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The Syriac Galen Palimpsest (SGP), a privately owned manuscript containing parts of books 2-9 of Galen’s Simple Drugs in Syriac translation, offers important evidence to the reconstruction of the Greek text of book 9. Roughly half the book survives in it, and the article discusses the methodology used to reconstruct the often poorly visible Syriac text, combining computational tools for text and image analysis. In particular, the creation of a lemmatised bilingual Greek-Syriac corpus provides an important heuristic tool for the reconstruction of the text. The Syriac version of two chapters from book 9, ‘on stones in sponges’ and ‘on ostracite’, are edited here for the first time and used to illustrate the challenges and the opportunities that the SGP offers not just for the study of the Greek textual history, but also the transmission from Greek into Arabic.

This special issue focuses on the ‘Arabic Commentaries on the Hippocratic Aphorisms’. During a 5-year ERC-funded project, a team of researchers led by Peter E. Pormann has produced a 1.5m-word corpus of preliminary editions, and analysed it in multi-faceted ways. The team shared their digital editions with scholars from outside Manchester, and invited them to engage with the new material; these editions are now freely available to all under a Creative Commons license. In April 2015, they organised an international conference at which team members and other scholars discussed this rich commentary tradition from various vantage points. This special issue contains a selection of papers read at the conference. In this contribution, we introduce our project and its collaborators; list the texts in our corpus of preliminary editions and reflect on the scholarly analysis to which it has hitherto been subjected, ranging from Graeco-Arabic studies, textual criticism, medieval exegetical methods, medical theory and practice, and questions about the social history of medicine. We conclude with an outlook on the most pressing needs for future research, and close with acknowledgments for the manifold support that we have received.

This article reassesses the attribution of the Aphorismscommentary preserved in the Haddad Memorial Library (MSḤaddād) to Palladius. Where the evidence for the commentary in Greek sources is virtually non-existent, Arabic testimonia are more numerous. We discuss Arabic fragments in Muḥammad ibn Zakarīyā al-Rāzī’s Comprehensive Book(al-Kitāb al-Ḥāwī) and Arabic commentaries on the Hippocratic Aphorisms. These fragments demonstrate that Palladius wrote a commentary on the Aphorisms. Analysis of MSḤaddād, however, reveals that the commentary it preserves cannot be a translation of Palladius’ Greek text. Philological evidence occasions the conclusion that MSḤaddād contains an anonymous Arabic Aphorismscommentary written in the early ʿAbbāsid period. We discuss two Hebrew manuscripts that purport to be translations of Palladius’ commentary. Although more work on the Hebrew Palladius is needed, it is clear that the Hebrew commentaries are different translations of the anonymous Aphorismscommentary in MSḤaddād.

ABSTRACT:This article discusses the methodologies and tools employed in the study of the Syriac Galen Palimpsest. While it focusses on the efforts of the ongoing Manchester Project, attention is also paid to earlier and contemporary work, particularly the most recent phase of research (which can be said to have started in 2009). In this way, the Manchester Project is properly contextualised. We describe the image analysis techniques employed by the Manchester team. The challenge is to reduce the information contained in the set of multi-spectral images and enhance it where it can usefully distinguish between undertext and overtext. One can either use unsupervised or supervised dimensional reduction techniques. An unsupervised method such as principle component analysis (PCA) provides an automatic result, whereas a supervised method such as Canonical Variates Analysis (CVA) requires one to teach the system by identifying blank areas, areas with only overtext, areas with only undertext, and areas with both. Using the resulting improvements to the visibility of the undertext, the Manchester team has been able to make significant advances in identifying where its folios fit into Galen's Book of Simple Drugs. The use of a program called SketchEngine is outlined, which permits an engagement with parallel Greek and Syriac texts and powerful searches - this is particularly useful for those folios that come from Books 6–8, for which a parallel Syriac manuscript exists. Having completed this initial stage, it became clear that around 100 folios that did not come from Books 6-8 remained to be identified. SketchEngine again has proved to be very useful in facilitating identifications of these folios. To illustrate the different challenges posed by these two distinct scenarios, examples are provided from Books 5 and 8.

ABSTRACT:This article presents the Syriac Galen Palimpsest's double history, of both the original manuscript and its subsequent reuse. The original medical manuscript contained Galen's Book of Simple Drugs in Syriac translation, was probably produced in northern Mesopotamia or western Syria, and dates to the first half of the ninth century. After only two centuries, it was erased and reused to produce a liturgical text called Octṓēchos, probably at the monastery of Saint Elias on the Black Mountain. This palimpsest was later transferred to Saint Catherine's monastery in the Sinai, where it remained for several centuries before being offered for sale in Leipzig in 1922 (perhaps due to the activities of Friedrich Grote). We pay close attention to the context, contents, codicology and palaeography of both the original manuscript and the palimpsest. We also contextualise both texts within the wider story of their transmission. Through the "skeleton" table we present the latest results of our almost complete identification of the undertext. We reconstruct the structure of the original codex through a collation diagram. We draw palaeographical parallels with a dated colophon of the well-known Sahdona-manuscript. This permits us to narrow done the time and place of production of the original manuscript.

This article presents an update on the collaborative research recently devoted to the spectral imaging, reading, and study of the so-called “Syriac Galen Palimpsest” (or “SGP”), of which the undertext contains a difficult-to-read but important witness to an early (6th-century) Syriac translation of Galen’s treatise On simple drugsby Sergius of Rēš 'Aynā. Important recent developments include a large number of new bifolia identifications, many of which were made possible thanks to collaboration between two on-going European projects: the ERC “Floriental” project at the CNRS (UMR 8167 Orient & Méditerranée) in Paris, and the AHRC project “Syriac Galen Palimpsest” at the University of Manchester.

The Syriac Galen Palimpsest is a remarkable, privately owned manuscript that contains the Syriac version of Galen’s Simple drugs by Sergius of Rēš ‘Aynā (d. 536). The anonymous owner commissioned a full set of multi-spectral images and made them freely available. The available combined and enhanced images of the undertext, however, leave many areas of poor readability. The present article reports on attempts to improve readability by using sophisticated algorithms (Canonical Variate Analysis). The initial results are encouraging, and additional image capture in the infrared area with wavelengths longer than 940 nm may also be useful.

Ibn Sarābiyūn is one of the last exponents of classical Syriac medical writing, and one of the most influential authors for the development of medical theory and practice in late ninth-century Baghdad in particular, and for the Arabic medical tradition in general. During the last thirty years, three important studies have been published regarding the life and work of Ibn Sarābiyūn, each of which dealing with a different aspect of the transmission of this important author’s œuvre. Likewise, during the last twenty-five years, a number of texts associated with Ibn Sarābiyūn's works have been edited, allowing us today to shed new light on the relation between the original Syriac and the numerous translations into Arabic, Latin and Hebrew. Furthermore, through analysing and comparing a number of manuscripts containing different parts of Ibn Sarābiyūn's work which have not hitherto been considered together, progress can be made towards answering the question how Ibn Sarābiyūn was translated and used during the medieval period.

The production of manuscripts can be an indication for the scientific, linguistic or medical interests of a community. In this paper the author argues that Parisinus Graecus 2293, a bilingual Greek-Arabic manuscript, containing parts of the first three books of Paul of Aegina's medical encyclopaedia, was produced in Sicily or Southern Italy, probably in Palermo during the reign of the Hohenstaufen. It is thus a testimony to the fervent scientific and medical interest of the Swabian court which promoted cultural exchange between the East and the West. The purpose of the manuscript was not so much to help medical practice but rather to further bilingualism by giving the reader a tool with which he could improve his knowledge of either language.