism had vanished. Ali B. Langroudi moves the story forward some two thousand years, to fourteenth-century Tabriz and to a translator who copied his own Gospel translation from Syriac into Arabic and Persian in parallel columns—annotated here and there in Latin by a European user, and inflected throughout with Turkic and Mongolian vocabulary. Plurilingualism here is actively negotiated: Arabic carries “inherited scholarly authority,” Persian is adapted for “local, non-specialist” readers, and the translator visibly code-switches between the two, apparently working from his own earlier bilingual draft rather than from the Syriac Vorlage alone. The manuscript stages the layered, hierarchical multilingualism of the wider Ilkhanid Turco-Mongol world. Georg Leube closes the issue by turning to fifteenth-century Armenian texts composed within the Qaraquyunlu and Aqquyunlu ‘Turkmen’ realms. Leube shows how a historiographical paradigm inherited from Hübschmann has obscured a supralinguistic administrative vocabulary shared across Armenian and Persophone chancery culture, the ad hoc creativity of individual authors negotiating two or more registers at once, and, in the poetry of the Armenian bishop and poet Mkrtičʻ Nałaš, a deliberate self-positioning within a Persophone mundus significans. Leube ends by questioning whether “code-switching,” a term drawn from the study of oral speech, is even the right tool for describing what written plurilingualism does; script, he suggests, following von Falkenhausen, may matter more than language to how these texts constructed identity. None of these three papers shares a period, region, or language family with the others—Sumero-Akkadian Assyria, Syro-Arabo-Persian Ilkhanid Iran, and Armeno-Islamicate Anatolia are not an obviously natural set. That is the point. The recurrence, across such different settings, of scribes and translators moving easily between two, three, or four linguistic registers—sometimes within a single line—suggests three local instances of a single, underlying condition of Middle Eastern manuscript culture, not three unrelated anomalies. The Aramaic-Arabic interface of pre-Abbasid Syria and Mesopotamia offers a fourth data point from the rich poetry in Maqāmāt al-Hamadhānī, when one Abū al-Fatḥ al-Iskandarī declares, “In the evening, I am a Nabīṭ [i.e., Aramaic speaker]… in the morning, I am an Arab.” The same plurilingual reflex runs through Assur’s classrooms, Tabriz’s scriptorium, and the Armenian sees of Turkmen Anatolia. If monolingualism is the myth, the manuscript—not the language—is the more honest unit of study: a page mixing Sumerian and Akkadian, or Arabic and Persian, or Armenian and Persianate vocabulary, is a faithful record of how its scribe thought and wrote. It is this record that the following three papers, each in its own idiom, ask us to take seriously.en-USMultilingual ManuscriptsMiddle Eastern Manuscript TraditionsJournal issue0000-0002-6181-5065