First known map of night sky found hidden in Medieval parchment

[jeffreyi]

A medieval parchment from a monastery in Egypt has yielded a surprising treasure. Hidden beneath Christian texts, scholars have discovered what seems to be part of the long-lost star catalogue of the astronomer Hipparchus — believed to be the earliest known attempt to map the entire sky.

Snip

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03296-1

[tanyev]

1. So cool that they are able to resurrect the older text:

The manuscript came from the Greek Orthodox St Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai Peninsula, Egypt, but most of its 146 leaves, or folios, are now owned by the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC. The pages contain the Codex Climaci Rescriptus, a collection of Syriac texts written in the tenth or eleventh centuries. But the codex is a palimpsest: parchment that was scraped clean of older text by the scribe so that it could be reused.

-----

Beyond that, multispectral imaging of palimpsests is opening a rich new seam of ancient texts in archives around the world. “In Europe alone, there are literally thousands of palimpsests in major libraries,” says Gysembergh. “This is just one case, that’s very exciting, of a research possibility that can be applied to thousands of manuscripts with amazing discoveries every time.”

[TomDaisy]

4. great owned by hobby lobby zealots

[Tetrachloride]

2. Wiki of the monastery is interesting

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Catherine%27s_Monastery

[paleotn]

5. Yep. St. Catherine's. Ancient.

Mohammad himself visited the monastery according to legend. It's even mentioned in the Koran.

[Karadeniz]

3. When one studies ancient Christian writing, one has heard of this monastery. Boy, I sure wish it

had been around several centuries earlier! I'd love to see mss from that period!!!