Page 250 - גנזי קדם ז

20* Jay Rovner

The iconic nature of the ENA 2630 carpet page is even more abstract, in
that it contains no representatonal figuration. Continuing further in what can be
described as an empathic attempt to understand this carpet page in the context
of the religious phenomenology of the culture in which it functioned, I pose
the following question, while remaining aware that I may be over-interpreting
the nature of this phenomen: What could be the purpose of creating such a
“verbal icon,” as it were?

The carpet-page may certainly have served a quasi-liturgical function,
reminding the practitioner as to the appropriate way to live his life and
guiding him in his prayers. The micrography itself, however, seems to signify
something on a level beyond that of an aide m em oire, for two reasons.
On the one hand, it is really too minute to be easily legible, and on the
other hand, such a function does not exploit the page’s semiotic design as a
self-contained, microcosmic and verbal representation of the “pious petitioner.”
Therefore, I suggest that it may also have served a quasi-magical, talismanic
purpose.18 On one level, the very act of inscribing and displaying the page
could be considered equivalent to reciting the verses or the petitions,19 in a

18 The expressive use of Scripture, along with the focus on the Tetragrammaton, seems to be a
normative expression of feelings similar to the magical intenions behind the use of a Jewish
amulet, which marshals “Words of Power,” expressive of a “firm belief in the tremendous
power of the written Names of God, of angels, and of biblical quotations generally”
to protect its wearer (T. Schrire, Hebrew amulets: their decipherment and interpretation
[London 1966], p.9). Although Jewish amulets make heavy use of scriptural passages, and
in particular of verses from Psalms (idem, p. 4, and cf. n. 12 above), similarly to our carpet
page, the latter does not function magically. It petitions God, whereas amulets attempt to
use divine names instrumentally to command, adjure, and control angels and demons.

19 As an expressive form, the use of Arabic ghubar writing in talismans is suggestive, albeit
because of a literalizing aspect absent in our case. In other Ghubar writing the words of a
text would be inscribed in small characters to form the shape of the words of a magical
incantation. (The result is similarto a calligram, except that the minuscule lettering takes the
shape of words rather than objects.) In uttering the incantation, the speaker was accounted
as having recited the entire microtext that makes up the macrotextual incantation. (For a
similar technique in Jewish micrographic art, see L. Avrin, Micrography as Art, published
with: C. Sirat, La lettre hebraique et sa signification [Paris and Jerusalem 1981], pl. 12, from
the Leningrad codex, 1009 CE, which differs from ghubar designs in that the micrography