Saturday, July 8, 2017

New Manuscript Discovered at Saint Catherine's Monastery

A news article popped up on my Facebook feed announcing that a new manuscript was discovered during renovations at Saint Catherine's Monastery, where Codex Sinaiticus was "discovered" by Tischendorf. The news source describes the find;
"Cairo- Egypt has announced the discovery of a rare manuscript dating back to the fifth or sixth century at the Saint Catherine Monastery in southern Sinai. Minister of Antiquities Khaled El-Enany said the manuscript was uncovered by monks during restoration works carried out at the monastery’s library. The minister highlighted the discovery’s importance, as it features medical texts written by the renowned Greek physician Hippocrates, along with three other texts by an anonymous writer."

Apparently the Hippocratic text is part of the underlying text of a Biblical palimpsest. The article describes the manuscript further on;
"Mohamed Abdel-Latif, assistant minister of antiquities for archaeological sites, explained that the discovered document is one of those known as "Palmesit" manuscripts, dating to the 6th century AD. The manuscript is written on vellum and bears parts of herbal remedies from a Greek recipe missing before 1200AD. He also noted that the second layer of the book features extracts from the Bible known as "Sinaitic manuscript" from the medieval eras."
 I wonder if the 'anonymous write' could be Galen, a second century physician who wrote copious commentaries and notes on Hippocrates. It is also curious what manuscript is meant by the "Sinaitic manuscript" mentioned.

You can read the full article here. News Source, ASHARQ AL-AWSAT


2 comments:

  1. Any speculation as to how long it will take to get this recipe translated and out into the world of 2017?

    ReplyDelete