The Vienna Basilica Palimpsests

One of the initiatives of the Roman emperor Justinian (527565), whose long reign marked a transition from the ancient Roman Empire to the Byzantine Empire of the Middle Ages, was the codification of Roman law. Legal regulations were included in several collections and codified in Latin. This created problems for the Greek-speaking population of the empire and inevitably led to Greek translations, summaries and commentaries. The Latin legal texts were soon being unofficially replaced by their Greek versions. In the 9th century, during a general cultural revival in the Byzantine Empire, a renewed interest in the past also included the Justinianic legislation. The circulation of legal texts in separate collections and different versions had made it difficult to find the laws relevant for a given problem. The solution was sought in a consolidated form of the entire legislation. The process begun under the Emperor Basil I (867886) led to the promulgation of its final result, the Basilica, imperial laws, around the year 900 by the emperor Leo VI the Wise (886912). The Basilica are the most extensive and comprehensive legislative text from the Byzantine Empire and a major witness for the Justinianic Corpus iuris civilis. They were held up as a model until modern time. Of this important legal collection only a few manuscripts have survived. Moreover, the Basilica have not been preserved in full, for sixteen of the sixty books of the original are lost. The discovery of two new manuscripts of considerable age, of the 10th and 11th century, in two Greek palimpsests of the Austrian National Library in Vienna twenty years ago, caused excitement worldwide and opened new perspectives. In the 12th century and around 1200, the Basilica text of these manuscripts was washed and scraped off from the parchment, and the expensive writing material was reused for Christian texts. The new texts were written in a distinct black ink over the Basilica, thus covering them up to a great extent. With the help of technical means previously available, Jana Gruskov, a classical scholar who discovered the manuscripts, and Bernard H. Stolte, a leading expert in Byzantine legal history, have so far deciphered and studied 5560% of the erased texts. It has turned out that the Vienna manuscripts, a full copy and a florilegium, are older than most of the other extant Basilica manuscripts and in part contain sections and readings so far unknown. The project aims at a complete decipherment of these palimpsests and their comprehensive exploration. State-of-the-art non-invasive methods of digital recovery will be applied to render visible the erased scripts. The two unique written artefacts hidden for centuries will be recovered and made available in comprehensive research publications.