Palimpsest
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A manuscript or document that has been erased or scraped clean, for reuse of the paper, parchment, vellum, or other medium on which it was written. Many historical texts have been recovered using ultraviolet light and other technologies to read the erased writing.
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Some famous palimpsests
- The Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris: portions of the Old and New Testaments in Greek, attributed to the fifth century, are covered with works of Ephraem the Syrian in a hand of the twelfth century
- Among the Syriac manuscripts obtained from the Nitrian desert in Egypt, British Museum, London: important Greek texts
- Codex Nitriensis, a volume containing a work of Severus of Antioch of the beginning of the ninth century is written on palimpsest leaves taken from sixth century manuscripts of the Iliad and the Gospel of St Luke, both of the sixth century, and the Euclid's Elements of the seventh or eighth century, British Museum
- A double palimpsest, in which a text of St John Chrysostom, in Syriac, of the ninth or tenth century, covers a Latin grammatical treatise in a cursive hand of the sixth century, which in its turn covers the Latin annals of the historian Granius Licinianus, of the fifth century, British Museum.
- The only known hyper-palimpsest: the Novgorod Codex, where potentially hundreds of texts have left their traces on the wooden back wall of a wax tablet
- The Ambrosian Plautus, in rustic capitals, of the fourth or fifth century, re-written with portions of the Bible in the ninth century, Ambrosian Library
- Cicero, De republica in uncials, of the fourth century, covered by St Augustine on the Psalms, of the seventh century, Vatican Library
- Codex Theodosianus of Turin, of the fifth or sixth century
- the Fasti Consulares of Verona, of 486
- the Arian fragment of the Vatican, of the fifth century
- the letters of Cornelius Fronto, overwritten by the Acts of the Council of Chalcedon
- the Archimedes Palimpsest, a work of the great Syracusan mathematician copied onto parchment in the tenth century and overwritten by a liturgical text in the twelfth century
- Sinaitic Palimpsest
- the unique copy of a Greek grammatical text composed by Herodian for the emperor Marcus Aurelius in the second century, preserved in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna
- Codex Zacynthius – Greek palimpsest fragments of the gospel of Saint Luke, obtained in the island of Zante, by General Colin Macaulay, deciphered, transcribed and edited by Tregelles
- Codex Dublinensis (Codex Z) of St. Matthew's Gospel, at Trinity College, Dublin, also deciphered by Tregelles
- Codex Guelferbytanus 64 Weissenburgensis, with text of Origins of Isidore, partly palimpsest, with texts of earlier codices Guelferbytanus A, Guelferbytanus B, Codex Carolinus, and several other texts Greek and Latin;
- Other palimpsests (New Testament)
To the present day survived about sixty palimpsest manuscripts of the Greek New Testament. Uncial codices:
Porphyrianus, Vaticanus 2061 (double palimpsest), Uncial 064, 065, 066, 067, 068 (double palimpsest), 072, 078, 079, 086, 088, 093, 094, 096, 097, 098, 0103, 0104, 0116, 0120, 0130, 0132, 0133, 0135.
Lectionaries:
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