In textual studies, a palimpsest is a manuscript page, either from a scroll or a book, from which the text has been scraped or washed off in preparation for reuse in the form of another document. Parchment was made of lamb, calf, or kid skin and was expensive and not readily available, so, in the interest of economy, a page was often re-used by scraping off the previous writing. In colloquial usage, the term palimpsest is also used in architecture, archaeology and geomorphology to denote an object made or worked upon for one purpose and later reused for another; for example, a monumental brass the reverse blank side of which has been re-engraved.
The Syriac language, also known natively in its spoken form in early Syriac literature as Edessan, the Mesopotamian language and Aramaic, is an Eastern Middle Aramaic dialect. Classical Syriac is the academic term used to refer to the dialect's literary usage and standardization, distinguishing it from other Aramaic dialects also known as 'Syriac' or 'Syrian'. In its West-Syriac tradition, Classical Syriac is often known as leššōnō kṯoḇonōyō or simply kṯoḇonōyō, or kṯowonōyō, while in its East-Syriac tradition, it is known as leššānā ʔatīqā or saprāyā.
The Dormition of the Mother of God is a Great Feast of the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and Eastern Catholic Churches. It celebrates the "falling asleep" (death) of Mary the Theotokos, and her being taken up into heaven. The Feast of the Dormition is observed on August 15, which for the churches using the Julian calendar corresponds to August 28 on the Gregorian calendar. The Armenian Apostolic Church celebrates the Dormition not on a fixed date, but on the Sunday nearest 15 August. In Western Churches the corresponding feast is known as the Assumption of Mary, with the exception of the Scottish Episcopal Church, which has traditionally celebrated the Falling Asleep of the Blessed Virgin Mary on August 15.
Saint Catherine's Monastery, officially the Sacred Autonomous Royal Monastery of Saint Catherine of the Holy and God-Trodden Mount Sinai, is a Christian monastery located in the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt. Located at the foot of Mount Sinai, it was built between 548 and 565, and is the world's oldest continuously inhabited Christian monastery.
Westminster College in Cambridge, England is a theological college of the United Reformed Church. Its principal purpose is training for the ordination of ministers, but is also used more widely for training within the denomination.
The term Melkite, also written Melchite, refers to various Eastern Christian churches of the Byzantine Rite and their members originating in West Asia. The term comes from the common Central Semitic root m-l-k, meaning "royal", referring to the loyalty to the Byzantine emperor. The term acquired religious connotations as denominational designation for those Christians who accepted imperial religious policies, based on Christological resolutions of the Council of Chalcedon (451).
The Syriac Sinaiticus or Codex Sinaiticus Syriacus (syrs), known also as the Sinaitic Palimpsest, of Saint Catherine's Monastery, or Old Syriac Gospels is a late-4th- or early-5th-century manuscript of 179 folios, containing a nearly complete translation of the four canonical Gospels of the New Testament into Syriac, which have been overwritten by a vita (biography) of female saints and martyrs with a date corresponding to AD 697. This palimpsest is the oldest copy of the Gospels in Syriac, one of two surviving manuscripts that are conventionally dated to before the Peshitta, the standard Syriac translation.
Syriac literature is literature in the Syriac language. It is a tradition going back to the Late Antiquity. It is strongly associated with Syriac Christianity.
Eusebian canons, Eusebian sections or Eusebian apparatus, also known as Ammonian sections, are the system of dividing the four Gospels used between late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. The divisions into chapters and verses used in modern texts date only from the 13th and 16th centuries, respectively. The sections are indicated in the margin of nearly all Greek and Latin manuscripts of the Bible, but can be also found in periphical Bible transmissions as Syriac and Christian Palestinian Aramaic 5th to 8th century, and in Ethiopian manuscripts until the 14th and 15th centuries, with a few produced as late as the 17th century. These are usually summarized in canon tables at the start of the Gospels. There are about 1165 sections: 355 for Matthew, 235 for Mark, 343 for Luke, and 232 for John; the numbers, however, vary slightly in different manuscripts.
The Curetonian Gospels, designated by the siglum syrcur, are contained in a manuscript of the four gospels of the New Testament in Old Syriac. Together with the Sinaiticus Palimpsest the Curetonian Gospels form the Old Syriac Version, and are known as the Evangelion Dampharshe in the Syriac Orthodox Church.
Agnes Smith Lewis (1843–1926) and Margaret Dunlop Gibson (1843–1920), nées Smith, were English Semitic scholars and travellers. As the twin daughters of John Smith of Irvine, Ayrshire, Scotland, they learned more than 12 languages between them, specialising in Arabic, Christian Palestinian Aramaic, and Syriac, and became acclaimed scholars in their academic fields, and benefactors to the Presbyterian Church of England, especially to Westminster College, Cambridge.
Western Aramaic is a group of Aramaic dialects once spoken widely throughout the ancient Levant, predominantly in the south, and Sinai, including ancient Damascus, Nabatea, Judea, across the Palestine Region, Transjordan, Samaria as well as Lebanon and the basins of the Orontes as far as Aleppo in the north. The group was divided into several regional variants, spoken mainly by the Nabataeans, Palmyrenes, Mizrahi Jews, Melkites of Jewish and pagan descent, Samaritans, Galileans and Maronites. All of the Western Aramaic dialects are considered extinct today, except for the modern variety Western Neo-Aramaic, which is still spoken by the Arameans (Syriacs) in the towns of Maaloula and Jubb'adin in Damascus, Syria.
The Sayings of the Desert Fathers is the name given to various textual collections consisting of stories and sayings attributed to the Desert Fathers from approximately the 5th century AD.
Bible translations into Aramaic covers both Jewish translations into Aramaic (Targum) and Christian translations into Aramaic, also called Syriac (Peshitta).
Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic. Portions of the Old Testament were written in Aramaic and there are Aramaic phrases in the New Testament. Syriac translations of the New Testament were among the first and date from the 2nd century. The whole Bible was translated by the 5th century. Besides Syriac, there are Bible translations into other Aramaic dialects.
The Schøyen Collection is one of the largest private manuscript collections in the world, mostly located in Oslo and London. Formed in the 20th century by the father of current owner Martin Schøyen, it comprises manuscripts of global provenance, spanning 5,000 years of history. It contains more than 13,000 manuscript items; the oldest is about 5,300 years old. There are manuscripts from 134 different countries and territories, representing 120 languages and 185 scripts.
Codex Climaci Rescriptus is a collective palimpsest manuscript consisting of several individual manuscripts underneath, Christian Palestinian Aramaic texts of the Old and New Testament as well as two apocryphal texts, including the Dormition of the Mother of God, and is known as Uncial 0250 with a Greek uncial text of the New Testament and overwritten by Syriac treatises of Johannes Climacus : the scala paradisi and the liber ad pastorem. Paleographically the Greek text has been assigned to the 7th or 8th century, and the Aramaic text to the 6th century. It originates from Saint Catherine's Monastery going by the New Finds of 1975. Formerly it was classified for CCR 5 and CCR 6 as lectionary manuscript, with Gregory giving the number ℓ 1561 to it.
Hyrcania was an ancient fortress in the Judean Desert. It was built by Hasmonean ruler John Hyrcanus or his son Alexander Jannaeus in the 2nd or 1st century BCE.
Codex Sinaiticus Rescriptus, mostly originating in Saint Catherine's Monastery, Sinai from Sin. Georg. 34; Tsagareli 81, is an accumulation of nineteen Christian Palestinian Aramaic palimpsest manuscripts containing Old Testament, Gospel and Epistles pericopes of diverse Lectionaries, among them two witnesses of the Old Jerusalem Lectionary, various unidentified homilies and two by John Chrysostom, hagiographic texts as the Life of Pachomios, the Martyrdom of Philemon Martyrs, and the Catecheses by Cyril of Jerusalem. The palimpsests manuscripts are recycled parchment material that were erased and reused by the tenth century Georgian scribe Ioane-Zosime for overwriting them with homilies and a Iadgari. Part of the parchment leaves had been brought by him from the Monastery of Saint Sabas, south of Jerusalem in the Kidron Valley, when he moved to St Catherine's Monastery and became there librarian. In the nineteenth century most of the codex was removed from the monastery at two periods. C. Tischendorf took two thirds in 1855 and 1857 with the Codex Sinaiticus to St Peterburg and handed it over to the Imperial Library, now the National Library of Russia, and the remaining third left on a clandestine route [so-called collection of Dr Friedrich Grote (1862-1922)] and found its way into various European and later also into US collections, at present in a Norwegian collection. From the New Finds of 1975 in the Monastery of Saint Catherine missing folios of some of the underlying manuscripts could be retrieved, with one connected to Princeton, Garrett MS 24.
The Hipparchus star catalog is a list of at least 850 stars that also contained coordinates of stellar positions in the sky, based on celestial equatorial latitude and longitude. According to British classicist Thomas Heath, Hipparchus was the first to employ such a method to map the stars, at least in the West. Hipparchus is also credited with creating a celestial globe, although this object is not known to be extant. The catalog was lost to history, until parts of it were rediscovered in 2022 in the Codex Climaci Rescriptus, an ancient palimpsest found in Saint Catherine's Monastery on Mount Sinai.
