Priceless Medieval Sacred Text Reveals Its True Origins

Ancient Origins

Arguably the world’s most famous medieval manuscript, the wonderfully illustrated Book of Kells, was “created in 2 parts over 50 years,” Dr Bernard Meehan of Trinity College, Dublin, told reporters at The Independent.

 Around 561 AD, Colum Cille (also known as Columba and Columbus) sailed from Ireland with 13 followers and landed on Iona, an isolated Scottish island off the south-western tip of Mull. There, he established a scriptorium and a monastic confederation which would become an intellectual powerhouse of the medieval world. The Book of Kells was created around 800 AD and contains the four gospels written in Latin calligraphy on calfskin leaves, decorated with elaborate and colorful illustrations. Glorifying life of Christ, this book is regarded as shadowing all other artistic and cultural achievements of the early Middle Ages.

Facsimile copy of the Book of Kells (CC BY NC-ND 2.0)

 Until now, it was believed that a group of 9th century Irish monks at Iona composed this world-renowned copy of the gospel, in one go, but Meehan claims the “last part of the book was written first.” Talking to reporters at The Independent, Meehan said, “St John’s Gospel and the first few pages of St Mark, was written and illustrated by a monk at the monastery of St Colum Cille on the Scottish island of Iona, during the last quarter of the eighth century AD and the Gospels of St Mark, St Luke and St Matthew were produced 50 years later at a new monastery at Kells, in County Meath, Ireland.”

The Book of Kells, (folio 292r), circa 800, showing the lavishly decorated text that opens the Gospel of John. (Public Domain)

Meehan first identified that the monk who prepared the Book of John “had a very particular style which made it stand out from other parts of the text.” Having completed St John's Gospel “this particular monk's work suddenly stops at the end of chapter four, verse 26, of St Mark’s Gospel,” Meehan added. He speculated that this may have been “intended as the start of another separate, standalone work” or that monk may have been killed during Viking raids on the island of Iona, which began at the turn of the ninth century. It was also possible the monk had fallen victim to an “outbreak of disease, possibly smallpox, that hit the monastery in the early part of the ninth century” added Meehan. In 806 AD Vikings raided the island killing 68 of the monastic community, and the surviving monks fled to a new monastery at Kells, County Meath, Ireland with the Book of Kells. It eventually came to Trinity College, Dublin, in 1661 AD, and is still on display there today.

Gospel of Matthew from the Book of Kells is now thought to be the work of a different scribe (Public Domain)

Although Dr Meeham’s new observations are grabbing today’s headlines, the Book of Kells was but one publication in the literary tradition of Iona, which itself was far greater and more expansive than any one book. When Columbus established his Celtic church and scriptorium in the 6th century the island was called Innis nam Druidneach, The Isle of Druids (priests of the pre-Christian Celtic religion). Written histories and folklore alike tell of Columbus doing battle with local Druid elders, who fled here the 5th century escaping persecution from Imperial Rome. A 2006 Scotsman article reveals that in the century before Columbus arrived the “Druids founded a library on Iona” and because they never wrote their traditions down, as far as we know, “the impact that finding this library would have on our interpretation of history would be explosive.”

Another literary legend on Iona speaks of another priceless cache of books, this time originating in “the greatest library in Europe.” Scottish History is murky for the first half of the first millennium, yet several chroniclers recorded King Fergus II uniting with Alaric the Goth to fight the Roman Empire during its fall. According to historian and author Dr E Mairi MacArthur, in the Scotsman article, King Fergus was said to have “recovered many books from the plundered Roman libraries, including rare religious manuscripts from ancient Greek and Persian philosophers and scientists.” These priceless volumes of ancient knowledge and lost wisdom are said to have been taken to Iona for safekeeping in “the secret druid library.”

Trinity College in Dublin is the current home of the original Book of Kells. (CC BY 2.0)

The Book of Kells survived, but it is generally held by historians that all the other books associated with Iona were destroyed in the 9th century Viking raids, but Dr E Mairi MacArthur is not so sure. She told the Scotsman “it is much more likely that the books travelled between Iona and Ireland, or perhaps even further afield. Or there is the possibility that they were hidden for safekeeping."

What with all this talk of secret Druid libraries, priceless ancient books from Rome and now the possibility that further manuscripts, maybe even finer than the Book of Kells, are hidden on this remote Scottish Island, in 2012 I took a documentary film crew to Iona and we surveyed the sacred island from a helicopter. We aimed to establish any overlooked architectural features hidden in the fields surrounding the Abbey which may point towards the presence of a subterranean chamber. Our project on Iona was featured in a somewhat sensational article in The Scottish Sun , and if you think my treasure hunting endeavors are a flight of fancy, then so too were the efforts of a 1950’s team of archaeologists from the University of St Andrews.

Book of Kells, Arrest of Christ. (Scanned from Treasures of Irish Art 1500 BC to 1500 AD) (Public Domain)

Having pieced together clues from written and oral records, as did I, they conducted a series of digs on the Treshnish Islands, near to Iona, specifically in search of the lost books. Claiming that if they found the books “it would undoubtedly be the single most important historical find of our time,” they ultimately failed. Since this 1950’s archeological project I am the only historian who has systematically set out to locate this potentially history changing treasure, and I return to Iona every few years chanting “Today’s the Day” in the tradition of treasure hunter Mel Fisher who in 1998 discovered the 1622 wreck of the Nuestra Señora de Atocha, with its half-billion dollar treasure hoard.

Dr Meehan's findings are being published this week in a new guide to the Book of Kells.

Top image: Book of Kells, Folio 32v, Christ Enthroned. Scanned from Treasures of Irish Art, 1500 BC to 1500 AD, From the Collections of the National Museum of Ireland. (Public Domain)

By Ashley Cowie

15th-century manuscript with 'alien' characters finally decoded

Fox news

By James Rogers

The Voynich manuscript's unintelligible writings and strange illustrations have defied every attempt at understanding their meaning. (BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY/YALE UNIVERSITY)

 Scientists have harnessed the power of artificial intelligence to unlock the secrets of an ancient manuscript that has baffled experts.

Discovered in the 19th century, the Voynich manuscript uses “alien” characters that have long puzzled cryptographers and historians. Now, however, computing scientists at the University of Alberta say they are decoding the mysterious 15th-century text.

 Computing science Professor Greg Kondrak and graduate student Bradley Hauer applied artificial intelligence to find ambiguities in the text’s human language.

RESEARCHERS OFFER YET ANOTHER EXPLANATION TO MYSTERIOUS VOYNICH MANUSCRIPT
The first stage of the research was working out the manuscript’s language. The experts used 400 different language translations from the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” to identify the language used in the text. Initially, it seemed like the text was written in Arabic, but the researcher's algorithms revealed that the manuscript is written in Hebrew.

“That was surprising,” said Kondrak, in a statement. “And just saying ‘this is Hebrew’ is the first step. The next step is how do we decipher it.”

Kondrak and Hauer worked out that Voynich manuscript was created using ‘alphagrams’ that use one phrase to define another so built an algorithm to unscramble the text. “It turned out that over 80 per cent of the words were in a Hebrew dictionary, but we didn’t know if they made sense together,” said Kondrak.

MYSTERIOUS MANUSCRIPT'S CODE HAS BEEN CRACKED, 'PROPHET OF GOD' CLAIMS The initial part of the text was then run through Google Translate. “It came up with a sentence that is grammatical, and you can interpret it,” Kondrak explained.

 The sentence was: “She made recommendations to the priest, man of the house and me and people.”

The full meaning of the text will need the involvement of historians of ancient Hebrew. The vellum, or animal skin, on which the codex is written has been dated to the early 15th century.

The research study is published in Volume 4 ofTransactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

There have been multiple attempts to decode the Voynich manuscript. In 2014, for example, researchers argued that the illustrations of plants in the manuscript could help decode the text’s strange characters. In 2011, a self-proclaimed “prophet of God” claimed that he had decoded the book.

Hippocratic Medical Recipe Lost in a Famous Egyptian Monastery Finally Comes to Light

Ancient Origins

The library at St. Catherine's Monastery is considered one of the most important for ancient texts.

New research examining a manuscript from the 6th century shows that it is not just the visible writing that holds value, but also the letters hidden underneath them. A copy of a medical recipe linked to the father of Western medicine, Hippocrates, is just one text that was waiting centuries to be uncovered.

The manuscript containing the recipe has been dated to the 5th or 6th century AD, so it is not an original created by the famed Greek physician Hippocrates; it is just a copy created after his death. Nonetheless, a researcher with the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library (EMEL) told Asharq Al-Awsat the document also holds value for its age, stating that the text "will be enlisted among the oldest and the most important manuscripts in the world.”

The recovered manuscript. (Ahram Online)

The nature of the remedy has yet to be provided, however it was found alongside drawings of herbs and three other medical recipes written by an anonymous author. Helmy El-Namnam, the Egyptian culture minister, asserted that the presence of these texts contained within the manuscript provides evidence for the leading position Egyptians had in science.

The identified manuscript is one example of the 130 known palimpsests held within the library of St. Catherine’s Monastery. Palimpsests are examples of manuscript pages which have text scraped or washed off them so that they can be reused for another document. In this case, the pages were made of leather. Ahmed Al-Nimer, supervisor of Coptic archaeology documentation at the ministry, explained to Ahram Online that the early text was erased “due to the high cost of leather at that time.”

National Geographic reports that the text was erased in the Middle Ages to make space for Bible text known as the “Sinaitic manuscript.” It was only thanks to the ongoing partnership between St. Catherine's Monastery and the EMEL that the medical texts were discovered.

Example of a palimpsest. The lower text is from the 6th century (Codex Guelferbytanus 64 Weissenburgensis, folio 92 verso), it contains the text of Luke 1:6-13; the upper text is from the 13th century - Isidore of Seville's "Origines" 8.10.2-8.11.4. (Public Domain)

EMEL used spectral imaging to reveal the text written by scholars interested in preserving Hippocrates’ medical knowledge into the 6th century. Spectral imaging allows experts to see images and text that is not visible with the naked eye.

EMEL also recognizes that there is a great possibility for more major discoveries lost within the pages of manuscripts held in the oldest monastery in the world.

 According to Asharq Al-Awsat, the library at St. Catherine's Monastery holds thousands of manuscripts written in Arabic, Greek, Ethiopian, Coptic, Armenian, and Syriac languages, as well as decrees created by Muslim caliphates. Many of the texts are considered rare.

St. Catherine’s Monastery, Sinai Peninsula, Egypt. (Berthold Werner/CC BY SA 3.0)

Although St. Catherine's Monastery is now considered a Byzantine era treasure for Egypt, it only survives today due to on an ancient and controversial agreement. As Ancient Origins writer Dhwty explains:

“According to tradition, the monks at St. Catherine’s Monastery had requested the protection of the Prophet Muhammad himself. The Prophet, who is said to have regarded Christians as brothers in faith, accepted their request favorably. A controversial document, known as the Actiname (‘Holy Testament’) was signed by the Prophet himself in 623 AD. According to this document, the monks of St. Catherine’s Monastery were granted exemption from taxes and military service. Additionally, Muslims were called upon to protect the monastery and provide the monks with every help. As a gesture of reciprocity, during the Fatimid period, the monks allowed the conversion of a crusader church within the monastery walls into a mosque.”

The Patent of Mohammed Granted to the Holy Monastery of Sinai, Saint Catherine's Monastery, Sinai, Egypt. (Public Domain)

The monastery has been on the UNESCO world heritage list since 2002 and also a popular tourist attraction.

Top Image: Monastery of St. Catherine at Mount Sinai. (Wellcome Images/CC BY 4.0) A page of ancient writing. (Public Domain)

By Alicia McDermott

Getting under the skin of a medieval mystery

Ancient Origins

A simple PVC eraser has helped an international team of scientists led by bioarchaeologists at the University of York to resolve the mystery surrounding the tissue-thin parchment used by medieval scribes to produce the first pocket Bibles.
Thousands of the Bibles were made in the 13th century, principally in France but also in England, Italy and Spain. But the origin of the parchment -- often called 'uterine vellum' -- has been a source of longstanding controversy.
Use of the Latin term abortivum in many sources has led some scholars to suggest that the skin of fetal calves was used to produce the vellum. Others have discounted that theory, arguing that it would not have been possible to sustain livestock herds if so much vellum was produced from fetal skins. Older scholarship even argued that unexpected alternatives such as rabbit or squirrel may have been used, while some medieval sources suggest that hides must have been split by hand through use of a lost technology.
A multi-disciplinary team of researchers, led by Dr Sarah Fiddyment and Professor Matthew Collins of the BioArCh research facility in the Department of Archaeology at York, developed a simple and objective technique using standard conservation treatments to identify the animal origin of parchment.
The non-invasive method is a variant on ZooMS (ZooArchaeology by Mass Spectrometry) peptide mass fingerprinting but extracts protein from the parchment surface simply by using electrostatic charge generated by gentle rubbing of a PVC eraser on the membrane surface.

Protein are extracted from the parchment simply by rubbing a PVC eraser on the membrane surface. Credit: Matthew Collins

The research, which is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), involved scientists and scholars from France, Belgium, Denmark, Ireland, the USA and the UK. They analysed 72 pocket Bibles originating in France, England and Italy, and 293 further parchment samples from the 13th century. The parchment samples ranged in thickness from 0.03 -- 0.28mm.
Dr Fiddyment said: "We found no evidence for the use of unexpected animals; however, we did identify the use of more than one mammal species in a single manuscript, consistent with the local availability of hides.

"Our results suggest that ultrafine vellum does not necessarily derive from the use of abortive or newborn animals with ultra-thin skin, but could equally reflect a production process that allowed the skins of maturing animals of several species to be rendered into vellum of equal quality and fineness."

Parchment or vellum was often made by stretching it on a wooden frame (public domain)

The research represents the first use of triboelectric extraction of protein from parchment. The method is non-invasive and requires no specialist equipment or storage. Samples can be collected without need to transport the artifacts -- researchers can sample when and where possible and analyse when required.
Bruce Holsinger, Professor of English and Medieval Studies at the University of Virginia and the initial humanities collaborator on the project, said: "The research team includes scholars and collaborators from over a dozen disciplines across the laboratory sciences, the humanities, the library and museum sciences--even a parchment maker. In addition to the discoveries we're making, what I find so exciting about this project is its potential to inspire new models for broad-based collaborative research across multiple paradigms. We think together, model together, write together."
Alexander Devine, of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, said: "The bibles produced on a vast scale throughout the 13th century established the contents and appearance of the Christian Bible familiar to us today. Their importance and influence stem directly from their format as portable one-volume books, made possible by the innovative combination of strategies of miniaturization and compression achieved through the use of extremely thin parchment. The discoveries of this innovative research therefore enhance our understanding of how these bibles were produced enormously, and by extension, illuminate our knowledge of one of the most significant text technologies in the histories of the Bible and of Western Christianity."

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• Ultraviolet light reveals hidden text in ancient book of Arthurian stories
• The Enigma of the Voynich Manuscript: History or Hoax?

Professor Collins added: "The level of access we have achieved highlights the importance of this technique. Without the eraser technique we could not have extracted proteins from so many parchment samples. Further, with no evidence of unexpected species, such as rabbit or squirrel, we believe that 'uterine vellum' was often an achievement of technological production using available resources."
Since finishing the work, parchment conservator Jií Vnouček, a co-author on the paper, has used this knowledge to recreate parchment similar to 'uterine vellum' from old skins. He said: "It is more a question of using the right parchment making technology than using uterine skin. Skins from younger animal are of course optimal for production of thin parchment but I can imagine that every skin was collected, nothing wasted."
Featured image: Manuscript of the ‘Book of Hours’ produced in Florence in the late 15th century. It is on uterine vellum. Credit: Rauner Special Collections Library.
By: Ancient-Origins