Palestinian Vocalised Piyyut Manuscripts in the Cambridge Genizah Collections

Book excerpt: In the Semitic languages the vowels are not part of the alphabet and each Semitic language has its special method of marking its particular vowel values. In the Hebrew of Late Antiquity, a supralinear method of doing this was first introduced after the Arabic conquest of Palestine in the seventh century. It was used mainly for liturgical purposes in complicated poetic texts, and it was soon displaced by the classical Tiberian system. The oldest existing specimens of this supralinear method are on vellum manuscripts from Cairo where the remaining fragments were deposited by Jewish refugees from Crusader Palestine at the end of the eleventh century. The fragments from the Cairo depository, known as the Cairo Genizah, are best represented in the Genizah Collections at Cambridge University Library. This volume gives for the first time a full description of the scattered and torn fragments, as well as of their notational value.