Sinai Palimpsests Project
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 of spectral data in the humanities. Funded by Arcadia.
Constructed between 548 and 565 CE, St. Catherine’s Monastery of the Sinai is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and home to the world’s oldest continually operating library. Among its treasures are 160 known palimpsests. Palimpsests are recycled manuscripts. Ancient and medieval scribes would sometimes erase the writing from older manuscripts and reuse the pages to make new manuscripts. The erased layers of writing in Sinai’s palimpsests preserve ancient and medieval texts in 10 languages that date from the 5th to 12th century, nearly all of which had not been studied or identified until now.
The goals of the Sinai Palimpsests Project were to:
- Use spectral imaging to recover erased ancient texts on Sinai palimpsests.
- Identify and paleographically describe the erased texts, as possible.
- Publish an online, digital library of Sinai palimpsests for scholarly access.
Before the Sinai Palimpsests Project, only three of the Monastery’s 160 known palimpsests had been comprehensively studied by scholars and published. Over the course of the five-year project, EMEL spectrally imaged 74 of the Monastery’s palimpsests (6,800 pages). Based on these images, participating scholars identified 305 erased texts. Many of these texts are new discoveries, previously unknown to scholarship, and others are either the oldest surviving copies of known texts or the first instance of a known text in a new language (e.g., translations of Greek texts into Christian Palestinian Aramaic).
A digital library of Sinai palimpsests, prepared by UCLA, is hosted online on behalf of St. Catherine’s Monastery. See www.sinaipalimpsests.org