St. Catherine Monastery

Trekearth's page on St. Catherine's Monastery on the Sinai Peninsula, a UNESCO World Heritage site and the repository of many ancient manuscripts.

The oldest record of monastic life at Sinai comes from the travel journal written in Latin by a woman named Egeria. She visited many places around the Holy Land and Mount Sinai, where, according to the Hebrew Bible, Moses received the Ten Commandments from God.

The monastery was built by order of Emperor Justinian I between 527 and 565, enclosing the Chapel of the Burning Bush ordered built by Helena, the mother of Constantine I, at the site where Moses is supposed to have seen the burning bush; the living bush on the grounds is purportedly the original. The site is sacred to the three major Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Photo by Konstantin Novakovic

For Sale: Sixth Century Codex

Someone should write this book.

Christian scribes wrote the sixth century Codex Climaci Rescriptus in Aramaic, the ancient language that Jesus spoke. Its 137 sheepskin leaves include both Old Testament and New Testament material.

Then, according to a Forbes article, the manuscript was taken from what is now Israel to the Sinai desert in Egypt and hidden for 300 years at the ancient St. Catherine's monastery. It's not clear why the codex was transported there, though Sotheby's speculates that it was taken there by Christian refugees fleeing Muslim persecution.

Ninth century scribes at the monastery, falling upon hard times without parchment, cannibalized older works. They tore pages from eight different books -- six in Aramaic and two in Greek -- and erased the original writing then wrote over it in black ink. They wrote instructions on running the monastery, copied from a sixth-century monk named John Climacus. Ah bureaucrats.

Next chapter: Twin British sisters found the codex in 1892 in Cairo. The twins bought as many leaves of the codex as they could between 1895 and 1906. They brought them to England and bequeathed them to Westminster College in Cambridge on their deaths in the 1920s.

In what sounds a bit like history repeating itself, now Westminster is raising cash for some building renovations. The Sotheby's sale was set for today. This Sotheby's link has a detailed provenance.