Codex Assemanius (scholarly abbreviationAss) is a roundedGlagoliticOld Church Slavoniccanonevangeliary consisting of 158 illuminatedparchment folios, dated to early 11th century. The manuscript is created in theOhrid Literary School of theFirst Bulgarian Empire.
The Codex is named after its discoverer, ItalianMaronite scholar and Vatican librarian of Lebanese originGiuseppe Simone Assemani, who discovered it and bought it in Jerusalem in 1736. His nephewStefano Evodio donated it to theVatican Library, where the codex is still kept today.[1]
By content it is anAprakos (weekly, service) Gospel. It contains onlypericopes (starting with the beginning of the Gospel of John), i.e. lectures prepared for the celebrations in church. At the end of the manuscript there is aMenologium which has lessons to be read during the feasts of the menaion (Sts. Demetrius, Theodosius, Clement and other saints). The codex is held by many to be the most beautifulOld Church Slavonic book.
The first person to write about the codex wasMateo Karaman in his workIdentitá della lingua letterale slava (manuscript, Zadar 1746). The manuscript was published byFranjo Rački (Zagreb 1865, Glagolitic),Ivan Črnčić (Assemanovo izborno evangjelje; Rome 1878, published privately, transcribed in Latin),Josef Vajs andJosef Kurz (Evangeliář Assemanův, Kodex vatikánský 3. slovanský, 2. vols, Prague 1929, ČSAV, phototypical edition) - republished by Josef Kurz in 1966 in Cyrillic transcription. The newest Bulgarian edition is byVera Ivanova-Mavrodinova andAksinia Džurova from 1981 (Asemanievo evangelie; Sofia: Nauka i izkustvo), with facsimile reproductions.
The manuscript abounds with ligatures. Linguistic analysis has shown that the manuscript is characterized by frequent vocalizations ofyers (ъ >o,ь >e), occasional loss of epenthesis, andь is frequently replaced with hardъ, esp. afterr. These are the traits pointing to the Macedonian area, and are shared withCodex Marianus. Yers are also frequently omitted word-finally, and occasionally non-etymologically mixed (ь being written afterk andg).