Tropologion Sin.Gr. Mr 56+5
Tropologion
Sin.Gr. ΜΓ 56+5 (often cited as
Sinai Greek NE/ΜΓ 56–5) is a ninth-century
Greek parchment manuscript from the New Finds
of St Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai.
It is the oldest known Greek witness to the
so-called New Tropologion, the main hymnal of
the Jerusalem (Hagiopolite) rite, and preserves
a uniquely rich layer of early-Palestinian
liturgical poetry.
The codex was discovered in 1975, when
renovation work in the tower of St George at
St Catherine’s uncovered a cache of previously
unknown papyrus and parchment manuscripts.
On palaeographic and liturgical grounds,
Alexandra Nikiforova dates Sin.Gr. ΜΓ 56+5 to
the second half of the ninth century.
The manuscript itself is later than much of the
tradition it transmits: scholars regard it as a
witness to Jerusalem’s liturgy and hymnography
whose roots reach back to the fifth–sixth
centuries.
The language of the manuscript is Greek, and it
belongs to the Greek New Tropologion family.
Modern studies describe it explicitly as the
oldest Greek tropologion, in contrast to
earlier-known Georgian and Syriac witnesses
(such as the Old Iadgari and Syriac tropligin).
The script is a sloping minuscule (often
described as ogivale inclinata), and the
codex shows signs of use, marginal notes and
some disorder in the sequence of folios, but is
overall in good physical condition.
Although the book reflects the liturgy of
Jerusalem, Nikiforova argues that Sin.Gr. ΜΓ
56+5 was produced “outside Jerusalem”, in an
Egyptian milieu. Its calendar and saints point
towards Egypt: it highlights a patronal feast
of the Archangel Michael, includes a hymn for
the shrine of Arsenius the Great, and speaks of
Mark the Evangelist as “our patron”, all of
which fit an Egyptian context rather than
Jerusalem itself.
At the same time, the tropologion clearly
belongs to the liturgical tradition of the
Anastasis cathedral in Jerusalem and to the
network of churches that followed its rite.
As a book type, a tropologion is a
calendar-ordered hymnal that gathers together diverse
genres of Byzantine hymnography (canons,
stichera, troparia and related pieces) for the
cycle of feasts and seasons. In the wider
tradition, the Greek tropologion corresponds to
the Georgian Iadgari, the Syriac
tropligin and the Armenian
šaraknocʿ.
Sin.Gr. ΜΓ 56+5 is a particularly full example:
according to the e-Scripta abstract, it
preserves seventy-three offices or “rites”
beginning with the Forefeast of Christmas and
running through to the commemoration of Joseph
of Arimathea on 12 June, incorporating Lenten,
Paschal and Pentecostarion material along the
way.
The structure of the offices follows the
Jerusalem pattern inherited from the Old
Iadgari: Vespers, Orthros and sometimes
Eucharistic chants, with older refrains,
calendar indications and rubrics that
distinguish it from later Constantinopolitan
books.
Within this framework, Sin.Gr. ΜΓ 56+5 offers
the most complete extant collection of early
Palestinian Greek hymnography for the
Christological feasts from Christmas through
Pentecost, combined with offices for a range of
saints and local cults.
Named hymnographers represented in the
manuscript include Cyril, John, Cosmas and
Andrew of Jerusalem; these are generally
understood as Cyril of Jerusalem, John of
Damascus (often cited simply as “John”),
Cosmas of Maiuma and Andrew of Crete/Jerusalem,
who were among the principal architects of the
new Jerusalem tropologion repertory.
Their canons and other compositions in Sin.Gr.
ΜΓ 56+5 show how the poetic and musical
language of Jerusalem developed in the
eighth–ninth centuries, just before the wider
“Byzantinisation” of local rites.
The sources of the book are multiple. On the
one hand, it draws heavily on the older
Hagiopolite tropologion tradition as known from
the Georgian Iadgari and related collections,
borrowing both structures (for example the
sequence of odes in canons) and specific
hymns.
On the other hand, comparative work with the
Syriac Melkite tropologion (Sinai Syriac 48)
and Georgian New Iadgari manuscripts shows that
Sin.Gr. ΜΓ 56+5 represents the Greek “original”
of a family of New Tropologion texts that
circulated across languages in the eastern
Mediterranean.
In terms of subject-matter, the tropologion is
not a narrative work but a liturgical one: it
“writes about” the mysteries of Christ and the
saints through hymnography. Its contents
include canons and stichera for the Christmas
and Theophany cycle, the Great Fast, Holy Week
and Pascha, the Pentecostarion period, and
feasts of important Palestinian and Egyptian
saints.
Among the distinctive items singled out in
recent scholarship are texts for the ancient
Jerusalem rite of the washing of the feet in
Holy Week and hymns for Good Friday associated
with Cyril of Jerusalem’s tradition.
Because it preserves an early, relatively
unrevised layer of the Jerusalem hymnal, Sinai
Gr. ΜΓ 56+5 has become a key witness for three
overlapping questions: the history of the
Jerusalem liturgy (and its “export” beyond
Jerusalem), the evolution of the tropologion as
a book type, and the oeuvre of major
hymnographers such as John of Damascus and
Cosmas of Maiuma.
Modern work by Nikiforova, Chronz and
collaborators, and by Frøyshov and colleagues,
has only begun to unlock this manuscript’s
importance, and it continues to serve as a
central point of reference in current debates
about early Byzantine hymnography and the
transmission of the Jerusalem rite.