Fascinating story, well-presented in the article cited: lots more
here than just "using high tech to read ancient mss.", too --
it's the Codex Sinaiticus, & Saint Catherine's Monastery, & 19th
c. scholarly skulduggery & 20th c. cultural property dealings &
lots more -- Agatha Christie comes to codicology...
Also, how to "unfold" a bunch of "crumpled" manuscripts preserved
for centuries as follows:
"The monks thought they had lost the entire manuscript to
Europe until 1975, when they discovered 12 of its pages
and 15 fragments in a forgotten chamber, buried under a
collapsed ceiling with thousands of other parchment
leaves and fragments... 'Some of them are crumpled in the
state they were found in and they need to be opened up...'"
-- sounds like Aurel Stein in Dunhuang, or Howard Carter's
"_wonderful_ things..." -- plus in this case, maybe inevitably,
"In the late 19th century, scholars applied chemicals to
the manuscript that briefly made the underlying text
visible but made the parchment more brittle..."
-- I seem to remember that they used to shellac ancient marble
statues to make them shiny, didn't they? Glad they didn't paint
the old cathedrals polychrome... Which would be considered more
politically correct nowadays, I wonder: a polychrome cathedral or
a black & white one? a highlighted ancient ms. or a non-? a Codex
Sinaiticus with or without shellac & marginalia?
Agatha has left us. Maybe Umberto Eco could write this one.
Many thanks for the pointer. I hope that when the Codex
Sinaiticus Website project website appears that someone will tell
us about it here? In the meantime there is a very interesting
rundown on Lobegott Friedrich Constantin (von) Tischendorf and
his various doings at,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Sinaiticushttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantin_von_Tischendorf
"Tischendorf exemplified the buccaneer image of 19th
century archaeology..."
-- so, maybe Dan Brown, then, and maybe in addition George Lucas,
for an "Indiana Jones" update...
Jack Kessler, kessler@well.com
ps. Stanford is pursuing a project of interest to "crumbled
codex" folks here, perhaps: their Stanford Digital Forma Urbis
Romae Project, per this month's National Geographic and online at,
http://formaurbis.stanford.edu/http://formaurbis.stanford.edu/docs/FURslabmap.html
-- the task of reassembling 1,186 shattered marble map fragments
forming 10-15% of an ancient map of Rome, now greatly assisted by
computerization / digitization --
"...a team from Stanford's Computer Graphics laboratory
has been creating digital photographs and 3D models of
all 1,186 fragments. The next step is to develop 3D
matching algorithms to 'solve the map', and to build a
fully searchable database of the fragments..."
On Tue, 21 Jun 2005, s cheiner wrote:
> The following article is about using high tech to read ancient
> mss.:
>
> http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/software/multimedia/story/0,10801,102634,00.html?source=NLT_AM&nid=102634
>
> C.J. Scheiner