A mythical ancient Greek astronomer’s secret sky map was discovered in a medieval document discovered in an Egyptian monastery, got that?
During the COVID-19 shutdown, a historian was reviewing images of an antique book when he stumbled onto what is believed to be the oldest known star map concealed beneath a medieval Christian text. The chart might actually be the creation of Greek astronomer Hipparchus (190-120 BCE), whose long-lost Star Catalogue has been sought after for ages. Hipparchus is recognized for mapping the stars centuries before any previous documented attempts.
The manuscript, which is now owned by the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, was discovered in the Sinai Peninsula’s Greek Orthodox St. Catherine’s Monastery. It comprised Syriac manuscripts from the 10th and 11th centuries. However, the passages were written on a palimpsest, which is parchment that has been scraped clean and reused, and it is believed that underneath are ancient Christian scriptures.
Dr. Peter Williams from the University of Cambridge assigned the task of researching the pages to his students in 2012. One student discovered a Greek phrase in the books that is frequently credited to the polymath and astronomer Eratosthenes.
After the discovery, the pages underwent a reanalysis using multispectral imaging, which involved photographing the pages in various light wavelengths and combining the images in a way that improved the buried writing that had been rewritten in the 10th and 11th centuries.
Williams was looking through photographs of the text when he came across a passage that prompted him to get in touch with specialists at the French National Scientific Research Centre (CNRS) in Paris. The text was discovered to contain myths explaining the origin of the stars by Eratosthenes written down in the fifth or sixth centuries. It seemed he had located coordinates for a distant star.
In the Journal for the History of Astronomy, the paper was published.
