AT DAYBREAK, after prayers in the ancient basilica, Father Justin, the Texan-born librarian of St Catherine’s monastery in Sinai, doffs his clerical head-dress and begins operating a Swiss camera that can capture illuminations, bindings and gold leaf in all their glorious detail. His assistant, Hameid, one of the first local bedouin to attend university, puts the manuscripts in place. Father Justin is among a small band of people dedicated to using technology to investigate, preserve and disseminate the glories of ancient writing.
Techniques like multi-spectral imaging—breaking light into many wavelengths—and X-ray fluorescence—involving electrons moving at close to the speed of light—are helping to decipher the hitherto illegible. And thanks to the internet, images of ancient writing can be shared and discussed across the world. Documents that history has separated can be reunited virtually. St Catherine’s has worked with the British Library, plus museums in St Petersburg and Leipzig, to put together a virtual copy of the oldest version of the Gospel, whose leaves are divided between the four institutions. Libraries that were dispersed along with their owners (like those held by Armenian communities in Turkey, massacred or put to flight in 1915) can be reconstituted in cyberspace.
Another huge repository of medieval codices, physical and virtual, is a Benedictine monastery in Minnesota: the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library. It began in the cold war, hoping to retain a record of Europe’s heritage in case the Soviets came. They didn’t; but photographing codices proved to be sound insurance. The library snapped codices in Ethiopia (see picture) some of which were destroyed after the Marxist coup of 1975. More recently, the library’s director, Father Columba Stewart, has scoured the monasteries of the Middle East, offering his services as a digital snapper of precious tomes in Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Iraq and elsewhere. Manuscripts in those parts are often in the care of their original monastic owners, who struggle to conserve and protect them from the ravages of war and local politics.
Is he the religious equivalent of Google, which is using its resources to photograph all the books in half a dozen important libraries? He sees big differences: his institution’s annual budget, at $1m, is not Google-sized; and it makes no profit. It offers its services, free, to institutions that are usually grateful. The images he captures are made available to the holders of the originals; and he generally trains locals to do the photography. When he reassures people about his motives, “it helps that I am a monk,” he says.
Other big players in the digitising of manuscripts include the Mormons. They have an interest in old writing which might confirm the teachings revealed to their founder, Joseph Smith. But the finest display of Mormon expertise in recovering texts involved material that is far from religious. Scholars from Brigham Young University (BYU) deciphered carbonised papyrus found at a villa in Herculaneum, which was destroyed by a volcano along with Pompeii. Much of it was philosophical writing from the school of Epicurus, who saw pleasure as life’s main goal; and there was a Roman comedy.
Regardless of the content, the scientific skills of the Mormon-inspired effort drew admiration. By using the bits of the light spectrum that are not visible to the human eye, the BYU researchers could tell black ink from charred papyrus. Now BYU scholars are working to record and study the Vatican library. And whatever their theological differences, the Benedictines of Minnesota and the Mormons now have one thing in common: both have made repositories of last resort, under the Utah mountains, where data and images are safe from almost any act of God or man.