The Invisible Poems Hidden in One of the World's Oldest Libraries
by Richard Gray - The Atlantic
by Richard Gray - The Atlantic
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The library at Saint Catherine's Monastery is the oldest continually operating library in the world. Among its thousands of ancient parchments are at least 160 palimpsestsmanuscripts that bear faint scratches and flecks of ink beneath more recent writing. These illegible marks are the only clues to words that were scraped away by the monastery's monks between the 8th and 12th centuries to reuse the parchments. Some were written in long-lost languages that have almost entirely vanished from the historical record.
But now these erased passages are reemerging from the past. In an unlikely collaboration between an Orthodox wing of the Christian faith and cutting-edge science, a small group of international researchers are using specialized imaging techniques that photograph the parchments with different colors of light from multiple angles. This technology allows the researchers to read the original texts for the first time since they were wiped away, revealing lost ancient poems and early religious texts and doubling the known vocabulary of languages that have not been used for more than 1,000 years.
Isolated at the mouth of a precipitous gorge at the foot of Mount Sinaia mountain sacred to the Christian, Islamic, and Jewish faithsSaint Catherine's Monastery has persisted relatively unscathed since the sixth century. Its library was famous as a center of learning even its very earliest days, and the tinder-dry climate has helped to preserve the delicate parchments.
At times in the past, however, the monks found themselves stranded without fresh supplies. The rise of Islam in the seventh century saw almost all of the other Christian sites in Sinai disappear, leaving the fortified monastery at Saint Catherine's far harder to reach. Tensions between the Muslim world and Christians during the Crusades also made pilgrimages to the monastery more sporadic. Scribes were often forced to reuse older parchments, each composed of hundreds of pages. They would carefully wash them with lemon juice and scrape them clean of text. The scribes chose older textssome dating as far back as 600 ADwhose language had been forgotten or whose information was no longer relevant.
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Over five years, the researchers gathered 30 terabytes of images from 74 palimpseststotaling 6,800 pages. In some cases, the erased texts have increased the known vocabulary of a language by up to 50 percent, giving new hope to linguists trying to decipher them. One of the languages to reemerge from the parchments is Caucasian Albanian, which was spoken by a Christian kingdom in what is now modern day Azerbaijan. Almost all written records from the kingdom were lost in the 8th and 9th century when its churches were destroyed.
Another dead language to be found in the palimpsests is one used by some of the earliest Christian communities in the Middle East. Known as Christian Palestinian Aramaic, it is a strange mix of Syriac and Greek that died out in the 13th century. Some of the earliest versions of the New Testament were written in this language
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Other palimpsests are written in more common languages like Arabic, Syriac, Latin, and Greek. More than 108 pages of previously unknown Greek poetry were uncovered beneath more recent Arabic and Georgian texts. Three previously unknown Greek medical treatises have also been found, including one that contains the oldest known recipe credited to Hippocrates, the father of Western medicine.
