Posted on 11/01/2022 7:21:43 PM PDT by marshmallow
(This cross-fade montage shows a detail of the palimpsest under ordinary lighting; under multispectral analysis; and with a reconstruction of the hidden text.Credit: Museum of the Bible (CC BY-SA 4.0). Photo by Early Manuscripts Electronic Library/Lazarus Project, University of Rochester; multispectral processing by Keith T. Knox; tracings by Emanuel Zingg.)
Scholars have been searching for what is believed to be the first map of the nighttime sky for centuries, and now they have finally found the medieval parchment hidden beneath Christian texts from the library at St. Catherine’s Monastery on Mt. Sinai.
James Evans, a historian of astronomy at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington, describes the discovery of the astronomer Hipparchus’ star catalogue as “rare” and “remarkable,” reports nature.com.
The astronomer’s work “illuminates a crucial moment in the birth of science, when astronomers shifted from simply describing the patterns they saw in the sky to measuring and predicting them,” Evans explained.
In 2017, a 6th century AD manuscript containing recipes of the “father of medicine,” the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, was discovered in the St. Catherine’s library.
The manuscript with the newly discovered astronomical text came from St. Catherine’s Monastery, though most of it is now owned by the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC. The codex is a palimpsest, where parchment is scraped clean of older text so it can be reused. The star catalogue was discovered underneath 10th-11th century Syriac texts.
(Excerpt) Read more at orthochristian.com ...
That’s amazing.
This is great, thanks for posting.
The image made me think of the National Treasure movie.
Lemon juice, hidden text... it’s all in there.
Then the side mention of Hippocrates really made me smile. I thought, Bill and Ted would have really loved that guy, seeing that he was the father of modern zoos.
Hippo Crates?...................
Doesn’t look like a map to me. Does the writing describe the objects and give coordinates?
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