Les quarante-neuf vieillards de Scété (Coptic text of Vat. Copt. 58)
· Anonymous
· composition date unknown; preserved in Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Copto 58
· hagiography
no English translation located. No published English translation of this text was located in the catalogues and series checked. Where only a non-English rendering or a translation of a daughter version exists, it is recorded below and does not close the gap. Treat this as a gap candidate, not as proof that no translation exists; the evidence names every source checked.
Why this is in the register
The Coptic text was edited with a French translation by Seymour de Ricci and E. O. Winstedt, Les quarante-neuf vieillards de Scété (Paris: Imprimerie nationale/Klincksieck, 1910); the Harvard record gives language French only and identifies the source manuscript as Vat. Cop. 58 (https://hollis.harvard.edu/discovery/search?query=any,contains,quarante-neuf%20vieillards%20de%20Scete&tab=Everything&search_scope=MyInst_and_CI&vid=01HVD_INST:HVD2&offset=0 A HOLLIS search for an English treatment ('forty nine martyrs of Scetis') returns 0 records (https://hollis.harvard.edu/discovery/search?query=any,contains,forty%20nine%20martyrs%20of%20Scetis&tab=Everything&search_scope=MyInst_and_CI&vid=01HVD_INST:HVD2&offset=0 The collection is absent from Budge's Coptic Martyrdoms (1914) table of contents.
Coptic account of the massacre of the monks of Scetis (the 'forty-nine elders'), a foundational Coptic monastic-martyr text. No Coptic Scriptorium file and no online full text located (archive.org title search returned 0 hits for the book), so extent is left null.
No open electronic text was verified for this work. The Greek/Coptic/Geʿez may exist only in a print or subscription edition (Migne, CSCO, TLG, CMCL).
Scanned witnesses
Scan search: restricted scan — 1 candidate(s). The digitised manuscript named by the dossier as the source of the Coptic text (Vat. Copt. 58) is online and viewable, so the work now has a manuscript witness with a stable shelfmark, IIIF manifest and 406 canvases. Caveat: the manifest carries no content description and the DigiVatLib detail page has none either (3 KB of text, no title/incipit), so the identification rests on the dossier's attribution, not on a catalogue statement I could read — confirm against van Lantschoot's catalogue of Vatican Coptic MSS before publishing a claim. There is no text layer at all (images only), and no Coptic OCR model: any text must be transcribed, or re-OCR'd after training. BnF holds three analytical records of the 1910 editio princeps (de Ricci & Winstedt; e.g. ark:/12148/cb31209464c, verified via SRU HTTP 200, 'In-4°, Paris 1910') but no digitised copy is reachable from this host (Gallica 403; Internet Archive title searches return 0).
Cite: Tergwame, “The Forty-Nine Martyrs (Elders) of Scetis”
(coptic gap dossier), 2026.
https://naxiai.com/christian/gaps/coptic-anon-forty-nine-martyrs-scetis