(11-01-2019, 06:37 AM)ChenZheChina Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I don’t know if it is a poem. However, it seems to me that the layout was intended to be like that, but not a result of damaged page.
Maybe, but it does not seem certain. Besides the irregular edge of the panel, there seems to be something wrong with the vellum surface in that blank area.
- There is a large stain in that area where the vellum is significantly more translucent than usual.
- There are a few rough creases converging towards that area.
- The texts seems to be organized as parags, not verses.
- The last glyphs of several lines -- notably 1, 3, 4, 5, 14, 16, 31 -- are blurred and fainter than the general text.
The stain is shaped like a mushroom, about 4 cm wide and 5 cm tall, turned 90 degrees CCW, staring from the deepest part of the dent on the east edge of the panel. Its effect on the transparency of the vellum can be judged by the blue streak from the verso that is visible where it crosses the stain. The last few glyphs of line 16, which are fainter and blurry, lie inside that stain.
The text seems to be organized into at least four parags, whose head lines are lines 1, 8(?), 16, 24. These parags, as in all the other pages, are tentatively determined by all or most of the following features: enlarged puff (p/f gallows) at the start of the head line, other puffs inside the head line, extra-wide interline spacing, and a tail line that starts at the (straight) left rail but ends well before or well after the (irregular) right rail. This last detail suggests that each parag is a running text, whose line breaks were chosen by the Scribe by the trivial line-breaking algorithm.
So here is my theory for what happened. The vellum was very bad near the east edge. Before the hide was cut into sheets, there was an elongated hole in it, spanning the baselines of lines 19 to 24, and above that point the edge of the hide came quite close to the current edge of the vellum. When the hide was cut, the cut bisected the hole, and above that point it had to deviate westwards to avoid the edge of the hide.
For some reason, during manufacture or some time after that, the vellum surface on the recto side became smeared with oil, wax, or some other liquid other than water, leaving the stain. The vellum around that area also shrank, producing the creases. Probably the shrinkage and the stain are related. Perhaps the maker or the Scribe tried ironing that spot because of the creases, ruining the vellum in the process.
Anyway, the Scribe then started writing line 1, and when he got to the
oly he noticed that the the strokes were coming out badly. So he broke line 1, wrote line 2, and broke it before the crease, just to be safe. But when he wrote line 3 he ran into bad vellum well before the crease. He kept going that way, breaking line whenever the traces became faint and fuzzy. After the
oly on line 8 he decided to stop before the crease, and tried to honor a right rail that was straight but slanted SE.
He finished that parag with no problems, but when he started the next parag, on line 16, he risked a longer line, but ran again into the bad surface. On the next line, 17, he ran into the problem even earlier. So for the next two lines he stopped 1.3 cm before that point. Then he cautiously returned to a right rail that was mostly straight and almost vertical, but still 4 cm away from the panel's edge. On the last line, finally, he chose to cross that rail with
or oraiiin in order to avoid a widow line. With that he ran again into the problem area, but there was no going back.
Quote: if it was really a damaged page, the other side (f81v) should have shown the same damage, but it did not.
But the text on You are not allowed to view links.
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does show the same damage in that same area of the folio. In fact, it seems that the spill that cause the stain happened on f81v, and percolated through the vellum to stain f81r. But this time it seems that the Scribe decided that the damage to the text was tolerable, so he ignored it and honored a straight left rail.
Quote:An example where I think there was really a page damage is You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , which was explained by Emma You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
Yes! But I think that what happened on f81r/f81v is very similar to what happened there.
All the best, --stolfi