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Purchased cheaply at auction as a second edition with extensive Latin "marginalia" by an unknown hand, this copy of "De humani corporis fabrica" was found to have been Andreas Vesalius' personal copy, and the thousands of autograph notes were his revisions for a third edition that never saw publication, offering rare insight into the mind of one of history's most important scientists and teachers.Purchased cheaply at auction as a second edition with extensive Latin "marginalia" by an unknown hand, this copy of "De humani corporis fabrica" was found to have been Andreas Vesalius' personal copy, and the thousands of autograph...

A team of scientists at the University of Basel, Switzerland, has discovered that a 1,800-year-old papyrus from the Basel Papyrus Collection is an ancient medical text from late antiquity and that it was likely written by the famous Roman physician Galen. The University Library in Basel possesses a collection of 65 papyri, mostly in Greek and several in Coptic, Hieratic and Latin. Less than half of this collection was published by Ernst Rabel in 1917 in Papyrusurkunden der Öffentlichen Bibliothek der Universität zu Basel. With mirror writing on both sides, one of the Basel papyri — dubbed P.Basel 1A —...

If you’re a history buff, you might not know much particle physics. But the two fields share more in common than you’d think. X-rays from a high-energy lab have revealed ancient Greek medical texts that had been stripped and covered with religious writing. Scientists at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have long been using high-powered x-rays at their Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL) to analyze ancient texts. This week, they’ll be revealing the text beneath 10th-century psalms from the St. Catherine’s Monastery on the Sinai Peninsula. The hidden words were a translation of writings by the ancient...

Common in the Middle Ages, palimpsests are works written on calf hide vellum pages, where the earlier ink has been scraped off and replaced with new writing. While some underlying text can occasionally be made out with the naked eye, technologies such as infrared bring to light words that were lost centuries ago...Iceland's connections to Scandinavia led to some of the most well-preserved information from the Viking Age, including an overview of Norway's royal lineage through the death of Magnus V Erlingsson in 1184. The islands's ancient poets, known as Skalds, were highly sought after across the Norse world. Norwegian...

Hidden for centuries, a forgotten chapter of the Bible has emerged from the shadows of history. Researchers, armed with ultraviolet light and meticulous scholarship, have uncovered a 1,750-year-old text that offers a fresh glimpse into the evolving nature of scripture. This find isn’t just a historical curiosity; it’s a profound insight into how faith and tradition were shaped in early Christianity. Preserved in an ancient Syriac manuscript, the chapter challenges long-held assumptions about biblical texts and their seemingly static nature. With its subtle variations and expanded narrative, this rediscovery raises compelling questions: What does this mean for the modern understanding...

In a 21st-century version of the age of discovery, teams of computer scientists, conservationists and scholars are fanning out across the globe in a race to digitize crumbling literary treasures. In the process, they're uncovering unexpected troves of new finds, including never-before-seen versions of the Christian Gospels, fragments of Greek poetry and commentaries on Aristotle. Improved technology is allowing researchers to scan ancient texts that were once unreadable -- blackened in fires or by chemical erosion, painted over or simply too fragile to unroll. Now, scholars are studying these works with X-ray fluorescence, multispectral imaging used by NASA to photograph...

Not what it appears to be: the Archaic Mark LONDON. A clever bit of detective work by US scholars and scientists has proven that one of the jewels of the University of Chicago’s manuscript collection is, in fact, a skilled late 19th- or early 20th-century forgery. Although speculation as to the authenticity of the Archaic Mark codex has been rife for more than 60 years, prior to this definitive research many believed it was an early record (possibly as early as the 14th century) of the Gospel of Mark and the closest of any extant manuscript to the world’s oldest...

Scientists x-rayed ancient Egyptian tomb paintings to better understand the painters' creative process.Every painter has a process, but the painstaking revisions and countless tiny edits are invisible to those who only see the final product. In a study published today in PLOS ONE, researchers used x-rays to reveal how 3000-year-old paintings inside Egypt’s Theban Necropolis unfolded step by step. The findings hint at the creative process used to produce these ancient masterworks.Applying the x-ray method to ancient Egyptian wall paintings “is really a game changer,” says Marine Cotte, a chemist at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, who previously collaborated with...

Although it is the world’s oldest continually operating library, dating back to the 6th century, the collection of manuscripts at St. Catherine’s Monastery at the foot of Mt. Sinai is no stranger to the latest technology. In 2012, they began spectral imaging on many of the manuscripts to discover the texts beneath the texts. Many of the manuscripts are palimpsests, meaning a previous text had been erased so the scribe could reuse the valuable parchments. Traces of the original texts remained, however. Now the monastery has begun a high-tech process of digitizing its 4,500 manuscripts—a process that could easily take...

The only recorded palimpsest in which a Christian text has been effaced to make way for the Islamic holy text is to go on sale at Christie’s An “extraordinary” discovery by an eagle-eyed scholar has identified the shadowy outlines of passages from the Bible behind an eighth-century manuscript of the Qur’an – the only recorded palimpsest in which a Christian text has been effaced to make way for the Islamic holy text. French scholar Dr Eléonore Cellard was looking for images of a palimpsest page sold a decade earlier by Christie’s when she came across the auction house’s latest catalogue,...

The first findings of the most detailed study yet by two British archaeologists into the Nazca Lines – enigmatic drawings created between 2,100 and 1,300 years ago in the Peruvian desert – have been published in the latest issue of the journal Antiquity. As part of a five-year investigation, Dr Nicholas Saunders of the University of Bristol's Department of Archaeology and Anthropology and Professor Clive Ruggles of the University of Leicester walked 1,500 km of desert in southern Peru, tracing the lines and geometric figures created by the Nasca people between 100 BC and AD 700. The confusing palimpsest of...

Many books were printed and bound in the 16th and 17th centuries. Bookbinders used parchment to strengthen their book bindings; that material was expensive and therefore people often chose to cut up old, medieval manuscripts. This often involved manuscripts that had lost their value: books that were too Catholic or were written in a language that could no longer be read.Something very special was found in a number of book bindings in the Alkmaar Regional Archive: 21 fragments of a manuscript from the 11th century, an almost 1,000-year-old Latin psalter with Old English glosses. Thijs Porck, senior university lecturer of...

One of the latest discoveries in the world of biblical research comes as a result of ultraviolet light technology that allowed researchers to see and translate a portion of scripture written nearly 1,500 years ago.Historian Grigory Kessel from the Austrian Academy of Sciences published his work at Cambridge and explained how the new technology has provided more insight into the preservation of scripture:Kissel said that they found an ancient version of Chapter 12 in the book of Matthew in the Bible that had been hidden beneath a section of text for over 1,500 years. His discovering is one of the...

His study found noticeable differences in how the Matthew chapters were translated.The Biblical text under UV light. Photo: Vatican Library. A medieval scholar has discovered one of the earliest translations of the Gospels using UV light. Grigory Kessel from the Austrian Academy of Sciences found the translation, which is written in Old Syriac and dates back 1,750 years, beneath three layers of text (Syriac, Greek, and Georgian) in a manuscript that has been in the Vatican Library since the mid-20th century. Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic that emerged during the 1st century. The text is believed to be a...

Researchers from the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OeAW) have discovered a small manuscript fragment of the Syriac translation of the New Testament, which is one of the oldest textual witnesses of the Gospels. The fragment was produced in the 3rd century and copied in the 6th century. The discovery of the fragment is an important piece of the puzzle in New Testament history. Grigory Kessel, a medievalist from the Austrian Academy of Sciences, was able to identify the fragment with the help of ultraviolet photography. The fragment was found as the third layer of text, or double palimpsest, in the...

Ultra-violet light has revealed a hidden fragment of a Syriac Christian New Testament translation dating back 1,750 years, according to a study published by the Journal Of New Testament Studies. Grigory Kessel, a medievalist from the Austrian Academy of Sciences, was able to decipher a lost fragment of the Gospels that had been written in Syriac text 1,750 years ago. Because parchment was scarce in the Middle East at the time, manuscripts were often erased and reused. By using UV light on a 6th century manuscript, Kessel was able to uncover one of the earliest translations of the New Testament...

Parchment was scarce in the desert in the Middle Ages, so manuscripts were often erased and reused.A medievalist from the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OeAW) has now been able to make legible the lost words on this layered manuscript, a so-called palimpsest: Grigory Kessel discovered one of the earliest translations of the Gospels, made in the 3rd century and copied in the 6th century, on individual surviving pages of this manuscript. The findings are published in the journal New Testament Studies...The small manuscript fragment, which can now be considered as the fourth textual witness, was identified by Grigory Kessel using...

True or false? Eight hundred years ago, a monk did his best to erase a copy of some of Archimedes' most important work, putting some prayers on the parchment instead, and the words of the great Greek mathematician were then gone forever. False. At Stanford University in California, some scientists are using X-ray technology to make the older ink shine through the later scribbling, thereby recovering a remarkable piece of history and doing something else to boot. They are giving us an illustration among many of how a civilization made great in part by the Greeks of antiquity remains great...

(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...

...The manuscript originated from the Greek Orthodox St Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai Peninsula, Egypt, but most of its 146 foils are now owned by the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC, Nature reports....the Codex Climaci Rescriptus is palimpsest, which is a parchment that was scraped clean of older text by the scribe so that it could be reused - technique to save paper...The astronomical information describes star-origin myths by Eratosthenes and parts of a famous third-century-BC poem called Phaenomena that was written by Aratus of Soli and also highlights constellations.Peter Williams, a biblical expert and lecturer on Hebrew...