Fascinating article in Antigone, a relatively new Classics journal on Greek and Roman times, about the rediscovery of ancient texts on Greek astronomy. The article, How Lost Secrets of Greek Astronomy Were Rediscovered, by Peter J Williams, describes how this all came about.
Originally the rediscovered text was thought to consist of:
Lines from Aratus' (315-240 BC) poem the Phaenomena, used to teach the constellations.
Drawings of the constellations
Stories from Eratosthenes (276-195 BC), the first person to accurately measure the circumference of the Earth, of how the constellations arose
Listing by Eratosthenes of the stars in each constellation
More recently the researchers have discovered parts of the lost star catalogue of Hipparchus (190-120 BC), regarded as the greatest astronomer of the ancient world.
The story of the rediscovery starts with two wealthy Scottish widows and twin sisters, Agnes Smith Lewis (1843–1926) and Margaret Dunlop Gibson (1843–1920). The sisters were residents at Cambridge University and also traveled widely in the Middle East. While in Egypt they purchased an ancient manuscript, Codex Climaci Rescriptus, which likely originated at St Catherine's Monastery, located at the foot of what was reputedly Mt Sinai. The Monastery has been the source of many ancient manuscripts in the form of palimpsests. A palimpsest is a document on which something has been written over an existing manuscript, a common practice in the first millennium because of the shortage of papyrus and lack of paper.
When brought back to Cambridge it was visibly apparent that writing existed beneath the more recent literary work written in Syriac. Scholars determined that it contained about 100 pages in Aramaic and Greek of biblical and philosophical texts. But nine pages remained indescipherable with the techniques of the time.
This changed in 2010 when the Cambridge college sold the manuscript to the Green family (founders of the Hobby Lobby chain) who donated it to their new Bible museum in Washington DC. In 2012 the author of the Antigone article, who is Principal of Tyndale House in Cambridge, the UK's largest institute dedicated to the research of the Bible, agreed to assemble a team to work on the undertext. The museum undertook rounds of digital imaging, including multispectral imaging to help the researchers.
Over the next five years, painstaking progress was made in deciphering the text. Then, in 2018, as Williams writes:
" . . . in 2017 the museum commissioned imaging and processing provided by a combination of the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library, the Lazarus Project of the University of Rochester, and the Rochester Institute of Technology. 42 images of each page were captured using different wavelengths and light filters and then programmers processed the images to make particular text more visible to researchers. In 2018 the image-processing specialists joined our textual scholars for a week at Tyndale House and we were able to give real-time feedback on the particular pixels or ink we wanted enhanced. Progress sped up.
One of the programmers, Vasilis Kasotakis, using Principal Components Analysis and Independent Components Analysis struck on exactly the right formula, so that suddenly a creature like a fish appeared on his screen where nothing significant had previously been visible. He let out an exclamation and everyone in the room crowded round to see his discovery."
The researchers began to understand they were reading an integrated text in which when the Aratus poem mentioned a constellation, Erathosthenes text about that constellation was inserted.
But it was not until 2021 that Williams was able to decipher key passages which turned out to be previously unknown text from the work of Hipparchus - the oldest known astronomical measurements!
Who knows what else awaits discovery? Williams writes:
There may also be more parts of the manuscript still in St Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai, where there are at least 160 palimpsests, most of which have not been studied.
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