Manuscripts in St. Catherine's Monastery, Mount Sinai
Manuscripts in St. Catherine's Monastery, Mount Sinai
The renowned Eastern Orthodox Monastery of St.
Catherine’s on Mt. Sinai was constructed by the Byzantine Emperor,
Justinian I, in the late sixth century AD over the relics of the
martyred saint and the place of the biblical burning bush as identified
by St. Helena, the mother of the Roman Emperor, Constantine. It is
home to reputedly the oldest continuously run library in existence
today. Its holdings of religious and secular manuscripts are legendary
and allegedly second only in number to the collection held by the
Vatican: from bibles, to patristic works, to liturgies and prayers
books, and on to legal documents such as deeds, court cases, Fatwahs
(legal opinions). The greater proportion of the manuscripts were
copied in Greek, and then in Syriac, Georgian, Coptic, Armenian,
Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, and Ethiopic, as well as Old Church Slavonic.
In 1949, Kenneth W. Clark, led an expedition to the Middle East
under the Auspices of the Library of Congress and its partners, to
microfilm old manuscripts in various libraries of the Middle East, the
largest and most isolated of which was that at St. Catherine’s. His
group evaluated the 3,300 manuscripts held there and chose 1,687 for
filming. Finally, the group also prepared under his direction a Checklist of Manuscripts in St. Catherine’s Monastery, Mount Sinai Microfilmed for the Library of Congress
(1950), which gave researchers access to both the manuscripts
microfilms and the black and white transparencies. The microfilm
collection is in the custody of the Humanities and Social Sciences
Division, where it still may be requested.
Since its appearance, this set has been so widely consulted by
scholars around the globe that the Library has now digitized the
microfilms to facilitate their use by scholars worldwide. At the same
time the descriptions of the manuscripts as found in the Checklist have also been edited and updated.
Clark’s group also chose 1,284 illuminations from 113 manuscripts to
be photographed in 4 x 5 inch black and white format. These have been
listed on pages 22-32 of the Checklist. These have not been digitized at this time but are available to researchers in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress.
Prints of the illuminations and microfilm reproductions of the
manuscripts may be requested through our Photoduplication Service.
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