Grigor Narekac‘i

Grigor Narekacʻi’s ganjs continue to evoke scholars’ attention from many points of view. One of the aspects of interest is its structural features. The ganj is a compound genre comprised of different poetical forms - ganj, tał, and mełedy: together they form a ganj kanon. The present paper deals with the emergence and development of the ganjkanon aiming at answering the question whether the ganj-tał-mełedystructural pattern has been invented by Narekacʻihimself or it is the result of a later development. According to the scholarly consensus, ganjs were originally composed in a ganj-tał-mełedy pattern. Considering the systemized picture of Narekacʻi’sganjs and tałs, Armine K‘yoškeryan argues that they were created as component parts of the same poetical system - the ganjkanon, and already in the tenth century, were collected into a liturgical collection, hypothetically called Ganjtetr. However, through the study of the manuscript tradition of ganjarans - a general structural study of 150 manuscript ganjarans of the Matenadaran’s collection, and a detailed study of the early surviving manuscripts from different collections, I will argue that the ganj kanon was a result of a gradual development in the course of the tenth to the twelfth-thirteenth centuries. Consequently, before being involved or participating in the formation of the ganj kanon, each component - ganj, tał, and mełedy -went through a separate phase of development influenced by different literary and non-literary factors. This implies important methodological clarification for the study of the origin and literary connections of the ganj.