ABSTRACT
Hymns in honour of the Theotokos are sung, according to the cycles of the Byzantine liturgical year, both for the feasts of the Mother of God (Èåïìçôïñéêáæ Aïñôáß) and as theotokia, following the cycle of the Oktoechos, especially on Wednesday and Friday each week. This explains the large number of such hymns in Byzantine hymnography – a treasury of hymns some of which belong to the most ancient strata of Greek ecclesiastical poetry. Almost a century ago, Anton Baumstark, the great historian of liturgy, drew attention to similarities between Byzantine and Coptic hymnography,1 which indicate a very early circulation of Byzantine hymns in honour of the Theotokos in Egypt, certainly before the eighth century. The oldest collections of Greek hymns, whose composition is closely associated with the Tropologion in the developments around the mid-ninth century following the Council of Nicaea II (787), already contain numerous theotokia, both as stichera and as troparia within the kanon. In this ancient collection of liturgical books in the form of the Tropologion, the kanons include up to fourteen troparia, as, for example, in the so-called ‘Paracletice sinaitica antiqua’ (Sin. gr. 776, Lond. B.M. Add. 26113, Sin. gr. 1593).2 Hymns in honour of the Theotokos also have their place in the Sticherokathismatarion, a non-musical collection of hymns known only from Greek manuscripts of the tenth and eleventh centuries.
