Template talk:Arabic manuscripts

Difference between a manuscript and a text

Hi there @पाटलिपुत्र! Thanks for creating this exciting looking template. I'm glad that we have this on Wikipedia. But I think it needs some refinement: the term 'manuscript' usually refers to a physical artefact, and a lot of what you have included in this template are texts that exist in many different manuscripts (many of which will be much later than the date of composition of the text itself). I think the template should be refined to include only actual manuscripts. How does that sound?

(There are some ambiguous cases where a text survives in only one manuscript, like The Story of Joseph in Arabic Verse and L'histoire de Joseph d'après un manuscrit oriental: I recognise that in these cases the text might belong in this template.) Alarichall (talk) 14:18, 23 January 2024 (UTC)

Hi @Alarichall:. I see what you mean. I was kind of contenting myself with the ambiguity, but it probably needs clarification. A template with only manuscript codes (MS 5229 ect...) would be horribly technical and only satisfying for specialist librarians. A template with only "texts" would also be strange since most of the "text" do not exist in extenso, but only through their manuscript copies often many centuries later. Maybe a solution would be to tweak the current format simply by adding known manuscript numbers in brackets, with links in the (rare) cases when individual manuscripts have their own articles (or possibly link to the Commons category as in "Arabe 3929"). For example:

• 13th century Maqamat al-Hariri (Arabe 3929, Arabe 6094, Arabe 584, Esad Efendi 2961, Or. 9718, S.23)
• 14th century Maqamat al-Hariri (Or. Add. 22114, Or. 7293, ÖNB AF9, Marsh 458)

... It might be too technical already though. What do you think? पाटलिपुत्र (Pataliputra) (talk) 15:11, 23 January 2024 (UTC)

Hello! Sorry for not managing to reply sooner. I do think that a template just for Arabic manuscripts would be cool. Yes, I agree it would only be of specialist interest, but correspondingly it would make for the kind of well-defined subject matter that suits a template.

It feels at the moment like this template is aiming to list all Arabic-language texts over a period of a thousand years... but if you follow this to its logical conclusion you would end up including literally thousands of texts, which would surely be too unwieldy?

I also don't think you're right that 'A template with only "texts" would also be strange since most of the "text" do not exist in extenso, but only through their manuscript copies often many centuries later'. People surely agree that we can conceptualise texts as entities that exist beyond their material instantiation in manuscripts, and lots of templates do this. By the same token, we don't feel we need to list every printed copy of War and Peace or every orchestral performance of The Magic Flute.

Moreover, while some medieval Arabic texts only survive in one or two manuscripts, some (like major religious texts) survive in hundreds or even thousands of manuscripts, so, again, it doesn't strike me as very practical to try to list the manuscripts of each text as part of the template. I see that you're listing manuscripts, with links to Commons, in the articles for the texts themselves, and this makes more sense to me.

So I'm struggling to work out quite who would find this template useful in its current form...

None of which is to criticise the great work you're doing on entries like Maqamat al-Hariri! Alarichall (talk) 15:40, 26 January 2024 (UTC)