The Monastery – A Unique Library – Palimpsests – Galen’s Journey – The Technology – Open Future
A LIGHT IN THE DESERT
A scientific quest to bring manuscripts from a remote Middle Eastern monastery back to life
Note: I tried to preserve as much as possible the original text; however, for the sake of clarity and coherence I did have to make some changes. Gabrielle should review the text carefully to make sure I have not in my revisions changed the sense of what she is trying to express.
I am unsure of the meaning of a couple of passages. If those passages are rewritten, please run them by me so I can see if they are clearer.
There were many unnecessary commas in the text; I deleted them.
I would be happy to explain to Gabrielle why I made the changes I made.
By Gabriele Barbati
For years, scholars and scientists have flocked to the world’s oldest working library in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. They imaged and studied ancient parchments, unlocked their mysteries and made amazing discoveries.
THE MONASTERY
The 6th-century C.E. monastery stands at the foot of the mountain where Christians, Jews and Muslims believe God spoke to Moses.
It houses two dozen Greek-Orthodox clerics, hardly visible among the tourists visiting Saint Catherine, Egypt.
Two dozen are what are left of the hundreds of clerics who, ever since Justinian, the Eastern Roman Emperor, ordered the construction of a religious complex in this rocky valley, found their way along the Mediterranean coast, through the Sinai Desert and to the shores of the Red Sea.
They would become the protagonists of a story which would unfold to include, at the dawn of the 21st century, modern-day satellite technology.
The Holy Monastery of the God-trodden
Mount Sinai, commonly
known as Saint Catherine’s Monastery
photo by Fr. Justin
Mt. Sinai, towering at 2285 meters above sea level, is the place where, according to the Bible’s Old Testament, Moses was ordered by God speaking through a burning bush to lead the Israelites out of Egypt and would later receive the Ten Commandments.
Mt. Sinai is also where popular tradition locates the remains of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, a 3rd-century Christian martyr, who is believed to have been buried by angels.
To honor those holy grounds and protect the early Christian presence from desert raids, Helena, the powerful mother of Emperor Constantine who had stopped the persecution of Christians in the Empire, ordered in 330 C.E. the construction of a small chapel which would eventually flourish into a monastery.
The remoteness of Saint Catherine’s would make it a crossroad for hermits, monks and travelers, blending cultures, languages and traditions.
“This was such a remote area that the library is the natural accumulation of all the manuscripts written by the monks or brought here by pilgrims”
Fr. Justin, Librarian of Saint Catherine’s Monastery
This unique mix is reflected in its library, which is considered the oldest continuously working library in the world.
It contains over 3,000 manuscripts and some 13,000 books, written mainly in Greek, Syriac and Arabic.
(video caption) Father Justin, Librarian of Saint Catherine’s Monastery
As early Christians came mainly from the Eastern Roman (or Byzantine) Empire whose capital was Greek-speaking Constantinople (today’s Istanbul), the Christian-Orthodox monastic community took Greek as its main language, though it remained open to the influx of other cultures and languages.
Among them was Syriac, a dialect which spread throughout the Middle East between the 4th and 8th centuries, mostly among Christian communities.
The Islamic history of the “Holy Monastery of the God-trodden Mount Sinai” (or Saint Catherine’s Monastery) began in 639-642 C.E. when the Arabs conquered this province of the Byzantine Empire.
The “Ahtiname,” the letter of protection that the Prophet Mohammad allegedly granted to Saint Catherine’s Monastery (by permission of Saint Catherine’s Monastery, Sinai, Egypt)
Most of the inhabitants of Egypt converted to Islam and, according to the tradition preserved in Saint Catherine, the Christian monastery survived only under the personal protection of the Prophet Mohammad.
That privilege apparently continued after the Prophet’s death, even when tensions with Christian Crusaders (1099-1270 C.E.) made pilgrimages to the Sinai more dangerous and life for the monks difficult.
During the 11th century, a mosque was built inside the monastery and became a unique feature for a religious Christian complex.
The Mosque of the Saint Catherine’s Monastery in 1898 (Credit: Library of U.S. Congress, G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection)
But while ancient knowledge was being preserved inside the walls by those who were shrouded by the devotion and rarefied rhythms of monastic life, Saint Catherine’s wouldn’t be completely shielded from external threats.
The most recent one came in April 2017 when a gunman affiliated with the Islamic State opened fire at a checkpoint on the road to Saint Catherine’s, killing a policeman.
The Library inside Saint Catherine’s Monastery (Credit: Fr. Justin)
A UNIQUE LIBRARY
However, for those with the resources and the bravery to venture into the Sinai Desert, the monastery has always had a coveted prize to offer: its Library.
On those shelves were the earliest copies of most of the classical works of science and religion, as they have been copied down for centuries by scribes.
(Note: I am trying to insert written in front of mainly . . . .)
And such knowledge was memorialized as words handwritten with ink on parchment.
Despite an established tradition in Egypt since pharaonic times of writing on papyrus, a plant which grows on the banks of the Nile River, ancient scribes at Saint Catherine’s would use parchment (more durable than papyrus) for their writing material.
Parchment was obtained from treating goat or sheep hides, through a lengthy process, which was not cheaper than papyrus sheets and was as scarce for a community living in the middle of a desert. OR
Parchment, which was not cheaper than papyrus sheets and as scarce for a community living in the middle of the desert, was obtained through a lengthy process of treating goat or sheep hides.
Parchments were so precious that sometimes scraps were stitched together to form a new sheet.
Conservators unbinding the Syriac Galen Palimpsest at Stanford University (Courtesy of SLAC – National Accelerator Laboratory)
With cellulose-based paper yet to arrive from the Chinese Empire, overwriting on old sheets was an efficient solution to make room for newer and more compelling texts.
Therefore, parchments were often scraped off and copies written in between existing lines or after turning a sheet 90 degrees.
A scribe who was usually a member of a religious order was often faced with the dilemma of choosing between the need to make copies of newer works and the interest in preserving older ones.
What scribes didn’t know at the time was ink fades and leaves crumble, which meant books were often lost to fire or political upheavals. Technology developed 15 centuries later would be able to detect what the naked eye couldn’t see.
Thus, it would be possible to recover every single layer of writing that had been painstakingly inscribed on animal skin and which was thought to have been lost forever after a parchment had been scraped clean.
It was clear to European travelers who managed to reach Saint Catherine’s in the 19th century that many of the parchments were palimpsests because ink strokes and shadows peeped out from the gutter and corners, suggesting they belonged to manuscripts older than the manuscripts before their eyes.
“The Palimpsests of Sinai were known because sometimes the faded, erased words protruded from under the margins and could be read. And from that time scholars knew that very often the underlying text was of greater interest than the uppertext,” said Father Justin, the American librarian of Saint Catherine’s.
PALIMPSESTS
The scholarly interest in Saint Catherine’s palimpsests was due in particular to twin sisters with a passion for languages and exotic travels beyond their native Scotland.
As described in Janet Martin Soskice’s The Sisters of Sinai, Agnes and Margaret Smith’s frequent travels to the Middle East culminated in 1892-93 with the discovery in the monastery’s library of the Codex Sinaiticus Syriacus, one of only two extant manuscripts preserving the Old Syriac version of the Gospels.
Portraits of Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson in Cambridge, U.K.
The 4th-century text was hidden in a palimpsest which featured an upper text from almost four centuries later detailing the life of female saints and martyrs.
But strokes of the undertext were still clearly visible and that caught the attention of the two self-taught linguists who between them were fluent in Syriac, Arabic and a dozen more ancient languages.
While the technology was yet to come, in some cases undertexts could be read by holding a page against the sun or by using ammonia-based chemicals to enhance the faded words.
The sisters’ work (especially Agnes’ publications on Saint Catherine’s Syriac collection) focused the spotlight again on the monastery’s
collection.
Fifty years earlier, there had been a major breakthrough at Saint Catherine’s:
the 4th-century Codex Sinaiticus, one of the earliest and most complete
translations of the Bible in Greek. It which would prove invaluable to scholars.
One of the two bound volumes of the Codex Sinaiticus at The British Library (Credit: codexsinaiticus.org)
A small portion of the Codex is kept at the monastery, while most of the folios are spread among universities and libraries in Germany, Russia and the U.K.
The interest in the monastery’s manuscript collection, which is second in quantity only to the Vatican Library’s in Rome, continues to this day.
Since 2009, a team of over 20 experts has been involved in imaging and studying around 160 palimpsests, including the Smith sisters’ discovery, the Codex Sinaiticus Syriacus.
The Syriac Galen Palimpsest (Courtesy of SLAC – National Accelerator Laboratory)
Part of the palimpsests comes from a recent and lucky find, a trove of baskets filled with books stored in a previously unknown room which was discovered during renovations at Saint Catherine’s in 1975.
The project posed a massive challenge, [compared to previous attempts at making the unseen visible.] I am unsure what this part of the sentence means; I would clarify or cut it.
Members of the imaging team and scholars in Saint Catherine in 2011 (Courtesy of R.B. Toth Associates)
It resulted in a staggering 7,500 images, over 600,000 picture files and a total of 47 terabytes of data which are now under review by many scholars.
The priority has been to identify the texts contained in each palimpsest and to compare them with other copies of the same works for further research.
And that practice led to an important discovery when preliminary results showed a leaf from an old medical book, one of many brought to the monastery and kept there for consultation in case a monk or someone in the community had to seek medical attention.
A few years earlier a similar
folio had inspired the curiosity of a Syriac scholar at Philipps University in
Marburg, Germany.
Grigory Kessel was in Baltimore studying the medical text On the Mixtures and Powers of Simple Drugs by Galen, a Greek
physician who lived in the 1st century C.E.
It was a Syriac translation from the 6th century that had been found in
a palimpsest from the 11th century (known now to the scientific community as
the Syriac Galen Palimpsest).
A folio from Galen’s On the Mixtures and Powers of Simple Drugs (Courtesy of R.B. Toth Associates/Equipoise Imaging)
A private collector had bought it at an auction in 2002 and later had it imaged at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.
Kessel realized that a single leaf that he had recently studied in a Washington library looked very much like it.
Further analysis revealed that the Syriac Galen Palimpsest was missing six pages.
An inscription on the Syriac Galen Palimpsest reads: “Consigned to the monks of Mount Sinai” (Credit: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana)
The single leaf in Washington was one of the missing pages, Kessel confirmed.
Three more would eventually turn up in the Vatican Library and one in Paris.
The final missing page was the folio found at Saint Catherine’s, from where the whole manuscript had originated.
Imaging proved that one of the palimpsest’s leaves found in Rome carried an inscription in Arabic: “Consigned to the monks of Mount Sinai. No one has authority to take it away from them.”
Conservators dealing with (is there a better word? Preserving? Restoring? Examining?) the Syriac Galen Palimpsest at Stanford University (Courtesy of SLAC – National Accelerator Laboratory)
GALEN’S JOURNEY
It was a significant discovery. Galen, a philosopher and a surgeon who served gladiators and emperors in Ancient Rome, made medical history with his theories on human anatomy and physiology, theories which would influence science for at least a millennium before being questioned.
Furthermore, On the Mixtures and Powers of Simple Drugs served as a vast up-to-date compendium of the available medical knowledge on illnesses and their remedies.
That was not a small detail, as Father Justin explained in his interview with VOA Persian.
Greek physician Galen – original image from the Wellcome Library used under Creative Commons license
In ancient times, indeed, Syriac was the language through which most of classical Greek scientific and medical knowledge was translated into Arabic and thus transmitted to the region encompassing today’s Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran.
In March 2018, 30 bi-folios (large sheets which are folded once or two or three times to make—respectively–four, eight or 16 pages) from Galen’s work were reimaged with more powerful equipment at the Stanford University Linear Acceleration Center (SLAC, also known as Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Light source, or SSRL), in California.
Performing and supervising the imaging operation was Michael Toth, an engineer and president of the consulting company R.B. Toth Associates, which pioneered the state-of-the-art technology that scans old manuscripts.
The Archimedes Palimpsest (Credit: http://www.archimedespalimpsest.org)
“We started in 1999 with the Archimedes Palimpsest,” Toth told VOA Persian, referring to the works of the Greek inventor and scientist who lived in Syracuse (a city on the Italian island of Sicily) in the 3rd century B.C.E.
The palimpsest, apparently featuring a religious text from the 13th century, was deposited by its owner (the same owner who would buy the Syriac Galen Palimpsest a few years later) at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, where Toth and a team of scientists in various fields volunteered to work on the project.
They were able to piece together an undertext containing copies of seven of Archimedes’ treatises, two of which were previously unknown–the “Method of Mechanical Theorems” and the “Stomachion.”
Archimedes is featured on one of the highest medals of honors for mathematicians, the Fields Medal (photo by Stefan Zachow)
It took ten years, but it was a major breakthrough since it brought back to the world the work of one of the greatest mathematicians of all time. Archimedes is still studied today for the physical principles and the geometric theorems which bear his name.
And, that, was just the beginning.
Project after project, old journals, ancient mummies, the United States Declaration of Independence and other historic manuscripts would come under Toth’s lenses.
Between 2009 and 2015, Toth and several other experts imaged what he called the “tremendous treasure” of the Saint Catherine’s Monastery, which is now kept in the newly renovated library.
“It wasn’t easy as Egypt went through two revolutions, kidnappings and frequent bombings in the Sinai,” Toth told the audience at a talk at the Smithsonian Associates in Washington in 2018.
But, perhaps counterintuitively, he said that overwriting an important old text resulted actually in preserving knowledge rather than erasing it.
“Becoming a religious venerated text allowed the palimpsest to be more carefully kept, and so the undertext within it,” he explained.
While revealing an ancient text buried by history is often simultaneously challenging and thrilling, Toth revealed to VOA Persian the hardest time he has had was in 2015 with the so-called “Birmingham Qur’an.”
Studying a Koran found in 1972 in the Great Mosque of Sana’a in Yemen, two Iranian scholars claimed the Koran was actually a palimpsest containing an earlier copy that predated the Uthmanic standard version of the Holy Book.
Similarly, the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom asked Toth to check whether the Koran fragments in the University’s Cadbury Research Library had been actually written on top of an older text.
“It was hard because it was like proving the negative, that something wasn’t there,” Toth said.
Toth and his team succeeded: they demonstrated that no older text was concealed under the elegantly crafted Koran writings.
Researchers established with radiocarbon that a Koran kept in Birmingham is written on a parchment dating from 568 and 645 C.E. (Courtesy of the University of Birmingham)
And Toth and his researchers were not the only teams achieving one success after another with ancient manuscripts.
In the meantime, other bright minds had come up with the idea of applying modern technology, as used already in other fields, to solve archeological mysteries; nowadays, at least eight different techniques have been used in universities and laboratories around the world.
Of note is the team of experts from Naples, Italy, which digitally unfolded and read some of the scrolls unearthed in the ancient Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, scrolls which had been obliterated by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 C.E.
Also of note is the work of computer scientists at the University of Kentucky who managed to read a portion of the Bible contained in the famous Dead Sea Scrolls.
But how does all this work?
Spectral data of Syriac 2A, 161r. revealed Syriac translation of Galen’s On Simple Drugs (by permission of Saint Catherine’s Monastery, Sinai, Egypt)
THE TECHNOLOGY
The techniques applied to manuscripts have been borrowed from aerial photography, which is commonly used by reconnaissance or weather satellites.
“Multispectral imaging has been used for years on satellites looking down at the earth. What’s different is I came up with illuminating the manuscript with just one color at a time and capturing an image at each different illumination,” William Christens-Barry, an optical physicist who has been working with Toth on several projects involving palimpsests, explained.
It’s called Narrow-band Multispectral Light Imaging.
One of the Sinai Palimpsests revealed a passage from St. Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians (by permission of Saint Catherine’s Monastery, Sinai, Egypt)
At first, the light spectrum was commonly limited to tungsten, white and ultraviolet.
Christens-Barry told VOA Persian that he came to realize how light at its various spectral bands, from small ultraviolet to wider infrared waves, could actually penetrate parchment at different depths and each help highlight more of the original text, such as traces of pigment or the indentation left by the strokes.
He came up with prototypes at first and ended up a decade later with portable modules able to deliver wavelengths of energy anywhere there is an ancient artifact to be explored.
A folio from the Sinai Palimpsests concealed a 5th– or 6th-century illustration of medicinal herb (by permission of Saint Catherine’s Monastery, Sinai, Egypt)
“You get as good of an image as you can. It sometimes happens that a simple image we capture makes the text visible, far more visible than it might have been just with typical room lighting. But more often it is the case that no image by itself is enough,” Christens-Barry said.
Simply put, imaging is a three-stage process (after the fragile leaves of a palimpsest are extracted from the binding and prepared for examination, as done by conservators at Stanford University for the latest round of imaging of the Syriac Galen Palimpsest).
“We use a 100-mega pixel camera roughly ten times bigger than a phone built-in camera (?) with two L.E.D. lights on either side shining down on the parchment,” Toth said. (phone with built-in camera, maybe?)
“The longer waves of the infrared would penetrate it while the ultraviolet and the blue can cause the parchment to fluoresce and create some shadows which reveal features which are not visible to the naked eye.”
To reveal the erased words on a palimpsest, the researchers make use of advanced photographic equipment featuring a wider dynamic range of colors to get a higher resolution.
Each page, depending on the location and the equipment available, is photographed at multiple exposures using up to a dozen energy wavelengths from invisibly small ultraviolet to long infrared bands passing through the middle wavelengths which are visibly blue, green and yellow.
Furthermore, collaboration with Stanford University helped Toth and his team to develop another technique: the X-Ray Fluorescence, or XRF.
It consists of an extremely bright X-ray light traveling at a high speed inside a cyclic particle accelerator called a synchrotron.
When the beam of light hits the surface of a manuscript, it dislodges an electron and energy bounces back generating a fluorescence.
Such “light-signature” is unique to each element on the surface, differentiating an older text from a newer one.
XRF at work on the Syriac Galen Palimpsest at SLAC-National Acceleration Laboratory (Stanford University) in 2018
XFR relies on the fact that ancient copyists at some point started writing with iron gall ink as opposed to carbon-based inks because the acidic content of iron gall ink (due to the ferrous sulphate added by the scribe to the mix of oak galls, water and arabic gum) bites into the surface and makes the writing more durable.
Iron, as well as zinc which was sometimes added to the mixture, emits a glow which is picked up by filters, whereas the X-ray beam dwells on the surface just as long as necessary to avoid burning the parchment.—I am unsure about this part of the sentence; should whereas be while? I am unsure.
Broadly speaking, such a technique could be compared to what forensic analysts do by shining lights on crime scenes.
The outcome, basically, is a map of the structure of a leaf where old and new layers can be differentiated, as when older paintings are covered by newer ones.
A folio in ancient Greek from the Sinai Palimpsests before and after imaging (by permission of Saint Catherine’s Monastery, Sinai, Egypt)
Step one takes time and may be complicated by wrinkles, mold, calcium residues and whatever else one can find on a centuries-old book.
Eventually, scientists are provided with a set of slightly different pictures to work with.
“Computer based algorithms then combine the images and detect their characteristics and correlations and software can figure out which combination of all those images can result in something that is visible,” Christens-Barry said.
Step two entails putting all the data together to enhance the appearance of the undertext using artificial colors to make it stand out.
In some cases, the team can perform more statistical analyses to bring out the text and make it legible.
OPEN FUTURE
Stage three is open-ended. After all, as Michael Toth points out, he and his colleagues just handle the technical side of the whole process: getting the images.
After that it is up to the linguists, historians and archeologists–individually or collaboratively–to interpret the data revealed by a palimpsest.
Both Toth and Christens-Barry said in their interviews with VOA Persian they were adamantly committed from the outset to making the data public.
Another ancient folio in Greek from the Sinai Palimpsests, as imaged (by permission of Saint Catherine’s Monastery, Sinai, Egypt)
They hope to encourage scientific progress and make the most out of the financial contributions (mainly from organizations in the United States and the United Kingdom) given to recover knowledge from the distant past.
“Others who may come along after us and who may be cleverer than us or have access to new technology, more powerful computers or better mathematics can add another chapter to this seemingly fully written story,” Christens-Barry said.
Indeed, the Sinai’s palimpsests have so far proven to be a wealth of information, revealing works in ten languages, including a large number of texts written in Christian Palestinian Aramaic and Caucasian-Albanian, an extinct language which was spoken in what is now Azerbaijan, and that has been traced by a Georgian scholar in two of the Sinai texts, which were translations of the Bible.—I am getting lost here; so much information in one sentence. I would clarify the part I highlighted in a separate sentence.
Georgian palimpsest revealed a Caucasian-Albanian text from the 7th-8th century (in red vertically – by permission of Saint Catherine’s Monastery, Sinai, Egypt)
Another major discovery made among the Sinai Palimpsests is related to medicine again and to, arguably, the father of modern medicine– Hippocrates.
A Greek doctor who lived between the 5th and 4th century BCE, Hippocrates’ teachings had been the starting point for Galen himself.
To measure the importance of Hippocrates for medicine, it suffices to say that most physicians today, before starting their practice, are required to take the so-called Hippocratic oath in several modified forms.
Fragment of the Hippocratic Oath – original image from Wellcome Library used under Creative Commons license CC BY 4.0
The manuscript contains a 6th-century copy of a medical recipe that the researchers attribute to the Greek doctor, making it a text 500 years older than any other Hippocratic texts previously known.
As for Galen’s On the Mixtures and Powers of Simple Drugs, the plan is to compare the newly found translation to the only other one available in Syriac, which is kept at the British Library in London.
Being older, and so closer in time to the original and with probably less of the changes and omissions usually attributable to scribes, when making copies from earlier versions of the same text, scholars hope to know more about Galen’s observations and, ultimately, about how medicine has developed to become what we know today. OR
By making copies from earlier versions of the same text, scholars hope to learn more about Galen’s observations and, ultimately, how medicine has developed to what it has become today. Earlier versions, closer in time to the original and probably with fewer changes and omissions attributed to scribes, are the purest historical versions.
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