Words & WritingGreek → English
Stemma
/ˈstɛmə/noun
A diagram showing how surviving manuscripts of a text descend from one another.
The Greek roots
στέμμα
stémma
wreath, garland
Literally: “wreath”
Follow a root:στέμμα1 word
The story of the word
In Greek a στέμμα was a wreath, the kind draped on altars and statues. Romans used the word for the garlands that linked the wax ancestor masks in an aristocratic atrium, and from those linked masks it came to mean a pedigree. Textual critics took it over for the family tree of manuscripts, with the lost archetype at the top and copies of copies branching below.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 17th century
Same family
stemmaticstemmaticsdiadem
In a sentence
Two of the four medieval copies share the same missing page, which puts them on one branch of the stemma.
He redrew the stemma after a fragment turned up in Cairo.