#Old manuscripts series#

Catherine’s hosts the world’s oldest continually operating library, used by monks since the fourth century. In the Sinai Desert, in Egypt, a monastery called St. Rossetto’s text is just one of hundreds whose recovery was recently announced by researchers participating in a project to decipher the secrets of a unique treasury.

Like finding an old photograph of a long-dead relative, discovering a lost piece of text can help us glimpse ourselves in the people who came before us. When classical Greek literature was rediscovered during the European Renaissance, it remade Western civilization, and planted seeds that still shape our lives today: Thomas Jefferson’s ideas about the pursuit of happiness were sparked by the Greek philosophers suffragists were inspired by Euripides’ heroine Medea. “Its loveliness increases it will never / Pass into nothingness.” Surely to uncover lost poetry from an ancient civilization from which we draw so many of our literary traditions is as exciting as unearthing any material treasure.Īnd this promise reaches beyond aesthetics. “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever,” he wrote. In his poem “Endymion,” based on a Greek myth about a shepherd beloved by the moon goddess Selene, John Keats paid tribute to the enduring power of superior works of art. “I thought, ‘Wow, this is something new.’”

“I tried different combinations, and there was nothing,” she recalls. But as soon as she got home, Rossetto rushed to her computer to check her transcription against known classical texts. There was no internet connection on the train. Instead, she began to see names from mythology: Persephone, Zeus, Dionysus. The style of the script suggested that it was probably written in Egypt in the fifth or sixth century, and Rossetto expected another Christian text. As Rossetto’s train sped through the Austrian Alps, she flipped between the images, adjusting the contrast, brightness and hue to minimize the appearance of the Arabic overtext while picking out tiny Greek letters, each around three millimeters tall. They were taken using a state-of-the-art technique known as multispectral imaging, or MSI, in which each page of a text is photographed many times while illuminated by different colors and wavelengths of light, and then analyzed using computer algorithms to find a combination that most clearly distinguishes the two layers of text. Rossetto, a PhD student, was given the images as an afterthought, when an older scholar complained that reading them was beyond his failing eyesight.īut these were no ordinary photographs, either. Nothing was known about what this “undertext” contained. The resulting double-text is called a palimpsest, and the manuscript Rossetto was studying contained several pages whose Christian text, a collection of saints’ lives written in tenth-century Arabic, hid a much older text beneath, in faintest Greek. In antiquity, it was common practice when parchment supplies were limited to scrape the ink from old manuscripts, with chemicals or pumice stones, and reuse them.

#Old manuscripts series#

Last summer, Giulia Rossetto, a specialist in ancient texts at the University of Vienna, was on a train home to Pordenone, in northern Italy, when she switched on her laptop and opened a series of photographs of a manuscript known as “Arabic New Finds 66.”