This album of photographic plates is a companion volume to the
descriptive Catalogue of Coptic Manuscripts in the Pierpont Morgan
Library. It presents a visual record of the Morgan Coptic collection.
The Morgan Coptic collection is unrivaled in wealth of Coptic manuscript
illumination dating to before AD 1000, including a near monopoly on
early Coptic frontispieces. Following a brief introduction and a few
images of the desert location near the town of al-Hamuli, where the bulk
of the Library's Coptic manuscripts were unearthed in 1910, the body of
the album presents the collection for codicologists, art historians, and
paleographers under the two categories of Decoration and Script. The
album contains a comprehensive record of frontispieces, headpieces,
tailpieces (including what may be the oldest Christian illumination), a
sampling of marginal ornaments and ornamental initials, specimens of the
scripts of most literary manuscripts, and selected documentary texts and
bindings. Full concordances between call numbers, plate numbers, and
catalogue numbers are also provided.