St. Catherine’s monastery in Sinai desert has become a research
center for the cutting edge technology of digitalizing ancient
scriptures. The monastery is the second-oldest continuously running
library of the world, after the Vatican.
The leader of the monks, Father Justin, asked for the help of Michael
Toth, a leading expert of digitalizing ancient manuscript. The team has
discovered so far scripts dating 1200 years back. The main target of
the team though is not so young.
The team is there to digitalize and discover the palimpsest
scriptures. Palimpsest is a piece of papyrus which is written over.
While papyrus was widely used, it was difficult and expensive for
writers to buy new pieces whenever they wanted. Therefore they used the
old ones and wrote over previous texts. This is what Toth and his team
is focusing on, taking pictures of older texts being written in
scriptures and papyrus which belong to the monastery and try to bring
them in surface.
Toth and his team have more than 10 years experience trying to
digitalize pictures and texts written in surfaces which have been
already erased and overwritten. The monastery was built in 550 A.D. by
Emperor Justinian and it is estimated to hold more than 3,300 old
scriptures and pictures. Up to now the digitalizing procedure has
revealed more than nine different languages written in different parts
of scriptures, showing that the monastery used to be a point for
academics more than a millennium ago.
The first findings will be presented in 2013 while some first
findings will be sent this autumn to 18 experts on ancient languages.
Most scripts are in the old Aramaic language of the 3rd-Century A.D. up
to the 8th-Century, a language which was dead when writers overwrote the
papyrus. The fact that the language was dead then was the main reason
that writers chose to overwrite it.Up to now 130 texts have been
recognized.
Most of them are religious texts but among the non-religious is a
medicine text which might be the oldest known text on medicine. The
technology used brings together different aspects of science, mainly
related to x-ray and physics. The equipment uses x-ray and other forms
of light to create the print of the text which is overwritten.The
problem is that sometimes some texts were overwritten twice making the
work of the team even harder. The scientific community and the whole
world is watching what the new discoveries of the team will bring to
light.
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