Codex Sinaiticus, the World's Oldest Bible, now online

The NPR radio program All Things Considered has an interview with Scot McKendrick, curator at the British Library, about the international project to create an online edition of the Codex Sinaiticus, the world's oldest known Christian Bible

Click here to listen to the Interview

The Codex Sinaiticus, or Sinai Book, was at the Monastery of St. Catherine in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula until 1859, when the book was divided. Part of it remained there, while other parts were taken to Britain, Germany and Russia.

Now, scholars from those four countries have virtually reassembled the 1,600-year-old work and made it available to anyone who wants to look at it for free.

"The whole project rests on an agreement between the four institutions. Each one committed themselves to ... the greater good of the whole to present this virtual codex," Scot McKendrick, chairman of the multinational group that worked on the project, tells Robert Siegel.

McKendrick, the British Library's head of Western manuscripts, says the codex offers an insight into what was happening in the fourth century.

"This is the point at which Christianity is becoming authorized, accepted by authority, and this book very much reflects that," he says. "It also reflects a point where there is still a discussion going on about which texts are in the Bible and which order they should be presented in."

The Codex Sinaiticus Web site is a veritable treasure trove for researchers and others. The site grants access not only to images of the pages, but also to the new transcription of the text, McKendrick says, which allows scholars to search for word patterns, among other uses. The digitized version offers breathtaking detail of the codex, which is written by hand in Greek on animal skin.

"The Web site is wonderful in that it allows you to see that physicality, see a thumbprint of a 1,600-year-old scribe, an insect that bit the animal that the page has come from," he says. "It's like a window in that ... critical era."

The Clopton Charter at Brock University

We have posted a feature article on our main Medievalists.net website about the discovery of a 13th century document at Brock University in Canada. The document, which details a land transfer between Robert de Clopton and his son, was hidden away in a drawer at the University's archive for over 30 years.



Last month, we published an article about the discovery, and since then we have interviewed all the people involved in researching this manuscript. We now are publishing new details about charter as well as images of it.

Click here to access The Clopton Charter at Brock University.

8th century Islamic vase found in Japan

Pieces of an Islamic ceramic vase dating back to the late eighth century have been discovered in Nara Prefecture, making it possibly the oldest Islamic porcelain found in Japan, Nara city government researchers said Friday.

Nineteen pieces with a blue-green exterior and dark green interior surface were unearthed at Saidaiji Temple in the ancient Japanese capital, they said without giving the specific date of the discovery.

The excavation team also unearthed a piece of wood bearing Chinese characters indicating the year of the reigning Japanese emperor, corresponding to 768 AD, which led the researchers to determine the era in which the Islamic vase was made.

Keisuke Morishita, the head of the western city's research center for buried cultural property, described the discovery as providing "first-class historical data that indicates there was a 'Silk Road of the Sea' linking eastern and western Asia."

The Nara researchers believe the vase was more than 50 centimeters high and had a diameter of 11 to 12 cm at its base, adding it was likely that the vase was used to carry spices or dates.

What were previously thought to be the oldest Islamic ceramics in Japan were found in Fukuoka Prefecture, but the latest find from the Abbasid Caliphate appears roughly a century older, they said.

The pieces will be on display at the Nara research center from Monday until the end of the month and then at Nara city hall from Aug. 10 to 31, according to the center.

Etruscans did not become the Tuscans, study shows

The current population of Tuscany is not descended from the Etruscans, the people that lived in the region during the Bronze Age, a new Italian study has shown.

Researchers at the universities of Florence, Ferrara, Pisa, Venice and Parma discovered the genealogical discontinuity by testing samples of mitochondrial DNA from remains of Etruscans and 27 people who lived in the Middle Ages (between the 10th and 15th centuries) as well as from people living in the region today.

While there was a clear genetic link between Medieval Tuscans and the current population, the relationship between modern Tuscans and their Bronze Age ancestors could not be proven, the study showed.

"Some people have hypothesised that the most ancient DNA sequences, those from the Etruscan era, could contain errors or have been contaminated but tests conducted with new methods exclude this," said David Caramelli of Florence University and Guido Barbujani of Ferrara University.

"The most simple explanation is that the structure of the Tuscan population underwent important demographic changes in the first millennium before Christ," they said.

"Immigration and forced migration have diluted the Etruscan genetic inheritance so much as to make it difficult to recognise."

The scientific data does not necessarily mean that the Etruscans died out, the researchers said.

Teams from Florence and Ferrara universities are working to identify whether traces of the Etruscans' genetic inheritance may still exist in people living in isolated locations in the region.

The new study, Genealogical discontinuities among Etruscan, Medieval and contemporary Tuscans, is published online by the scientific journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.

The Etruscans lived mainly between the rivers Tiber and Arno in modern-day Umbria, Lazio and Tuscany, in the first millennium BC.

English Historical Review - June 2009

The June 2009 issue of the English Historical Review (Volume 124, Number 508) has now been published, and it includes a couple of articles that would be of interest to medievalists.

History and Hagiography in the Late Eleventh Century: The Life and Work of Herman the Archdeacon, Monk of Bury St Edmunds, by Tom Licence

Pages 516-544
Abstract: During the 1090s, a monk of Bury St Edmunds, called Herman, wrote an account of St Edmund's miracles by weaving them into a historical framework founded on the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. His aim was to portray St Edmund as a national saint whose mercies had helped to shape the fortunes of the English people. Herman's work is an invaluable source for historians working on the eleventh century, but his identity is in doubt with the consequence that even his name is disputed. Antonia Gransden argues that ‘Herman’ in fact was a French hagiographer called Bertran who came to England c. 1090. The present article overturns this theory, painting quite a different picture of the monk whose work sheds new light on historical writing and intellectual culture at his monastery. Formerly a senior cleric in the bishop's household, Herman had spent up to thirty years or more in East Anglia, managing the bishop's correspondence with the king and dealing with major players who feature in his history. As a senior monk at Bury St Edmunds he would preach to the common people and invite them to revere the saint's relics. Moreover, he had an ambitious vision for his written project, which was uniquely innovative for its time as much in its portrayal of history as in its design.

Making Sense of the Early Middle Ages, by Roger Collins

Pages 641-665

Synopsis: A review of five recent books: The New Cambridge Medieval History. Vol. I: c.500–c.700, edited by Paul Fouracre; Framing the Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800, by Chris Wickham; Paradigms and Methods in Early Medieval Studies, edited by Chazelle Celia and Felice Lifshitz; Europe after Rome: A New Cultural History 500–1000, by Julia M.H. Smith; and The Early Middle Ages: The Birth of Europe, by Lynette Olson. Professor Collins offers a negative opinion of the current work being done here, concluding that, "Many historians of the period are apparently unwilling to write in clear and comprehensible English for the enthusiastic readership that exists for historical works, preferring to cloak their meaning in language that is aimed only at an initiated élite. All in all, there seems to be far too much navel-gazing going on, and generally there is greater danger of intellectual paralysis than of over-confidence."

For more information on accessing these articles, please see the Oxford University Press website.

Remains of a medieval castle found at St. Adrian's tunnel in Basque Region

Those responsible for leading excavations into the St Adrian tunnel (between Gipuzkoa and Alava) which started a year ago have been amazed by recent findings.

"This is double what we expected (to find)," said one archaeologist. "Without doubt, what is emerging here is a big surprise."

Remains which have been found inside the tunnel, where today only the old Roman road and an ancient chapel still stand, have lead archaeologists to conclude that there once stool a medieval castle of some magnitude, as well as possibly an inn and a cemetery. All of these are evidence of the importance of the underpass which joins the Basque provinces of Gipuzkoa and Alava.

The Lizarate pass, better known as the San Adrian tunnel, was once the entrance to Gipuzkoa and the Roman road that runs through it united the medieval kingdom of Castile with France.

"It was like the N1 (an important highway that runs from Madrid to the Basque town of Irun) of its day ... marketers, princesses,.. everybody traveling between Castile and France would have to have passed through here," explained one of the diggers.

Furthermore, remains have also been found from the Bronze Age, two metres below where the current archway stands, proving that the passageway was previously much wider.

Representatives from the council of Gipuzkoa will continue to encourage the archaeological exploration of the site with the objective of retrieving this historically strategic spot of the Aizkorri Aratz national park.

As one council deputy explained: "Firstly what we want to do is preserve the site and then of course give it the importance that is warrants."