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 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.
The Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus designated by the siglum C or 04, δ 3, is a manuscript of the Greek Bible, written on parchment. It contains most of the New Testament and some Old Testament books, with sizeable portions missing. It is one of the four great uncials. The manuscript is not intact: its current condition contains material from every New Testament book except 2 Thessalonians and 2 John; however, only six books of the Greek Old Testament are represented. It is not known whether 2 Thessalonians and 2 John were excluded on purpose, or whether no fragment of either epistle happened to survive.
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.
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.
A biblical manuscript is any handwritten copy of a portion of the text of the Bible. Biblical manuscripts vary in size from tiny scrolls containing individual verses of the Jewish scriptures to huge polyglot codices containing both the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) and the New Testament, as well as extracanonical works.
Uncial 064 designated by, ε 10, is a Greek uncial codex of the New Testament, on parchment leaves. Formerly it was labelled by Θe. Palimpsest.
Christian Palestinian Aramaic was a Western Aramaic dialect used by the Melkite Christian community, probably of Jewish descent, in Palestine, Transjordan and Sinai between the fifth and thirteenth centuries. It is preserved in inscriptions, manuscripts and amulets. All the medieval Western Aramaic dialects are defined by religious community. CPA is closely related to its counterparts, Jewish Palestinian Aramaic (JPA) and Samaritan Aramaic (SA). CPA shows a specific vocabulary that is often not paralleled in the adjacent Western Aramaic dialects.
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.
Codex Vaticanus Graecus 2061, usually known as Uncial 048, α1 (Soden), is a Greek uncial manuscript on parchment. It contains some parts of the New Testament, homilies of several authors, and Strabo's Geographica. Formerly it was known also as the Codex Basilianus 100, earlier as Codex Patriniensis 27. It was designated by ב a, p.
Uncial 0135, ε 85 (Soden), is a Greek uncial manuscript of the New Testament, dated paleographically to the 9th century.
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.
Lectionary 27, designated by siglum ℓ27, is a Greek manuscript of the New Testament, on parchment leaves. Palaeographically it has been assigned to the 14th-century.
The great uncial codices or four great uncials are the only remaining uncial codices that contain the entire text of the Bible in Greek. They are the Codex Vaticanus in the Vatican Library, the Codex Sinaiticus and the Codex Alexandrinus in the British Library, and the Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris.
British Library, Add MS 17212 is a double palimpsest, with three successive writings: a Syriac translation of St. Chrysostom's Homilies of the 9th/10th century covers a Latin grammatical treatise from the 6th century, written in cursive, which in turn covers the Annales of Roman historian Granius Licinianus. It is a rare example of a double palimpsest. The manuscript has survived in incomplete condition.
Lectionary 316 (Gregory-Aland), designated by siglum ℓ316 is a Greek manuscript of the New Testament, on parchment. Palaeographically it has been assigned to the 8th century. The manuscript has survived in a fragmentary condition.
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 classcist 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.
