Agnes Smith Lewis

The title page lists Agnes Smith Lewis's degrees — honorary DD of Heidelberg, LLD of St Andrews, LittD of Dublin and PhD of Halle-Wittenberg — and Mingana calls her the discoverer of the Sinaitic Syriac Version and of other valuable documents. She lived in Cambridge and signed her preface at Castle-brae in May 1914. ^{2 3 4}

She relates that she bought the manuscript at Suez in 1895 from a travelling antiquities dealer; its upper script is a series of Arabic homilies by Church Fathers such as Theodosius, Chrysostom and Mar Jacob, which experts at Oxford and the British Museum dated to the very end of the ninth or the beginning of the tenth century. With a chemical reagent she brought up a Syriac under-text of the Protevangelium Jacobi and the Transitus Mariae, published in 1902 as Studia Sinaitica XI, and noticed among the quires Kufic leaves that she identified as Qur'anic, contenting herself with locating their suras and verses. ^{1 5}

On 27 November 1913 she showed Mingana her book, and he asked about the "sic" marks she had put on Qur'anic words; he explained that forty-one were archaic spellings and that one in Surat al-A'raf could differ in meaning. He then deciphered the leaves in her house, each reading being checked by her and most also by her sister Margaret Dunlop Gibson. ^{5 6 3}