At St. Catherine’s Monastery at the foot of Egypt’s Mount Sinai,a team from Greece are photographing thousands of fragile manuscripts, including some of the earliest copies of the Christian gospels, using a complex process that includes taking images in red, green and blue light and merging them with computer software to create a single high-quality color picture, Reuters reports.
Even though the monastery has survived centuries of warfare, it lies in a region where Islamist militants have destroyed countless cultural artifacts and documents in Syria and Iraq. Egypt’s Christian churches have also been targeted by an Islamist insurgency in the rugged and thinly populated northern Sinai.
The Holy Monastery of the God-Trodden Mount Sinai – which is part of the Eastern Orthodox church – lies in the safer southern half of the Sinai Peninsula. Yet in 2017, Islamic State claimed responsibility for an attack on a nearby Egyptian police checkpoint, in which one officer was killed.
The aim is to create the first digital archive of all 4,500 manuscripts in the library, starting with around 1,100 in the Syriac and Arabic languages, which are particularly rare.
The task could take more than a decade, using digital cameras and computer arrays alongside sophisticated cradles designed to support the more fragile manuscripts.
Read more at ekathimerini.com
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Photo Source: Wikimedia Commons License: CC-BY-SA Copyright: Berthold Werner
