Page 258 - גנזי קדם ז

28* Jay Rovner

inscription of the carpet page, he would not have made the righthand border
abut the inner design, while leaving a space between the border and the inner
design on the left side. At any rate, the presence of scorings indicates that the
framing text was carefully planned, while striations show that the interior one
was more generally marked into regions. It seems likely that our scribe, having
first executed the border frame, which appears symmetrical, miscalculated the
area required for his micrographic design: either he ran out of space on the right,
and had to run his micrography right up against the right-hand border area, or,
perhaps more likely in the execution of a Hebrew-oriented plan, he inserted the
inside text working from the right, and found he had room to spare on the left.

While it is always possible that the shape of the parchment changed because
of temperature changes and other stresses, radical changes due, for example,
to fire, could not have caused this asymmetrical layout, as the verso does not
exhibit any indication of such extreme stress. Whether he was following some
sort of aesthetic rule (a sort of golden mean of page layout design), or was
simply a less than perfect draftsman,33 our scribe made his left margin wider
than his right one,34 and probably his bottom margin larger than the top one,

either to trimming or to the aforementioned asymetirical design of the model used in the
page, or both.
33 Whatever faults one may find with the planning of the carpet page, the beauty of the
majuscule lettering, the imaginative micrographic plan andthe skill with whichthe symmetry
ofthe micrographic design was executed are indisputable evidence ofthe work of atalented,
albeit less than perfect, scribal artist. One may quibble with the scribe’s decision not to
write the majuscule bottom border text upside down, a technique already employed for
symmetrical effect in this period, as evidenced in the Leningrad codex of 1009 (see Avrin
[n. 19 above], pl. 10), but this decision does provide a more readable, functional, product.
Understanding the designer’s intentions would also provide insight into his reasons for
orienting the border verses on either side in the same direction. Perhaps, as well, a more
skilled worker would not have had to truncate some verses (cf. several instances of the
abbreviational ‫ וגו׳‬and the unmarked truncation of border verse 8 at the bottom), but would
have allowed space to copy every verse in full.
34 The asymmetrical layout of this sheet suggests the possibility that a facing sheet was also
designed, with the short margins on its left side, to form a pair with this one (see the
following note). Unfortunately, if such a page exists, it has not yet been identified. It is also