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Monks use hi-tech on ancient texts
Monday 20 June 2005 6:45 AM GMT
The world’s oldest monastery has plans to use hi-tech cameras to shed light on ancient Christian texts preserved for centuries within its fortress walls in the Sinai desert.
Saint Catherine’s Monastery hopes the technology will allow a fuller understanding of some of the world’s earliest Christian texts, including pages from the Codex Sinaiticus - the oldest surviving bible in the world.
The technique, known as hyper-spectral imaging, will use a camera to photograph the parchments at different wavelengths of light, highlighting faded texts obscured by time and later over writings.
It should allow scholars to understand corrections made to pages of the Greek Codex Sinaiticus, written between CE 330 and 350 and thought to be one of 50 copies of the scriptures commissioned by Roman emperor Constantine.
“If you look at all the corrections made by each scribe then you can come out with a principle on which he was correcting the text,” said monastery librarian Father Justin.
In a joint project with the monastery, libraries in Britain, Germany and Russia, which together hold the bulk of the manuscript, will also scan pages and fragments of the text to digitally reunite the work in a facsimile.
Forgotten manuscript
The monastery had kept the Codex Sinaiticus until the mid-19th century, when the bulk of it was taken to Russia by a German scholar and never returned. Russia sold those pages in 1933 to the British Library, where they are still kept.
The monks thought they had lost the entire manuscript to Europe until 1975, when they discovered 12 of its pages and 15 fragments in a forgotten chamber, buried under a collapsed ceiling with thousands of other parchment leaves and fragments.
The monastery, which has never lost hope the manuscript may be returned, has agreed to take part in the project on condition it includes a modern history of the Codex.
The Greek Orthodox monks keep a framed copy of a note left by the German scholar promising to return the manuscript.
Unpublished documents in Russian archives could shed light on the circumstances in which the text left the monastery.
Restoration
Pages of the Codex Sinaiticus in Britain and Germany are in good enough condition to be photographed straightaway, but those in the monastery need restoration to ready them for the process.
“Some of them are crumpled in the state they were found in and they need to be opened up,” said book historian Nicholas Pickwoad, an adviser to the monastery’s conservation project.
The monastery plans to build a conservation workshop to treat the Codex and other works in its collection of 3304 manuscripts and 1700 scrolls, which make up the biggest collection of early Christian texts outside the Vatican.
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