So Let's Be Real - the Sinai Palimpsest Project Turns Out to Be a Big Waste of Time

[Secret Alias]

When they announced that they were going through all the books St Catherine's at Sinai we all had visions of all these new exciting works that were going to be discovered. Seems to be it was a big nothing-burger. Can anything say what notable material was uncovered with all these new technological tools?

[StephenGoranson]

Some texts were uncovered.
Somewhat related in recent news:

The oldest-to-date medical recipes from Hippocrates were recently discovered by monks at the St. Catherine’s Monastery in South Sinai, Egypt.

The discovery of the 6th century AD manuscript, which contains many medical recipes written by the ancient physician, occurred amidst restorations at the monastery’s library. .....

https://greekreporter.com/2022/07/21/me ... ery-egypt/

[StephenGoranson]

Some finds, so far, mentioned:
http://sinaipalimpsests.org/palimpsests-and-scholarship

including this photo caption:
Scholar Agamemnon Tselikas and Scientist Bill Christens-Barry discuss a difficult palimpsest,while Scientist Keith Knox works in the background.

[Secret Alias]

Disappointing

[StephenGoranson]

Excerpts from a 2017 article in The Atlantic by Richard Gray:
[....]
One of the languages to reemerge from the parchments is Caucasian Albanian, which was spoken by a Christian kingdom in what is now modern day Azerbaijan. Almost all written records from the kingdom were lost in the 8th and 9th century when its churches were destroyed.

“There are two palimpsests here that have Caucasian Albanian text in the erased layer,” says Michael Phelps, the director of the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library and leader of the project. “They are the only two texts that survive in this language ... We were sitting with one of the scholars and he was adding to the language as we were processing the images. In real time he was saying ‘now we have the word for net’ and ‘now the word for fish.’”

Another dead language to be found in the palimpsests is one used by some of the earliest Christian communities in the Middle East. Known as Christian Palestinian Aramaic, it is a strange mix of Syriac and Greek that died out in the 13th century. Some of the earliest versions of the New Testament were written in this language. “This was an entire community of people who had a literature, art, and spirituality,” says Phelps. “Almost all of that has been lost, yet their cultural DNA exists in our culture today. These palimpsest texts are giving them a voice again and letting us learn about how they contributed to who we are today.”

Other palimpsests are written in more common languages like Arabic, Syriac, Latin, and Greek. More than 108 pages of previously unknown Greek poetry were uncovered beneath more recent Arabic and Georgian texts. [....]

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arc ... ts/536313/

[Secret Alias]

Still I have gone on these searches in libraries. If this was me, I'd be disappointed with my efforts. There was an expectation that 'lost books' would be lurking in the library somewhere.

[StephenGoranson]

agressive insipidity, noted

[Secret Alias]

Really. Money has no bearing in factoring whether or not a project was 'successful' or not. I forgot. You're a product of an institutional culture which tends to be aggressively hostile to financial accountability. Surely we were expecting more than a Hippocrates book and some dead languages.

[Secret Alias]

"Arcadia provided EMEL a grant of $2.1 million in support of this collaboration with St. Catherine’s Monastery to recover erased texts among its many palimpsests." https://www.library.ucla.edu/news/lost- ... artnership Not my money but disappointing.

[StephenGoranson]

"we," paleface?
whose money, so far-- they disappointed?