The Enigma of the Sinaitic Glagolitic Tradition

The sensational find on Mt. Sinai in May 1975 has not only yielded a large amount of important manuscripts, but also raised many questions about their development and St. Catherine`s monastery as an international centre of Christianity and culture. Complex, comparative investigations are needed to answer them and to draw a conclusive picture of the various traditions which co-existed and influenced each other there. Continuing ASF-project P19608, this joint-venture aims at the edition of the hitherto inedited manuscripts of the Glagolitic finds (Sin. slav. 3N & 5N) and the comparative analysis of the whole Sinaitic Old Church Slavonic collection (10th-11th/12th c.), on the one hand, and the further development and application of technical means for the preservation, investigation and virtual restoration of written cultural heritage and its access for the research community, on the other. Recent comparisons of the Glagolitic Sinaitica have shown that they were at least partly written there. While it is clear from their liturgical character that these books must have been in practical use, we can only guess why they were not composed in the younger, Cyrillic script - like most contemporary sources deriving from other areas. It seems that their authors formed a special group that adhered to the oecumenical tradition of Cyril and Methodius and defended it against the (Constantinopolitan or Roman) official church politics of their respective home lands. These results open up a new chapter in the early cultural history of the Slavs. In order to illuminate it three major tasks have to be fulfilled: to complete the edition of the Glagolitic findings, to collect and analyze the Glagolitic sources originally belonging to the Sinaitic collection in comparison to other (OCS and Greek) samples of Sinaitic and non-Sinaitic origin, and to investigate the scenario in which the OCS tradition on Mt. Sinai came into being. In order to exert these tasks, experts of the humanities, computer scientists and chemists will work together: Special imaging, image-enhancement, and image-analyzing techniques are needed for fragments preserved in a bad condition or containing palimpsests; the philological analyses have to be improved and accelerated by special computer programs; and the materials of the mss.-make-up (parchment, inks, pigments/dyes) must be analyzed by non-destructive (XRF, FTIR, UV-vis) means. Some of these means have already been developed and/or successfully applied in the running project and will only be adopted for the work with non-Glagolitic objects, others are yet to be developed. Three complex results are to be expected: 1. highly important editions and comparative data (codicology, palaeography, graphemics, material) of the relevant documents; 2. improved imaging devices and new computer- programs for the preservation, analysis and restoration of damaged written sources; and 3. new insights in the literary, language and cultural history of the Slavs and their connections with the Christian Orient.

In view of the remarkable fact that the majority of Old Church Slavonic manuscripts written in the first Slavic, Glagolitic script (10th-11th c.), were discovered not in their homelands, but in St. Catherine's monastery on Sinai, this interdisciplinary follow-up project of philologists, computer scientists and chemists pursued three major goals: 1. the publication of the remaining unedited Old Church Slavonic-Glagolitic manuscripts from the great find of 1975; 2. the analysis and comparison of all relevant manuscripts which were discovered on Sinai and of those found in the Slavic lands (especially in the Balkans), in order to elucidate their provenance and to cast light on the circumstances under which Glagolitic manuscripts were written on Sinai or were conveyed there and preserved over the centuries; and 3. the application of the latest imaging and image-processing techniques and the development of new programs both for the restoration of damaged or overwritten manuscripts and also for the chemical-spectroscopic investigation of the materials (parchment, inks, pigments etc.) from which they are made.The most important outcomes of this project are: 1. after improving the acquisition-system and adapting the relevant software, the digital and partly multi-spectral capture of more than 25 as well as spectroscopic material analysis of 19 manuscripts for edition and/or comparison; 2. the post-processing of the images of corrupted manuscripts via contrast enhancement, use of false colours etc.; 3. the facsimile- and internet-publication and preparation of a critical edition of Demetrius' Psalter 3N, the largest manuscript of the new finds and the one which is of most significance within the given framework; 4. the facsimile- and prepared text-edition of the so-called Medical Folia, the oldest non-religious document of Slavic literature and the only one written on thrice erased parchment; 5. a print- and internet-edition with accompanying photographs of the Menaion-fragment 4N, a remnant of one of the oldest Slavic collections of hymns for divine service; 6. the development or improvement of computer programs for the enhancement of images and the automated recognition of layout, characters (OCR), and scribal hands; 7. the further enhancement of the multi-spectral images and subsequent new deciphering of the most important service-miscellany 5N, yielding a rate of 10-30% more text per page; 8. the component analysis, evaluation and comparison of chemical material data detected by spectroscopy (via X-Ray-Fluorescence and Fourier-Infrared-Transform analyses); 9. the overall description and data comparison of 24 manuscripts in all, resulting in the identification of 45 sections by 41 scribes and assessment of their Sinaitic or non-Sinaitic origin as well as their cultural and historical setting.