More Revelations From St. Catherine’s Monastery Include Lost Ancient Languages
Scientists have found languages not used since the “Dark Ages” among ancient manuscripts revealed at the St. Catherine’s monastery in Egypt. It is the latest findings to be released
More Revelations From St. Catherine’s Monastery Include Lost Ancient Languages
Scientists have found languages not used since the “Dark Ages” among ancient manuscripts revealed at the St. Catherine’s monastery in Egypt. It is the latest findings to be released from the 1,500-year-old site that last month provided the earliest copies of texts from Greek physician Hippocrates.
Defunct Language Forms Discovered
Among the many new texts found by researchers from the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library in California were documents written in uncommon languages. According to the website of the Sinai Palimpsest Project, there is an international team of 23 world-renowned scholars that is, ‘constantly making new discoveries concerning ancient languages, texts and script styles.’
The thousands of manuscripts at St. Catherine's are written in Arabic, Greek, Ethiopian, Coptic, Armenian, and Syriac languages. With the new findings, this list now includes Caucasian Albanian, which had only been known from dispersed stone engravings until now, and Christian Palestinian Aramaic that became defunct after the 12th century. There are also texts written in Latin that have not yet been fully identified but are ‘sometimes in very early scripts’, states Sinai Palimpsest Project.
Additionally, three ancient Greek medical texts that were previously unknown to historians were also uncovered, as well as the earliest copies of some texts from legendary Greek physician Hippocrates, as reported in an Ancient-Origins article last month.
“The age of discovery is not over,” Michael Phelps from the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library in California told The Times. And adds, “In the 20th century new manuscripts were discovered in caves. In the 21st century, we will apply new techniques to manuscripts that have been under our noses. We will recover lost voices.”
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A fragment of a reused parchment, or palimpsest, covered with medieval Greek writing (left) shows faint traces of a text lying beneath. Multispectral imaging of the parchment (right) shows that the erased text, in red, is 1 Corinthians, transcribed in the 5th century. (Credit : Greekworldmedia )
New Technique Helps Scientist Unearth Lost Texts
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