Page 248 - גנזי קדם ז

18* Jay Rovner

carpet page examined herein. The quoted passages included in the design, all
of biblical origin, are generalized in their application but, united in the structure
through which they gain their particular significance, they become associated
with the person(s) whose wall they decorate. This structure and its potential
for signification will be explored below.

Scripture-bound throughout, our micrographic item is spiritual and liturgical
in nature.12 It has been carefully planned, not only in its spatial design but in its
textual structure as well: passages of one type were selected for the majuscule
border, while verses of a different sort predominate in the micrographic center,
playing off their different characters by differentiations in the size, location and
format of the writing. Are these distinctions meaningful on a level other than
that of graphic design, and if so, how can this additional aspect be interpreted?
In other words, how can the “spacial semantics” 13 of this page be parsed?

Stipulating that the following remarks are somewhat speculative, I would
like to attempt an explanation that combines both anthropological and aesthetic
factors. Our sheet seems to portray, through the choice of majuscule border
verses, a pious persona, while using the inner micrographic verses to reveal
this person’s interior prayer life, thereby effecting, in its very design, a
microcosmic representation, a homology, of an ideal, paradigmatic type. The
framing border lines, according to this interpretation, represent this idealized
socio-religious persona, namely one who cultivates righteousness and piety;
one who, attuned to divine expectations, has a reciprocal relationship with his
God. The design then goes beneath the outward surface (the border frame) to
limn the interior devotional life of such a type in the micrographic inscriptions

12 It has no connection withthe amulet type, “Shimmush Tehillim,”wherein verses from Psalms
are used along with divine and demonic names for magical purposes. See B. Rebiger, Sefer
Shimmush Tehillim: Buch vom magischen Gebrauch der Psalmen (Tubingen 2010).

13 This term is borrowed froman interpretation ofthe architectural layout ofa Buddhisttemple
as reflecting the hierarchical structure of “the systematics of... Buddhist scholasticism.”
See J. I. Cabezon, “Tibetan Gothic: Panofsky’s Thesis in the Tibetan Cultural Milieu,” in
idem (ed.), Scholasticism: Cross-Cultural Comparatvie Perspectives (Albany 1998), pp.
141-159, esp. p. 149.