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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.
>Oh, like in the Crusades when sacking Christians armies would often wipe out every inhabitant-whether Jewish, Muslim, or Christian-of a conquered city?
I know you are playing the moral equivalence game here, so it might be worthwhile for me to point out some salient facts:
1) I am not Christian, so I do not excuse any specific or general barbarity on the part of the Crusades by Christians.
2) Muslim conquests of the Levant and North Africa starting in the 7th Century triggered a three century long archeology dark age (also, a similar dark age throughout the Mediterranean). Populations collapsed from their Roman and post-Roman levels. The ecologies of the North Africa and Levant regions were destroyed, and to this day have yet to recover. Numerous Roman settlements were sacked and the inhabitants slaughtered, never to return. That's why you can go to Algeria or Libya or Syria and find intact Roman ruins today.
3) Christianity didn't have the concept of Holy War until exposed to Islamic Jihad. The Crusades were basically a Christian reaction to the Muslim Jihad which had been attacking Christian lands for a solid 350 years before the first Crusade kicked off, during which millions were killed, and millions more sold into slavery. The time frame of these Christian sites "disappearing" was during the initial Muslim conquest, when Christians and Christianity had done nothing to Islam or Muslims except not converting when it was demanded by Mohammed and his acolytes. So they got murdered by him and his followers, their books and buildings burned, and their children sold into slavery.
4) Despite all the supposed raping, plundering, and massacres at the hands of the Crusaders, they had almost no demographic impact on the region. Contrast that with the demographic impact of the initial Muslim conquests, and you come up with two different tales. Islam didn't fall into a dark age because the Crusades destroyed their cities, murdered their people, and destroyed their culture.