Vienna Palimpsests Projects

2013-present, Austrian National Library, Vienna, Austria.

EMEL is a long-term partner with the Austrian National Library and the Byzantine Research Division of Institute for Medieval Research, Austrian Academy of Sciences. EMEL provides spectral imaging and image processing to recover erased ancient texts on selected palimpsests. Funded by the Austrian Science Foundation.

2019 to present, the Vienna Herodian palimpsest (Codex Historicus graecus 10) preserves in its erased layer a unique 10th century copy of De prosodia catholica by Aelius Herodianus (2nd century CE). Herodian’s Prosody is one of the most influential works in linguists from the ancient world. The Vienna palimpsest contains 20 pages of this mostly lost work, which otherwise survives only in quotations by other ancient authors.

The project will pioneer the integration of X-ray fluorescence imaging (XRFi) and spectral imaging, and generate derivative images which combine information otherwise unique to each imaging technology.
Project scholars will publish a full, critical edition of the fragments online, complete with images from the project.

See here for the the official homepage of the Herodian palimpsest project:

https://www.oeaw.ac.at/en/byzantine-research/language-text-and-script/book-culture-palaeography-and-palimpsests/vienna-herodian-palimpsest

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