It is perhaps a surprise that a minor sect of Second Temple Judaism, based around the personality of a single but ultimately ephemeral charismatic leader whose ministry was perhaps as short as three years, developed to become the World’s largest religion, by number of adherents. That religion is, of course, Christianity, and the charismatic leader was Jesus of Nazareth, whose short period preaching around the territory of Judaea inspired thousands of religious followers who spread the burgeoning Christian faith around the Mediterranean, and into its hinterland. One such area was Armenia, already a very ancient Kingdom who had stood up against Roman expansion. While briefly incorporated into the Empire during the reign of Trajan, Armenia managed to navigate a course of conditional independence, underpinned by the ferocity of Armenian warriors, until the country was eventually split between the Sassanid and Byzantine Empires in AD 363. Christianity first appeared in Armenia during Christ’s lifetime, when the King of Edessa had supposedly written to Jesus himself in order to be cured of leprosy. While he had to make do with one of Christ’s Apostles – Thaddeus, known in the Western tradition as Jude – he was nonetheless cured and, impressed with the power of the new religion, encouraged its expansion into Armenia. The faith got off to a rocky start; the reigning monarch, Sanatruk, apparently killed two of Jesus’ Apostles, Thaddeus and Bartholomew, along with two female members of his own family whom they had converted. According to the Early Christian writers Eusebius and Tertullian, the Armenian Christians were thereafter persecuted until the reign of Tiridates III, when Gregory the Illuminator, the first primate of the Armenian Apostolic Church, converted the reigning King and, from AD 301, Armenia became the first country to adopt Christianity as its state religion.

Armenia became a crux from whence both Oriental Christianity – based on the notion that Christ was at once the Incarnate Word, fully divine and fully human, in one nature (Greek phusis), rather than the previous Arianist notion that Christ was merely the first among the created beings – spread, and was an important counterbalance to the Roman tradition when that city eventually became the hub of what is now Western Catholicism. The rich and lively Armenian tradition was supported by a large array of liturgical texts, which both entrenched conservatism and enabled gradual evolution. Among the most important of such texts were breviaries, liturgical books which, in their essential form, were used to pray the canonical hours, the seven subdivisions of the day which were, in the earliest Christian tradition, marked by prescribed forms of prayer. Books of Hours (Greek horologia) were created to record these prescribed prayers, which stemmed from Jewish hourly prayers (zmanim). Gradually, appendices were added to these Books of Hours, containing psalms, extracts of scripture, lessons, the writings of the Early Church Fathers, as well as the hymns and prayers associated with the canonical hours.

This marvellous breviary (zhamagirk) is a remarkable Seventeenth Century AD survival of the kinds of liturgical books produced for lay people of status. The principal colophon informs us that the prayer book was copied from a ‘choice copy’ by a scribe, Eghiay Hamt’etsi, who describes himself as ‘sinful and unworthy’, in comparison to the ‘kind-minded[ deacon Simeon, who commissioned it. The book was copied in AD 1637 (1086 in the Armenian calendar), in the Monastery of the Holy Virgin Mary in what is now Ankara, Turkey. The same scribe is also known from a Gospel copied in Constantinople in AD 1640 (Hakobyan, V. (1978) Hayeren ieragreeri XVII dori guishatakaranner (1621 – 1640). Vol. II. Erevan: p. 820, nr. 1208). A later owner of the book, Abraham, the son of Amtros agha, added fly leaves in Greek, one of which states that he purchased the breviary in AD 1661; the same hand has added a ‘prayer of confession’ at the end of the principal colophon.

Contents:

Fols.1 – 59: The Midnight Office: ‘Lord if thou wilt open my lips, my mouth shall sing thy praises.’
Fols. 59b – 83: Matins: ‘Having come all of us into the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church…’
Fols.83b - 98a: Prime: ‘From the East unto the West, from north and south, all races and peoples…’
Fols. 98a - 103a: Sexth: ‘With sober mind and diligent understanding ,let us stand with one accord in prayer before our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.’
Fols.103a - 108b: None: ‘With holy hearth and firm faith,let us stand with one accord in prayer before our Lord and Saviour…’
Fols.108b - 172a: Divine Liturgy: ‘O Jesus Christ our Lord, who art clothed with light as with a garment…’
Fols.172b - 201a: Vespers: ‘Blessed Lord ,who dewellest on high ,and praised in the glory of thy majesty.’
Fols.201b - 205b: Hour of Rest ‘My soul is always in thy hands,and in thy holy cross I have hoped, O King of Heaven’
Fols.205b-206a: Princial Colophon.
Fols.206a-207a: Prayer of confession.
Fols.207b-208: Text in Turkish in Armenian letters.