LAYERS OF HISTORY: The Sinai Palimpsests’ Project - in the oldest continually operating library in the world

LAYERS OF HISTORY: The Sinai Palimpsests’ Project  - in the oldest continually operating library in the world

By Jenna Le Bras*

From the shrine bathed in the early morning light, Father Justin lets his eyes linger on the arid peaks of South Sinai with contentment. “Can you see the sentry box at the top of the mountain? There is always someone guarding over there. It’s important to protect this place, but first and foremost to show that it is protected,” he says.

Father Justin, a monk from the Unites States, is a very old man — long and narrow, and dressed in a dusty black gown and small toque. With his white beard covering his chest and his slender fingers crossed on his paunch, he flutters through the corridors of the priory, as he has for 21 years. He knows by heart how to move around this small shell in the desert: the village of ancient stones surrounded by a rampart, the lane of dorms for special guests, the garden with olive trees, the perched walkways that flow from one building to another and revolve around two centers: the Transfiguration Church and the Chapel of the Burning bush.

Sitting at 1,570 meters above sea level, St. Catherine’s Monastery was founded in 527 by the Emperor Justinian, enclosing a chapel built 200 years earlier at the bottom of Mount Sinai, where Moses supposedly saw the Burning Bush. At the top of the hills, which bear the prophet’s name, Moses had received the Tablets of the Law, according to the Old Testament. The area came under Arab rule during the 7th century, and despite the rise and fall of surrounding civilizations, monks and pilgrims have continued to find peace in South Sinai, attracted by its austerity, its biblical associations and its reputation: the monastery has never once been destroyed or abandoned. Today, monks — now 25, though the community used to be more than 200 — maintain the cycle of daily services, and many people keep making the trek to this holy place, following the footsteps of those who have been visiting for over 1700 years. St. Catherine’s is alive with a history that tells itself in the intangible: the souls and the tales of the men guarding this oasis of peace for centuries, but also in the visible heritage of the place: the structures, the artifacts and the writings.

Father Justin glides toward a big wooden door that he unlocks and opens onto a dark room. When he turns on the lights, a high ceiling and two floors appear. On the first, a metal railing encircles shelving units carrying old ledgers that look like spell books. “This is the room that holds all the manuscripts and the early printed books,” he explains. “It used to be a simple utilitarian hall, like a warehouse. We wanted to bring it up to modern standards and we wanted it to be beautiful.”

St. Catherine’s hosts the oldest continually operating library in the world, used by monks since the 4th century. In addition to printed books, scrolls and correspondence, it contains 3,300 manuscripts, piled up over the centuries and remarkably well preserved by the dry climate. In 2007, Father Justin, the monastery’s librarian, packed them safely away while today’s new library was created. “We predicted it would take two years to renovate it but it took us eight, because of all of the complications,” he smiles, referring to the political crises in the country since 2011. ...

St. Catherine’s library has the second biggest array of ancient Christian manuscripts after the Vatican, which makes it a vital source of information for historians and researchers. Its prized collection of 160 palimpsests in particular has been given attention these past seven years, within the scope of an ambitious scanning program: the Sinai Palimpsests’ Project (http://sinaipalimpsests.org/) ...

The Sinai Palimpsests’ Project, led by a team from the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library (EMEL), a US non-profit funded by the UK-based Arcadia Foundation, aims at capturing the faded layers under more recent texts through a state-of-the-art technique known as spectral imaging, whereby images are captured under illumination with different wavelengths of light and then processed to reveal information invisible to the naked eye. ... 

“Throughout the duration of the project, we have applied spectral imaging on more than 6,000 pages of the palimpsest manuscripts, and the variety of the texts is incredible,”marvels Phelps [Michael Phelps, the project’s director]. “We think of this monastery as a remote, isolated desert location, but there are 11 different languages preserved in these erased layers, and diverse texts that range from the 5th century all the way up to the 12th. Of course there is theology, prayers, liturgy and all the things you would expect to find in a monastery, but there are also all these exciting classical literary texts that have been discovered.”

Another notable thing about the palimpsests, Phelps says, is that there is usually no direct relationship between overtexts and undertexts; they are in different languages (sometimes four languages exist in the same manuscript), which evokes speculation about their geographical origins. Researchers suspect most circulated from one place to another before finally landing at the Greek Orthodox monastery, perhaps brought by pilgrims on their way to or from Jerusalem.

“When you have two texts sharing the same physical space, it brings up many historical questions about continuity, the movement of books and the transmission of literature,” says Phelps. “One community wrote the bottom layer, another community wrote the top layer, and now we have this manuscript that has stayed among the same people for years. The relationship between the top layer and the bottom layer can tell us a great deal about the experience of certain groups at a certain time.” ...

*From Layers of History: The Sinai Palimpsests’ Project By Jenna Le Bras: https://worldcrunch.com/culture-society/sinai-spectral-high-tech-in-ancient-library-reveals-layers-of-history