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Blobrana


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RE: Ancient manuscripts
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A rare Old Testament manuscript about 1 300 years old is finally on display for the first time, after making its way from a secret room in a Cairo synagogue to the hands of an American collector.
The manuscript, containing the "Song of the Sea" section of the Old Testament's Book of Exodus and dating to around the 7th century AD, comes from what scholars call the "silent era" - a span of 600 years between the third and eighth centuries from which almost no Hebrew manuscripts survive.

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Blobrana


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The Iliad
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After a thousand years stuck on a dusty library shelf, the oldest copy of Homer's Iliad is about to go into digital circulation.
A team of scholars travelled to a medieval library in Venice to create an ultra-precise 3-D copy of the ancient manuscript -- complete with every wrinkle, rip and imperfection -- using a laser scanner mounted on a robot arm.
A high-resolution, 3-D copy of the entire 645-page parchment book, plus a searchable transcription, will be made available online under a Creative Commons license.
The Venetus A is the oldest existing copy of Homer's Iliad and the primary source for all modern editions of the poem. It lives in Venice at the ancient Public Library of St. Mark. It is easily damaged. Few people have seen it. The last photographic copy was made in 1901.

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Blobrana


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MUL.APIN
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Using modern techniques and some rocks a US astronomer has traced the origin of a set of ancient clay tablets to a precise date and place. The tablets show constellations thought to be precursors of the present-day zodiac.
The tablets, known collectively as MUL.APIN, contain nearly 200 astronomical observations, including measurements related to several constellations. They are written in cuneiform, a Middle-Eastern script that is one of the oldest known forms of writing, and were made in Babylon around 687 BC.
But most archaeologists believe that the tablets are transcriptions of much earlier observations made by Assyrian astronomers. Just how much older has been disputed the estimates go back to 2,300 BC.
Now Brad Schaefer, an astronomer at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, says he has dated the observations to 1,370 BC, give or take a century.
The tablets contain a number of different observations, including the day each year that certain constellations first appeared in the dawn sky. These dates change over the millennia because of a tiny wobble in the Earth's axis.

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Blobrana


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Some of the most famous pieces of paper in the world have a friend in Yuma. The 2,000-year-old Dead Sea Scrolls are hailed as the greatest archaeological discovery of the 20th Century and a Yuma professor wants to help the world understand their message and mystery.
Pam Kuhlken, a professor at Arizona Western College, recently co-authored the book "What are the Dead Sea Scrolls and Why Do They Matter?"

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Blobrana


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A rare Torah scroll fragment from the Book of Exodus dating back to the 7th century that includes the famous Song of the Sea will be unveiled Tuesday at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the museum announced Monday.

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Blobrana


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Researchers at the University of Manchester have uncovered new evidence which firmly places the origins of modern medicine in ancient Egypt and not Greece.
The researchers from the Knowledge Horizon Centre for Biomedical Egyptology (KNH) were examining ancient texts written on papyrus made from the plant- which ancient Egyptians used to make scrolls. The medical papyri were written at least 3500 years ago, 1000 years before Hippocrates, who it is claimed was the father of medicine, was even born.
The Egyptian papyri contain medical treatments and prescriptions used in ancient Egypt.

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Blobrana


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Experts are "lost for words" to have found that a medieval prayer book has yielded yet another key ancient text buried within its parchment.
Works by mathematician Archimedes and the politician Hyperides had already been found buried within the book, known as the Archimedes Palimpsest.
But now advanced imaging technology has revealed a third text - a commentary on the philosopher Aristotle.
Project director William Noel called it a "sensational find".
The prayer book was written in the 13th Century by a scribe called John Myronas.

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Blobrana


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In a move to preserve rare and priceless ancient manuscripts lying forgotten in temples and museums across the country, India Wednesday launched an online database of one million of an estimated five million such known documents.

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Blobrana


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Bodmer Papyrus
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 Benedict XVI received as a gift to the Holy See one of the most ancient manuscripts of the Gospels, an artifact that demonstrates Scripture's historical actuality. The Pope was given the 14-15 Bodmer Papyrus (P75), dated between A.D. 175 and 225, on Monday by Frank Hanna and his family, of the United States. "The papyrus contains about half of each of the Gospels of Luke and John. It was written in Egypt and perhaps used as a liturgical book" - Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, archivist and librarian of the Holy Roman Church, during the audience. The manuscript previously belonged to the library of the Bodmer Foundation in Cologny, Switzerland, and is now in the Vatican Apostolic Library.

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Blobrana


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Oldest Semitic text
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A magic spell to keep snakes away from the tombs of Egyptian kings, adopted from the Canaanites almost 5,000 years ago, could be the oldest Semitic text yet discovered, experts said Tuesday.
The phrases, interspersed throughout religious texts in Egyptian characters in the underground chambers of a pyramid south of Cairo, stumped Egyptian experts for about a century, until the Semitic connection was found.
Believing that some snakes spoke the Semitic language of the Canaanites, Egyptians included the magic spells in inscriptions on two sides of the sarcophagus in an effort to ward them off.

"Come, come to my house," reads one section in the Semitic language that is supposed to be the snake's mother speaking, trying to lure him out of the tomb. In another passage, the snake is addressed as if he is a lover with "Turn aside, O my beloved."

The Egyptian and Semitic sections are each an integral part of the magic spell and neither can stand alone, according to Professor Reuven (Richard) Steiner, an expert in Semitic languages and teacher of Semitic literature at Yeshiva University in New York. For this reason, the Egyptian experts could not fully understand parts of the religious texts.

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