2011-2016, St. Catherine’s Monastery of the Sinai, Egypt. A collaboration of EMEL, St. Catherine’s Monastery of the Sinai, and the UCLA Library to recover erased texts from the Monastery’s many palimpsests. The project spectrally imaged 74 palimpsests (6,800 pages), identified 305 erased texts from Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and created world’s largest collection…
2018-2020, Cambridge University Library, Cambridge, United Kingdom. A collaboration of EMEL, Cambridge University Library, and the Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing at Birmingham University. The project is led by Professor David Parker (Principal Investigator) and Dr Hugh Houghton (Co-Investigator) and is funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council Research Grant. The erased…
2017-2018, Museum of the Bible Scholars Initiative, USA. Spectral imaging of an important palimpsest of Sinai provenance, in collaboration with the Lazarus Project and the Museum of the Bible Scholars Initiative. Funded by the MOTB SI. This palimpsest includes recycled folios from at least ten different Greek and Christian Palestinian Aramaic manuscripts. Multispectral imaging has…
2017-2020, Ambrosiana Library, Milan, Italy. A collaboration of EMEL and St. Mary’s University, San Antonio, to apply spectral imaging and reflection transformation imaging to palimpsests at the Ambrosiana Library in Milan. Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Multi-spectral imaging recovered texts that included a 5th century copy of the Book of Jubilees, the…
2016, Austrian National Library. Funded by the Austrian Science Foundation. Continuing from initial imaging in 2013, this project applied advances in spectral imaging to Scythica Vindobonensia, Codex Historicus gr. 73 of the Austrian National Library, to elucidate further a unique witness to the historical writings of Dexippus, an Athenian historian of the 3rd c. CE. The…
2016, State Library of Berlin. EMEL spectrally imaged a palimpsest that preserves rare early Ethiopic texts, including the oldest surviving copy of the Books of Enoch, the oldest non-biblical Ethiopic text, and several yet unidentified texts. Funded by the German Research Council. New Biblical Text Discovered Thanks to a grant from the German Research Council…
2015, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University. Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Martellus’ map, which dates to about 1491, is a highly detailed map of the then known world – reputedly studied by Christopher Columbus. “Multispectral imaging recovered more information than we dared to hope for,” says Chet Van…
2015, Cambridge University Library. Coordinated by Judith Olszowy-Schlanger of the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, in collaboration with Ben Outhwaite of the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit, the project applied cutting-edge spectral imaging and multidisciplinary materials’ analysis to the study of dozens of Genizah fragments. Some of the fragments were palimpsests, and others were…
2014, The Vatican Library. Funded by the Classics Conclave, Oxford. In 2003, nearly 200 verses of an unknown comedy of Menander, a Greek dramatist (c. 342/41 – c. 290 BC) were discovered in a palimpsest in the Vatican library. The verses by Menander are the oldest layer of writing in a double palimpsest, i.e., a…
2013 – 2014, Funded by National Endowment for the Humanities [FAIN: HD-51709-13] This project integrated two proven technologies for imaging cultural artifacts: • Spectral imaging, which collects detailed color data in order to recover information which is indistinguishable to the naked eye, such as unreadable text on a manuscript or stages of revision in a…
