Dated colophons

A colophon is the note a scribe adds at the end of a manuscript recording when, where, and sometimes why it was copied. A surprising number of medieval scribes across very different traditions did this consistently enough that whole populations of dated colophons can now be counted and compared: SfarData's codicological survey -- a study of manuscripts as physical objects -- of dated Hebrew manuscripts, Armenian hishatakaran memorial colophons, and comparable dated-colophon bodies from Ethiopic, Syriac, Georgian, West African, and East Asian Buddhist scribal traditions.

Because each colophon carries an actual date, this is one of the few instruments that turns manuscript survival into a real time series rather than a rough century-by-century guess. Odes before archives and Piecework prices its errors both look at what a colophon's presence or wording reveals about the economics of the copying itself -- piece-rate pricing, error patterns. The khaz tracks the colophon famine and Calamity lengthens the colophon test whether gaps or unusual density in the dated record track real historical disruptions, such as famine or calamity, rather than random survival noise.