Toto

An interesting discussion of cutting edge technologies in reading ancient documents.

This copy of Aristotle was recycled in the 13th c. as a prayer book, and later covered with paintings of the evangelists.

The pages of a medieval prayer text also contain words of ancient Greek engineer Archimedes. It takes high-tech imaging to read between the lines.

mountainman

Interesting changes are afoot with technology and BC&H.
Things which conceivable could never have been known
or knowable are becoming known via technology.

Here is a list of books which I would like to see
somehow "turn up under technology" in the near
future ....

* Ammianus Marcellinus (Books 1-13)
* Julian's "Against the Galilaeans" (Books 1-3)
* Anything written by Apollonius of Tyana.

Aerik

Many evangelical organizations around the country have been known to urge their constituents to go to their public and school libraries, use marker to black out 'unchristian' text and write in 'scripturally accurate' subsitutions.

Any difference between a monk writing prayers over Aristotle?

Nope.

S.C.Carlson

You answered your own question correctly. The palimpsesting of the manuscript (washing the old ink off to write a new text) was a common means of recycling valuable parchment. Many of earliest and most important manuscripts of ancient works are preserved in the partially erased undertext of a palimpsest.

The paintings of the evangelists, on the other hand, are an early 20th-century forgery designed to "enhance" the value of a stolen manuscript (in the post World War I chaos in Constantinople) for the illuminated manuscript art market. The forger also artificially "aged" and mutilated some of the leaves to further support the forgery, making it all the more difficult to read the undertext. Tragic, really.

Stephen

mountainman

In another thread post tenebras lux
posted the following image reference:
http://www.ub.unibas.ch/kadmos/gg/pi...24_005_tit.htm

Looking carefully at the image one can almost make out lines
of text across the parchment(?). Is this an example?

S.C.Carlson

No. That happens when the ink on the other side of the page is visible through the page. That also happens in manuscripts (the image above is a printed book) when the parchment is thin.

Stephen

Roger Pearse

This is the Archimedes palimpsest. There is quite a decent website about it. The owner wants his name kept quiet, but he also owns a substantial chunk of the unpublished Greek mathematical codex which was sold at the same time as the gospel of Judas.

Reuse of old parchment is commonplace. Indeed I believe some church councils passed a canon that pages of bibles should not be so used -- which tells us only that it was pretty common! Parchment was valuable -- after all, the alternative was to go and find a sheep and separate him from his skin and then do the time-consuming process of preparing it.

The great name associated with palimpsests is Cardinal Angelo Mai. He was in turn director of several important manuscript collections, and he noticed that some of his property was clearly overwritten. Experiments with chemicals brought up the original text (sometimes then destroying the manuscript), and allowed him to recover a trove of lost texts, including Cicero's Republic, Fronto's Letters and much else. Much of this was at the Ambrosian library in Milan which had acquired many of the manuscripts of Bobbio, a monastery in North Italy founded by the Irish monastery-founder St. Columbanus at the very start of the Dark Ages, when many books were still in circulation. The monks valued the parchment, not the useless pagan texts, but thereby preserved large amounts of them.

Once it was realised that the lettering could be seen using quartz lamps the use of chemicals stopped. But even more can be seen if you can vary the wavelength of the light used. This is the principle behind Multi-Spectral Imaging, which is the technique used on the Archimedes palimpsests, and also on the Herculaneum rolls which feature black ink on charred-black papyrus. While normal light allows nothing, you just change the wavelength of the light shined on it until you find a wavelength (think colour of light) at which the ink absorbs it but the parchment does not, and there you are.

The other moral of the story is that the only people with real access to our manuscript collections are those on the staff. I doubt the Ambrosian would allow a visitor even to use a camera in a mobile phone.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Steven Carr

Isn't that in the heyday of Christianity encouraging science to develop?

S.C.Carlson

Mar Saba was not located in Paris.

Aerik

S.C.Carlson

Actually, I think that considering that a monastary can do a pretty good job of shepherding plenty of sheep/goats/whatever to provide plenty of parchment, I think that palimpsests and modern xtians editing library books are the same in intent as well. In both cases, there is clear disrespect for non-religious text and real-world philosophy.