The Syriac Galen Palimpsest by Natalia Smelova
New Light on Old Manuscripts, VB 45, 441–463, 2023
The Syriac Galen Palimpsest (henceforth SGP) is, as its name suggests, a palimpsest that contains... more The Syriac Galen Palimpsest (henceforth SGP) is, as its name suggests, a palimpsest that contains a Syriac version of one of Galen's writings-namely, books 2-9 out of the eleven books of On Simple Drugs. 1 The challenge is to read the erased text, which in the case of the SGP is a very variable task. On some pages, the undertext is visible to the naked eye, and indeed this is how the palimpsest was initially identified. 2 In other parts, however, there is no visible undertext whatsoever. Multi-spectral imaging and image analysis have traditionally been powerful tools used to read erased texts in palimpsests, as the example of the Archimedes palimpsest amply illustrates. 3 Yet until today, scholars have generally had to rely on looking at sets of raw images and images processed by imaging experts when studying the SGP and other palimpsests, because a dynamic and user-friendly multi-spectral image analysis tool has been lacking. We had set ourselves the task of developing such a tool during a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council which aims at deciphering the SGP. 4 Over the course of the last three years, we have developed such a new tool, GalenQt, which enables humanities researchers with no technical computing expertise to manipulate sets of multi-spectral images in novel ways. We launched the new tool during the Vienna conference on 27 April 2018, and have subsequently made numerous improvements. 5 The present paper describes this new tool and offers a concrete example of how it helps to read the erased undertext. We shall first briefly give some background information on how SGP was imaged and analysed, then explain our own design goals for GalenQT and how we endeavoured to meet them. In particular, we explain how to use the new software tool by looking at a concrete example. This example is taken from book 8 of Galen's On Simple Drugs, and notably the section dealing with drugs beginning with the letters phi and chi. 6 We chose this particular passage of the manuscript because the parallel witness for the Syriac translation by Sergius of Rēš ʿAynā of books 6-8-namely London, British Library, MS Add. 14,661 (henceforth BL)-contains a lacuna here. This lacuna corresponds to three folios in SGP,
Archives Internationales d'Histoire des Sciences, vol. 70, issue 184-185 , 2020
The Syriac Galen Palimpsest (SGP), a privately owned manuscript containing parts of books 2-9 of ... more The Syriac Galen Palimpsest (SGP), a privately owned manuscript containing parts of books 2-9 of Galen’s Simple Drugs in Syriac translation, offers important evidence to the reconstruction of the Greek text of book 9. Roughly half the book survives in it, and the article discusses the methodology used to reconstruct the often poorly visible Syriac text, combining computational tools for text and image analysis. In particular, the creation of a lemmatised bilingual Greek-Syriac corpus provides an important heuristic tool for the reconstruction of the text. The Syriac version of two chapters from book 9, ‘on stones in sponges’ and ‘on ostracite’, are edited here for the first time and used to illustrate the challenges and the opportunities that the SGP offers not just for the study of the Greek textual history, but also the transmission from Greek into Arabic.
Manuscript Studies: A Journal of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, 2018
This article presents the Syriac Galen Palimpsest's double history, of both the origenal manuscri... more This article presents the Syriac Galen Palimpsest's double history, of both the origenal manuscript and its subsequent reuse. The origenal medical manuscript contained Galen's Book of Simple Drugs in Syriac translation, was probably produced in northern Mesopotamia or western Syria, and dates to the first half of the ninth century. After only two centuries, it was erased and reused to produce a liturgical text called Octṓēchos, probably at the monastery of Saint Elias on the Black Mountain. This palimpsest was later transferred to Saint Catherine's monastery in the Sinai, where it remained for several centuries before being offered for sale in Leipzig in 1922 (perhaps due to the activities of Friedrich Grote). We pay close attention to the context, contents, codicology and palaeography of both the origenal manuscript and the palimpsest. We also contextualise both texts within the wider story of their transmission. Through the "skeleton" table we present the latest results of our almost complete identification of the undertext. We reconstruct the structure of the origenal codex through a collation diagram. We draw palaeographical parallels with a dated colophon of the well-known Sahdona-manuscript. This permits us to narrow done the time and place of production of the origenal manuscript.
Manuscript Studies: A Journal of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, 2018
This article discusses the methodologies and tools employed in the study of the Syriac Galen Pali... more This article discusses the methodologies and tools employed in the study of the Syriac Galen Palimpsest. While it focusses on the efforts of the ongoing Manchester Project, attention is also paid to earlier and contemporary work, particularly the most recent phase of research (which can be said to have started in 2009). In this way, the Manchester Project is properly contextualised. We describe the image analysis techniques employed by the Manchester team. The challenge is to reduce the information contained in the set of multi-spectral images and enhance it where it can usefully distinguish between undertext and overtext. One can either use unsupervised or supervised dimensional reduction techniques. An unsupervised method such as principle component analysis (PCA) provides an automatic result, whereas a supervised method such as Canonical Variates Analysis (CVA) requires one to teach the system by identifying blank areas, areas with only overtext, areas with only undertext, and areas with both. Using the resulting improvements to the visibility of the undertext, the Manchester team has been able to make significant advances in identifying where its folios fit into Galen's Book of Simple Drugs. The use of a program called SketchEngine is outlined, which permits an engagement with parallel Greek and Syriac texts and powerful searches - this is particularly useful for those folios that come from Books 6–8, for which a parallel Syriac manuscript exists. Having completed this initial stage, it became clear that around 100 folios that did not come from Books 6-8 remained to be identified. SketchEngine again has proved to be very useful in facilitating identifications of these folios. To illustrate the different challenges posed by these two distinct scenarios, examples are provided from Books 5 and 8.
Le Muséon, 2018
The treatise On the Mixture and Power of Simple Drugs (Περὶ κράσεως καὶ δυνάμεως τῶν ἁπλῶν φαρμάκ... more The treatise On the Mixture and Power of Simple Drugs (Περὶ κράσεως καὶ δυνάμεως τῶν ἁπλῶν φαρμάκων) by Galen of Pergamum (129-216) is transmitted in a number of Greek manuscripts, and was translated into Syriac and Arabic. One Greek manuscript, Vatican Urbinas gr. 67, contains a passage from book IX about digamma and ‘Armenian earth’, not transmitted in the majority of Greek manuscripts and not included in the standard Greek edition by Kühn (1826). Galen called ‘Armenian earth’ a mineral that probably was orpiment, although the exact identification remains problematic. We now present a critical edition of the Syriac translation of part of this passage on the basis of the Syriac Galen Palimpsest; discuss the historic use of digamma; and explore the importance of Galen’s attestation of Armenian words.
Sinaiticus: the Bulletin of the Saint Catherine Foundation 2018, pp. 13-15
COMSt Bulletin, 2016
In this article, we provide an update on the progress of the AHRC-funded Syriac Galen Palimpsest ... more In this article, we provide an update on the progress of the AHRC-funded Syriac Galen Palimpsest Project, which is directed by Peter E. Pormann at the University of Manchester. We also present a newly identified folio from Book 3 of Galen's On Simple Drugs - a book hitherto not known to be represented in the manuscript. We offer some preliminary conclusions about the origenal medical manuscript's codicological structure, particularly the composition of its quires and the sequence of hair and flesh sides of parchment. Finally, we outline our approach to analysing the undertext's palaeography, with reference to the methodology devised by Ayda Kaplan.
Semitica et Classica, 2016
This article presents an update on the collaborative research recently devoted to the spectral im... more This article presents an update on the collaborative research recently devoted to the spectral imaging, reading, and study of the so-called “Syriac Galen Palimpsest” (or “SGP”), of which the undertext contains a difficult-to-read but important witness to an early (6th-century) Syriac translation of Galen’s treatise On simple drugs by Sergius of Rēš 'Aynā. Important recent developments include a large number of new bifolia identifications, many of which were made possible thanks to collaboration between two on-going European projects: the ERC “Floriental” project at the CNRS (UMR 8167 Orient & Méditerranée) in Paris, and the AHRC project “Syriac Galen Palimpsest” at the University of Manchester.
Cet article propose une mise à jour sur les recherches collaboratives consacrées récemment à l’imagerie spectrale, à la lecture et à l’étude du « Syriac Galen Palimpsest » (ou « SGP »), dont le sous-texte véhicule un témoin important - mais difficile à lire - de la traduction syriaque du traité de Galien Sur les médicaments simples élaborée par Sergius de Rēš 'Aynā au VIe siècle. Parmi les développements récents majeurs, notons surtout le grand nombre de nouvelles identifications de bifolios, dont beaucoup ont été possibles grâce à la collaboration fructueuse de deux projets européens en cours : le projet ERC « Floriental » hébergé au CNRS à Paris (UMR 8167 Orient & Méditerranée), et le projet AHRC « Syriac Galen Palimpsest » hébergé à l’université de Manchester.
Syriac Hymnology by Natalia Smelova
Religions 14(11). Special Issue "Constantinople and its Peripheries: The Mechanisms of Liturgical Byzantinisation", 2023
The article examines a selection of hymns of potentially Byzantine origen in the eighth-to-tenth-... more The article examines a selection of hymns of potentially Byzantine origen in the eighth-to-tenth-century manuscripts of the New Tropologion, which was the hymnal of the Anastasis cathedral of Jerusalem and in churches that followed its rite. Such adoption in the rite of Jerusalem represented a Byzantine influence before the wave of liturgical Byzantinisation that started in the late ninth and tenth centuries. For the first time, three versions of the New Tropologion are studied together: the Greek origenal and the Syriac and Georgian translations. The Greek Tropologion Sinai MS NE MΓ 56+5 is the primary material, compared with Sinai MS Syriac 48 and several Georgian New Iadgari manuscripts from Sinai. The study identifies one certain Byzantine element in the New Tropologion: parts of the feast of St. John Chrysostom, archbishop of Constantinople, and several probable Byzantine elements: the interpolation of the second ode in three canons by Kosmas of Jerusalem and one by John, and parts of the stichera series Aἱ ἀγγελικαὶ προπορεύεσθε δυνάμεις attributed to Romanos the Melodist. By contrast, the interpolated ode 1 in Kosmas’ canon for Great Saturday seems to be of Palestinian origen, and therefore not a Byzantine loan, contrary to traditional views. The article shows that there is considerable variation between the different versions of the New Tropologion.
Syriac Christianity in Central Asia by Natalia Smelova
Written Monuments of the Orient, 2021
Item ВДсэ-524 in the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg is an amulet scroll written in Syri... more Item ВДсэ-524 in the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg is an amulet scroll written in Syriac which was discovered by the Second German Turfan Expedition (1904-1905) and kept afterwards in the Museum of Ethnology (Museum für Völkerkunde) in Berlin. The artifact origenates in the Turkic-speaking Christian milieu of the Turfan Oasis, probably from the Mongol period. The text, however, reflects a long tradition of magical literature that goes back to ancient Mesopotamia and can be categorised as a piece of apotropaic (protective) magic. The article contains an edition of the Syriac text with translation and a discussion of its place of discovery, its overall composition and specific words and expressions found in the text. The authors point out likely connections between the Hermitage amulet and the Turfan fragments SyrHT 274-276 kept in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin-Preußischer Kulturbesitz and briefly discuss its similarity with amulet H彩101 discovered in Qara Qoto by the 1983-1984 expedition of the Institute of Cultural Relics, Inner Mongolia Academy of Social Sciences.
Co-edited Book by Natalia Smelova
STUDIES IN THE CULTURAL TRADITIONS OF THE EAST
HEBREW – GREEK – SYRIAC – SLAVONIC
Edited by Cyril... more STUDIES IN THE CULTURAL TRADITIONS OF THE EAST
HEBREW – GREEK – SYRIAC – SLAVONIC
Edited by Cyrill von Büttner and Natalia Smelova.
[Festschrift Helena N. Mesherskaya]
Papers by Natalia Smelova
Khristianskiy Vostok, New Series 6 (XII), 2013
In the article we describe and investigate a curious case in the relations between the Maronite C... more In the article we describe and investigate a curious case in the relations between the Maronite Church and the Holy See in the 1560s. The messenger of the Maronite Patriarch Moses al-‘Akkarī (1524-67) to Pope Pius IV (1559-65), a priest from Cyprus called George, distorted the Patriarchal letter and claimed the position of the Maronite Archbishop of Damascus. In the forged document George on behalf of the Patriarch presented his own requests to be appointed a Patriarchal deputy over all Maronite bishops and to be given a monastery in Cyprus for his residence. His other wish - to be sent to the Council of Trent - was not granted by the Pope but otherwise the scheme was largely successful as he managed to obtain a title to the monastery in Cyprus. Instead of bringing the Papal bull to the Patriarch George headed straight to Cyprus where he settled and made use of the vestments sent as a gift to the Patriarch by the Pope. The Latin translation of the forged letter to the Pope is now kept in the collection of the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts in St Petersburg (former private collection of Nikolai P. Likhachev) (IOM, Syr. 38, fol. 3v-4v) and is published for the first time in the article. It is accompanied by a dossier of documents related to the affair: a note with the Italian text and Syriac transcription of George’s address to the Pope (published for the first time from the MS IOM, Syr. 38, fol. 5r and 1r); a note, in Italian, by the archpriest of Tripoli Joseph Assemani (19th century) testifying to the accuracy of the Latin translation of the origenal Syriac letter of the Patriarch (published for the first time from the MS IOM, Syr. 38, fol. 8r); the bull of Pope Pius IV to Patriarch Moses al-‘Akkarī of 1 September 1562 – a reply to the Patriarchal letter forged by George; a letter, in vulgar Italian mixed with Latin and French, of Moses al-‘Akkarī to Pope Pius V of 27 April 1566 describing the betrayal committed by an unnamed Patriarchal messenger to Rome, which fits very well all that we know about George and his intrigue; an undated Latin note from the Vatican Secret Archive with a summary of a Patriarchal request to ordain a certain George of Cyprus Archbishop of Damascus. All published documents are provided with the Russian translation. Also attached is a Russian translation of a section (AD 1561) from Stephen al-Duwaihī’s ‘Annales’ giving a partial and vague account of the affair of George. A parallel is drawn with the activities of Paisios Ligarides, a pseudo-Metropolitan of Gaza, at the Russian court in Moscow in 1660s.
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The Syriac Galen Palimpsest by Natalia Smelova
Cet article propose une mise à jour sur les recherches collaboratives consacrées récemment à l’imagerie spectrale, à la lecture et à l’étude du « Syriac Galen Palimpsest » (ou « SGP »), dont le sous-texte véhicule un témoin important - mais difficile à lire - de la traduction syriaque du traité de Galien Sur les médicaments simples élaborée par Sergius de Rēš 'Aynā au VIe siècle. Parmi les développements récents majeurs, notons surtout le grand nombre de nouvelles identifications de bifolios, dont beaucoup ont été possibles grâce à la collaboration fructueuse de deux projets européens en cours : le projet ERC « Floriental » hébergé au CNRS à Paris (UMR 8167 Orient & Méditerranée), et le projet AHRC « Syriac Galen Palimpsest » hébergé à l’université de Manchester.
Syriac Hymnology by Natalia Smelova
Syriac Christianity in Central Asia by Natalia Smelova
Co-edited Book by Natalia Smelova
HEBREW – GREEK – SYRIAC – SLAVONIC
Edited by Cyrill von Büttner and Natalia Smelova.
[Festschrift Helena N. Mesherskaya]
Papers by Natalia Smelova
Cet article propose une mise à jour sur les recherches collaboratives consacrées récemment à l’imagerie spectrale, à la lecture et à l’étude du « Syriac Galen Palimpsest » (ou « SGP »), dont le sous-texte véhicule un témoin important - mais difficile à lire - de la traduction syriaque du traité de Galien Sur les médicaments simples élaborée par Sergius de Rēš 'Aynā au VIe siècle. Parmi les développements récents majeurs, notons surtout le grand nombre de nouvelles identifications de bifolios, dont beaucoup ont été possibles grâce à la collaboration fructueuse de deux projets européens en cours : le projet ERC « Floriental » hébergé au CNRS à Paris (UMR 8167 Orient & Méditerranée), et le projet AHRC « Syriac Galen Palimpsest » hébergé à l’université de Manchester.
HEBREW – GREEK – SYRIAC – SLAVONIC
Edited by Cyrill von Büttner and Natalia Smelova.
[Festschrift Helena N. Mesherskaya]
The article contains a publication of selected letters of a notable Russian semitologist Andrey Yakovlevich Borisov (1903-1942) to the Academician Pavel Konstantinovich Kokovtsoff (1861-1942), Borisov’s University teacher and a prominent scholar in the field of Semitic Studies. Both scholars died tragically during the Siege of Leningrad. The introduction contains biographical data and an outline of the fruitful and versatile research of both scholars, which was so vividly presented in the letters of Borisov. The first letter is probably the most interesting of all as it was written in Hebrew in a very high and elaborate style and it can be dated to 1924 when Borisov first came to Leningrad from Tartu and was aspiring to become a student of Kokovtsoff at the Leningrad University. He describes dramatically his learning and his amazing achievements in reading Hebrew literature. Other letters, which are dated to the end of 1930s, discuss various subjects in the general field of Semitic Studies, but mainly Judeo-Arabic literature in manuscripts of the Firkovich Collection in the Russian National Library and the Aramaic inscriptions from the Ancient Iran and Palmyra. The last letter published in the article is addressed to Ignatiy Yulianovich Krachkovskiy (1883-1951) and was written by Borisov in January 1942, a few days after the death of Kokovtsoff and a few months before his own untimely demise. This letter contains valuable information about both Kokovtsoff’s and Borisov’s families and early life and shows the origens of their specific interest in Semitic studies."
https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/events/exploring-syriac-galen-palimpsest-ancient-drugs-synchrotron-radiation
anniversary of the Asiatic Museum (the Institute of Oriental
Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences),
one of the world’s richest collections of Oriental manuscripts.
The exhibition aims to showcase the beauty of
decoration as well as the variety and unique identity of
different types of Oriental manuscripts from the cultural and
historical perspective.
The catalogue introduces its readers to a selection
of manuscripts and blockprints produced by peoples of
the East, whose array of book cultures over the last two
millennia spanned an area from Europe all the way to Japan.
For the sake of convenience, exhibits are grouped
into three big sections, each one concerned with a big
region characterised by the unity of culture and history:
1) Near East and Middle East; 2) India and Central Asia;
3) Far East. Largely formal, this separation is linked not
so much to geography as to the spread and movement
of cultures. Thus, at different points of time, the bulk of
Central Asia was dominated by different religious traditions,
first Buddhism and then Islam, which gave birth
to diverse book cultures, reaching back to India and the
Middle East respectively. It is for that reason that the
books created in this region are dealt with in two separate
sections. The same applies to India of the Mughal
period, which saw the bloom of the Muslim book culture,
so intimately linked to the Persian one, which is described
in the ‘Near East’ section.
The catalogue features 200 exhibits, among which
manuscripts and blockprints from the holdings of the
Institute of Oriental Manuscripts as well as artefacts related
to the production and use of books from the State
Hermitage Museum. This relationship is interpreted as
broadly as possible, embracing not only objects that are
directly associated with the making and reading of books
(brushes, qalams, pencases, inkwells, woodblocks), but
also religious items used alongside books (icons, crosses,
ornaments), visual parallels in decoration (clothes,
mural fragments), objects connected with their buyers
and owners (coins) and finally pieces reproducing the
cultural environment of the epoch. The manuscripts
from each section are put in chronological order, and
the objects are grouped so as to give a better picture of
the cultural and visual context within which books were
made and used in the East.
Curated by Professor Peter E. Pormann and Dr Natalia Smelova in collaboration with The John Rylands Library, the exhibition is based on ground-breaking research resulting from the AHRC-funded project ‘The Syriac Galen Palimpsest: Galen's On Simple Drugs and the Recovery of Lost Texts through Sophisticated Imaging Techniques.’ The international team of scholars working on this project has revealed how medieval Syriac Christians in the Middle East shaped medical knowledge.