ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Twenty Years of Recovering Ancient Texts Long Considered Lost

• In Event: DH in the History of Premodern Sciences 2

English Abstract

In the last twenty years, innovations in cultural heritage imaging have fundamentally transformed the landscape of manuscript studies and opened a new era of discovery. When the Archimedes Palimpsest project concluded its final imaging session in 2007, it produced a prototype multispectral imaging (MSI) system customized for the recovery of erased or obscured text in ancient and medieval manuscripts. In 2011, the scientific team from that project joined EMEL in an ambitious effort to use MSI to recover hundreds of erased texts from the palimpsests of St. Catherine's Monastery of the Sinai. The Sinai Palimpsests Project not only recovered thousands of pages of erased texts in eleven languages and dating from the fifth to the eleventh century, but also provided six years of continuous funding for its scientific participants to engineer marketable solutions for MSI for libraries and museums. Most recently EMEL led a collaborative project to recover erased texts from palimpsests at the Biblioteca Capitolare di Verona, Europe's oldest library, where eighteenth and nineteenth scholars painted chemicals onto palimpsests resulting today in discolored and damaged parchment. This presentation will trace the course of technological innovation and text recovery with MSI over the last twenty years.

Authors

• Damianos Kasotakis, EMEL

• Michael Phelps, EMEL