Giulia Rossetto from the Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) discovered a previously unknown text from Homer’s time in St. Catherine’s Monastery in the south of the Egyptian peninsula of Sinai. From fragments of an erased writing on medieval parchment sheets, she was able to reconstruct a text that tells in verse form of the childhood of the god Dionysus. The researcher reports on it in the “Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik”.
The Catherine’s Monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai was founded in the 6th century by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian and is thus the oldest monastery in Christendom that has been inhabited to this day. Its library contains an extraordinary collection of manuscripts from the first millennium with thousands of manuscripts.
These include over 160 so-called palimpsest manuscripts. These are written parchment pages and rolls that have been recycled. The original ink was washed off or scraped off the leaves and the valuable parchment was written on again.
Using multispectral photography and subsequent computer-aided image analysis, the scientists can make fragments that have been preserved in a poor condition legible again. In the course of the “Sinai Palimpsests Project” started in 2011, 74 manuscripts have been deciphered so far.
Giulia Rossetto from the Institute for Medieval Research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences discovered two medieval parchment sheets with a previously unknown text while she was still studying for her doctorate at the University of Vienna. With painstaking work, she was able to decipher the erased writing on it, letter by letter.
“It is a poetic text in hexameters, the classic meter of epic poetry. This came from an epic that originally probably comprised 24 books, and whose existence has so far only been indirectly proven,” explained Rossetto. The fact that the content dates from Homer’s time “we know from certain features in the metric and certain archaic Greek words that were used,” Rossetto told the APA. In addition, there are quotations from the text by other authors, according to whose information the text from this period – about 7th to 8th century BC. Chr. – stem.
An important indication of the meaning of the text is the mention of the name Dionysus, the ancient god of wine. The content of the poem revolves around the childhood of Dionysus, toys and gifts are mentioned that are used by adversaries – the titans – to distract the child.
“These details were previously only known from indirect transmission, i.e. from quotations in other works. Now, for the first time, we have the original text to which these quotations go back,” says Claudia Rapp from the University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the scientific director of the “Sinai Palimpsests Project” is. The text was known until late antiquity, the font style suggests that it was copied in Egypt in the 5th or 6th century.
According to Rapp, the discovery is of great cultural and historical interest, as it shows that there was still an active interest in religious texts from pagan antiquity in Egypt at that time, “at a time when Christianity was becoming firmly established in the Roman Empire establish.” But at some point later the text was erased again. In the early 10th century, Arabic-speaking monks in the Christian monastery of Mar Saba near Jerusalem were rewriting the leaves with descriptions of the lives of saints.
(SERVICE – Internet: http://sinaipalimpsests.org/)