New Syriac Palimpsests from the collection of St.Catherine's Monastery on Sinai: preliminary observations on some manuscripts (original) (raw)

Beyond the Invisible: Some Aspects of Syriac Palimpsests

Palimpsests and Related Phenomena across Languages and Cultures, 2025

The study examines Syriac palimpsests and provides observations into the practice of manuscript palimpsestation and reuse in the Syriac Christian milieu during the Middle Ages. Predominantly attested for the period between the ninth and eleventh centuries, the recycling of Syriac parchment codices was primarily confined to various traditions of Syriac Christianity. The study, undertaken on the basis of a list of palimpsests with identified undertexts, takes a close look at various characteristics of reused codices and those produced from them. Alongside such aspects as age and content, the study addresses the issue of reasons leading to reuse; proposes a typology of newly produced codices based on the number of manuscripts they were made of; and distinguishes two possible scenarios for the provenance of reused codices.

Classical Texts among the Palimpsests of the Monastery of St. Catherine (Sinai): An Overview

C. Rapp, G. Rossetto, J. Grusková, G. Kessel (eds), New Light on Old Manuscripts: The Sinai Palimpsests and Other Advances in Palimpsest Studies (Veröffentlichungen zur Byzanzforschung 45), Vienna, 2023

updated: 22.01.2021. This number does not include the over 100 palimpsest fragments from the fragments collection of the Monastery, which were surveyed and documented by Damianos Kasotakis from March to May 2020. 2 On the language distribution among the overtexts and the undertexts, see Rapp, Secluded Place or Global Magnet? and Rapp's contribution to this volume. 3 The exact total number of Sinai manuscripts was indicated to me by Father Justin Sinaites (personal communication, February 2021). See also Frøyshov, Les manuscrits de la bibliothèque du Sinaï, 61. 4 The latter term was used during the Sinai Palimpsests Project. 5 As far as the Sinai palimpsests are concerned, only in few cases was one textual unit or UTO copied by more than one hand. This happens for texts of documentary nature, such as those extant as scriptiones inferiores in Sin. ar. NF 8 (Diktyon 58318). 6 The Appendix indicates the names of the scholars who identified the texts which I take into consideration in this article.

A New (Double Palimpsest) Witness to the Old Syriac Gospels (Vat. iber. 4, ff. 1 & 5

New Testament Studies, 69(2), 210-221, 2023

Vat. iber. 4, a membrum disjectum of the manuscript Sin. geo. 49, contains on two of its folios the Syriac Gospel text as the lowest layer (scriptio ima) within a double palimpsest. Comparison with known Syriac versions of the extant text-Matt 11.30-12.26shows that the text represents the Old Syriac version, and is particularly akin to the Curetonianus (Sy c). On palaeographic grounds, the original Gospel manuscript can be dated to the first half of the sixth century. The fragment is so far the only known vestige of the fourth manuscript witness to the Old Syriac version.