The Syriac Galen Palimpsest: Galen's On Simple Drugs and the Recovery of Lost Texts through Sophisticated Imaging Techniques

The project is focusing on the Syriac Galen Palimpsest (SGP), an extremely valuable multi-layered medieval manuscript containing a Syriac translation of Galen's main pharmacological treatise, 'On Simple Drugs', as the erased undertext. The manuscript is kept in a private collection in the USA, it has been fully digitised using multispectral technology and the results were made freely available online on the dedicated website. The project aims to create the critical edition of Galen’s text in Syriac based on the SGP through the advanced methods in image analysis and the bilingual Graeco-Syriac corpus on Sketch Engine platform.

Website

Partners

Bastien Kindt (GREgORI Project, Université catholique de Louvain)

Project Team

Professor Peter E. Pormann (School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, University of Manchester)
Dr Naima Afif (School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, University of Manchester)
Professor Siam Bhayro, (Department of Theology & Religion, University of Exeter)
Professor William I. Sellers (School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Manchester)
Dr Natalia Smelova (School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, University of Manchester)

Funders

AHRC (AH/M005704/1, Sep 2015 – Feb 2020)