urtext

Noun

1. A primitive, seminal, or prototypical example of an artistic genre or the basis of an ideological movement.
   • Nearly coinciding with the publication of Thomas’s work was what, in many ways, stands as the ur-text of Turkish denialist “scholarship”: Esat Uras’s Tarihte Ermeniler ve Ermeni Meselesi. Uras, born Ahmed Essad, was an...
   • The Weekly Standard ran an interminable series of essays lauding manliness and lamenting its demise at the hands of liberalism. Perhaps the Ur-text of this movement was a 2003 Jay Nordlinger op-ed in The Wall Street...
   • The ur-text of this trope in recent cultural history is the 2000 Japanese cult-classic film Battle Royale[…]. - 2018 July 16, Steven Poole, “From Fortnite to Love Island: how the ‘fight to the death’ defines our times”,...
2. The original version of a piece of music or text, often as created by the composer or writer.
   • The recensional variation found in some tractates suggests the possibility that at an early stage of the – oral (?) – transmission there was no urtext, or that passages not stemming from the urtext entered into the text...

   Synonyms: original manuscript