Identification and Description of the Syriac and Arabic Manuscripts at St. Catherine’s Monastery of the Sinai. Phase 1: Syriac Parchment Manuscripts

FAIN: PW-285050-22

UCLA; Regents of the University of California, Los Angeles (Los Angeles, CA 90024-4201)
Virginia Steel (Project Director: July 2021 to April 2024)
Athena N. Jackson (Project Director: April 2024 to present)
Dawn Childress (Co Project Director: May 2022 to present)

The identification and description of 152 Syriac parchment manuscripts from St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai Peninsula (Egypt), development of a data collection tool, and contribution of content to the Sinai Manuscripts Digital Library. 

The Sinai Manuscripts Digital Library (SMDL) seeks to increase access to the over 1,000 digitized Arabic and Syriac manuscripts of St. Catherine’s Monastery through a multi-phased scholarly description project that will focus on the identification and description of texts and paratexts within the manuscript collections and on documenting codicological and contextual evidence. An NEH Humanities Collections and Reference Resources (HCRR) Implementation grant will allow the project team to complete Phase 1 of this project: the identification and description of 152 Syriac parchment manuscripts from the collection. Through these activities and the resulting descriptive outputs, the proposed project will contribute to the larger Syriac Studies corpus and community and serve as a major research tool for significant new discoveries related to Syriac history and culture, as well as the history and culture of the Mediterranean, Byzantium, and the Middle East