#codex zacynthius

[ancientstuff]

Recovering the text of the earliest Greek New Testament Commentary manuscript

The University of Birmingham’s Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing and Cambridge University Library are delighted to a...

This is really cool. Such a fascinating process to recover the original document of a palimpsest.

[archaeologyrocks101-blog]

A £1.1m campaign by Cambridge University Library to secure one of the most important New Testament manuscripts – the seventh-century Codex Zacynthius – has been a success.

[erikkwakkel]

Treasures below the surface of the page

An important Bible manuscript made the news this week. The University of Cambridge announced it was aiming to purchase (for 1.1. million pounds) the Codex Zacynthius, a so-called palimpsest containing the Gospel of Luke copied in the 6th or 7th century (pic 2). A palimpsest is the answer to a universal truth that ruled the medieval scriptorium: when you run out of calfs and sheep, you can’t make any more books - their skins being the source for the objects’ parchment sheets. Just one thing remained: scraping clean the pages of an existing book and fill the blank surfaces with the desired text. Presto, a medieval “palimpsest” was born (from the Greek palimpsestos, “scraped again”). Like all palimpsests, the Zacynthius Codex contains an upper text (in this case a 13th-century liturgical work) and an older lower text (the Gospel of Luke, scraped away 600 years earlier). These fascinating medieval “two-for-ones” hide all sorts of treasures below their surface, like a Gospel Book from the 6th century hidden under a 13th-century Isidore of Seville (pic 1), a really old Latin copy of Augustine underneath a Hebrew Genizah fragment (pic 3), or an early-modern musical score written over a 14th-century work (pic 4). Recycling is clearly not a modern invention.

More information about the Codex Zacynthius in this press release. Here are the zoomable pages of another important specimen, the Archimedes palimpsest. The Genizah fragment is discussed here, the music manuscript here, and the top pic here.