Astronomical discovery

CODEX CLIMACI RESCRIPTUS: Scholars Discover Early Astronomical Drawings. Undergraduate Students with Green Scholars Initiative Find 1,500-Year-Old Drawings of Constellations Hidden in Ancient Biblical Manuscript.

OKLAHOMA CITY, Sept. 19, 2014—

Museum of the Bible announced today that undergraduate students with its Green Scholars Initiative have discovered what may be among the earliest-known classical drawings of celestial constellations hidden under a layer of Greek text in a 1,500-year-old biblical manuscript. Additionally, the student-scholars at Tyndale House, an institution associated with the University of Cambridge, found the earliest manuscript attributed to Eratosthenes in the same document. The Greek mathematician, geographer and astronomer was the first to calculate the Earth’s circumference, the tilt of its axis and the inventor of geography.

The research, conducted in 2012 and 2013 at Cambridge, also uncovered the earliest copy of the opening of a work by Aratus, a Greek poet who was one of the first to write about constellations and other celestial phenomena.

The discoveries were made as students used high-tech, multispectral imaging on the Codex Climaci Rescriptus, an ancient codex purchased in 2009 as part of the Green Collection, one of the world’s largest private collections of rare biblical texts and artifacts. This is a palimpsest manuscript, meaning the writing underneath was rubbed out and written over as ancient scribes repurposed costly parchment in order to create a new document.

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Follow the link for more details. Regular readers will recall that this manuscript is a palimpsest (i.e., a lower layer of writing has been erased and then over-written with new text). The top layer of writing has biblical texts in Greek, but the erased writing is gradually being recovered and includes biblical and other material in Aramaic, and now this. Background on the Codex Climaci Rescriptus is here and links. It was bought at auction in 2009 for the Green Collection (but cf. also here), about which there has been much controversy recently. I blog, you decide.