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Lost Languages Discovered in One of the World's Oldest Continuously Run Libraries (smithsonianmag.com)
Saint Catherine's Monastery, a sacred Christian site nestled in the shadow of Mount Sinai, is home to one of the world's oldest continuously used libraries. Thousands of manuscripts and books are kept there -- some of which contain hidden treasures. An anonymous reader shares a report: Now, a team of researchers is using new technology to uncover texts that were erased and written over by the monks who lived and worked at the monastery. Many of these original texts were written in languages well known to researchers -- Latin, Greek, Arabic -- but others were inscribed in long-lost languages that are rarely seen in the historical record. Manuscripts with multiple layers of writing are known as palimpsests, and there are about 130 of them at St. Catherine's Monastery, according to the website of the Early Manuscript Electronic Library, which has been leading the initiative to uncover the original texts. With the rise of Islam in the 7th century, Christian sites in the Sinai Desert began to disappear, and Saint Catherine's found itself in relative isolation. Monks turned to reusing older parchments when supplies at the monastery ran scarce. To uncover the palimpsests' secret texts, researchers photographed thousands of pages multiple times, illuminating each page with different-colored lights. They also photographed the pages with light shining onto them from behind, or from an oblique angle, which helped "highlight tiny bumps and depressions in the surface," Gray writes. They then fed the information into a computer algorithm, which is able to distinguish the more recent texts from the originals.
Not exactly. Palimpsets are on parchment not paper, and the method works in part because classical methods of writing used thick ink that was there for a long time which was then scraped away. Doing this with modern ink on a piece of paper is a very different story.
But perhaps the most intriguing finds are the manuscripts written in obscure languages that fell out of use many centuries ago. Two of the erased texts, for instance, were inked in Caucasian Albanian, a language spoken by Christians in what is now Azerbaijan. According to Sarah Laskow of Atlas Obscura, Caucasian Albanian only exists today in a few stone inscriptions. Michael Phelps, director of the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library, tells Gray of the Atlantic that the discovery of Caucasian Albanian writings at Saint Catherine’s library has helped scholars increase their knowledge of the language’s vocabulary, giving them words for things like “net” and “fish.”
Other hidden texts were written in a defunct dialect known as Christian Palestinian Aramaic, a mix of Syriac and Greek, which was discontinued in the 13th century only to be rediscovered by scholars in the 18th century.
Of course, with sea related words discovered, the obvious line of jokes is to connect this with the Deep Ones, Dagon and Cthulhu. No doubt, the true horror in the more obscure texts is being kept quiet, possibly known only to the Laundry and the Black Chamber.
The parchment was much to expensive, much to valuable to simply burn. It was a relatively easy task to scrape off the old ink.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
Why? Because it is? I know that you're a small minded individual unable to critically think but you might be shocked to learn that religion is not immediately anti-education or anti-science. For example, evolution has been considered "most probably fact" within the catholic church since the late 1800s. The pioneering work in evolution being done by a monk of all people. Toss in that for a very long time (we're talking centuries) if you wanted a science based education you went to the Jesuits (you'll be shocked to find out who they're associated with) and you'll start to understand what a moronic statements the OP as well as your post are making.
It's still about 1,400 years old, as opposed to Christianity which is about 2,000 years old. Judaism as we know it is really a merger of the ancient Hebrew monotheistic faith and Aristotlean thought, so is maybe two or three hundred years older than Christianity.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I'm surprised they didn't burn it.
You're confusing Christianity with Islam.
After 1,700 years, Buddhas fall to Taliban dynamite
The propensity of Muslims to destroy things even has multiple Wikipedia pages.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm sure some Thalidomide-brained idiot is going to drag up the Crusades or something else that happened a thousand fucking years ago in order to justify Islamic barbarity TODAY.
If he is referring to Gregor Mendel(d. 1884), the founder of modern genetics, no they didn't.
They did promote him to be abbot of his abbey, where he didn't have time from science. I guess that's technically a confirmation of the Peter Principle.
No it isn't. While secularization has reduced the number of Christians in Europe, the notion of "Christian cities dissappearing" due to Muslim immigration is preposterous. Stop spreading lies.
At a certain point, some classes of comments are transparently not serious attempts to have discussion or are people who are so divorced from reality that it really isn't in general worth the time or resources to spend that much time on them. Yes, I suppose one could point out to the person who is making comments about Christianity that in fact Christianity was responsible for the preservation of many texts from other religions and cultures and that of what we have of classical Greek and Roman literature is due purely to the preservation by monks, but why bother? Anyone who didn't sleep through high school history should know that. Similarly, one could respond to the people making anti-Islamic comments by pointing out that during much of the Middle Ages it was far easier to be a Jew or Christian in an Islamic area than it was to be a Jew or Muslim in a Christian area, but none of these people are seriously interested in those discussions.