Recovering Some Lost Lines in the Mēmrē of Narsai (d. c.500), with an Appendix on a Stemma of Manuscripts of Narsai

In 1905, Alphonse Mingana published a two-volume edition of metrical homilies, or mēmrē, of the important East-Syriac theologian and poet Narsai (d. c.500). This edition remains the field-standard resource for scholars working on Narsai. In the present article, I draw attention to four cases in which a line was missing from the manuscript(s) that served as the basis of Mingana’s edition, resulting in a broken couplet in Mingana’s text. I restore these couplets by consulting ms Diyarbakır 70 (= Da), which was copied near Erbil in 1328, and thereby I recover some lost lines of Narsai. In a concluding appendix, I discuss how these lost lines can serve as errores significativi (Leitfehler) for establishing a stemma of the manuscripts of Narsai’s mēmrē.