More re earliest page found at Deir al-Surian

The Art Newspaper

Fragments of the earliest dated Christian literary manuscript have been found at Deir al-Surian, an ancient monastery in the Egyptian desert. Dating from 411 AD, these were discovered under a collapsed floor of a ninth-century tower. The fragments are from the final page of a codex written in Syriac (an Eastern Aramaic language) which was acquired by the British Museum library in the 19th century.

Few manuscripts have had such an astonishing history. In 1847, British Museum librarian William Cureton said that “among all the curiosities of literature, I know of none more remarkable than the fate of this matchless volume”. We can now add a final chapter to the story.

The manuscript on Christian martyrs was written in Edessa (now Sanliurfa, Turkey), and at some point in the next five centuries it was taken eastwards. In 931, the abbot of Deir al-Surian travelled to Baghdad and brought it back to Egypt.

In 1086, a monk added a marginal note in the middle of the manuscript, expressing concern that the last page with its colophon (the scribe’s ending notes) might be lost. Since the book was by then already “ancient”, he wanted to record that it had been written in 411. The monk’s precaution was wise, since centuries later the last page did indeed become detached.

The European who found the main manuscript was Lord Curzon, who visited Deir al-Surian in 1837 in search of ancient texts for the British Museum. There were then only a dozen monks, led by a blind and elderly abbot. Lord Curzon bought three Coptic manuscripts, but he had heard rumours that earlier texts in Syriac were hidden in the cellar of the ancient tower, in a vault used to store olive oil.

The Independent UK also covers the story and has a set of photographs of the fragments as they were found (click on the More Pictures link under the main photograph).

For those who are unfamiliar with Egyptian monasticism, Deir al Surian (Monastery of the Syrians) is located in the Wadi Natrun, in the desert near the western part of the Nile Delta. It is thought to have been established here as early as the Sixth Century, and forms part of a history of Coptic monastic life dating back to the Fourth Century, when St Macarius retreated here and attracted followers. It started out life as the Monastery of the Holy Virgin Theotokos, but its name changed to Monastery of the Holy Virgin of the Syrians when it was sold to rich Syrian merchants from Mesopotamia in the Eighth Century. Its role as a library began in the Tenth Century, when a senior monk named Moses of Nisbis brought over 250 Syrian texts to the monastery, after spending a number of years actively collecting them. Its role as a centre for scholarly activity raised its importance, and by the Eleventh Century it was the biggest of the Wadi Natrun monasteries, with 60 monks in residence. The monastery experienced a series of downturns in its fortunes, but continued to be occupied (albeit not exclusively by Syrian monks). It now has electricity and telephone lines, and has been extensively restored in recent years.