Year: 1988
Type: article
Abstract: TWELVE HUNDRED years ago, a monk used a knife and pumice to scrape and polish the ink from an old codex-a kind of book-so he could reuse the parchment for inscribing a copy of The Lives of the Female Saints.The words he erased were four centuries old at the time, and are now known to be the oldest translation of the four Gospels of the New Testament from Greek into Sinaitic Syriac, a dialect of the Aramaic spoken by Jesus.Bruce Zuckerman of the West Semitic Research Project at the University of Southern California and his brother Ken, arguably the best manuscript photographers in the world, carefully photographed the codex at the monastery of Saint Catherine, which was built by the emperor Justinian on the slopes of Mount Sinai in the sixth century.Each page was photographed 13 times-under infrared, ultraviolet, and visible light, with different filtering and on different films.The photos made some of the erased text directly visible, but not enough to make the codex suitable for extensive study.It would take modern image processing and biblical-scholar-friendly software (at a price poorly funded researchers could afford) to revivify the syllables and Philip Borden is vice president of Microexpert Systems, Inc., Calabasas, California.Jeffrey Wike is Microexpert's manager of intelligent imaging.Their interests in artificial intelligence include research in a computer-vision-based expert decision system for docking the space shuttle and several simulation-oriented intelligent tutoring systems. U Information Display 4/88cadences of Jesus' words much as he actually spoke them.
Source: Information Display
Authors: Philip Borden, Jeffrey Wike
Language: English
Subfield: Archeology (arts and humanities)
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4411558358