The manuscript came from the Greek Orthodox St Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai Peninsula, Egypt, but most of its 146 leaves, or folios, are now owned by the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC. The pages contain the Codex Climaci Rescriptus, a collection of Syriac texts written in the tenth or eleventh centuries. But the codex is a palimpsest: parchment that was scraped clean of older text by the scribe so that it could be reused.For the recovery of the Erastosthenes material in 2017, see here. For other PaleoJudaica posts on the Codex Climaci Rescriptus, see here and here and links.The older writing was thought to contain further Christian texts and, in 2012, biblical scholar Peter Williams at the University of Cambridge, UK, asked his students to study the pages as a summer project. One of them, Jamie Klair, unexpectedly spotted a passage in Greek often attributed to the astronomer Eratosthenes. In 2017, the pages were re-analysed using state-of-the-art multispectral imaging. Researchers at the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library in Rolling Hills Estates, California, and the University of Rochester in New York took 42 photographs of each page in varying wavelengths of light, and used computer algorithms to search for combinations of frequencies that enhanced the hidden text.
Cross-file unde Syriac Watch, Palimpsests, Algorithm Watch, and Lost Books.
UPDATE: The underlying article in the Journal for the History of Astronomy is accesible for free: New evidence for Hipparchus’ Star Catalogue revealed by multispectral imaging.
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