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Show ^3 •• &f U' Faculty of Arts, Farouk I University, ALEXANDRIA. Egypt. 24 August, 1949. Dear Dr. Evans, Although we have never met or exchanged correspondence before, what I have heard about you from Mr. Wendell Phillips encourages me to write to you an a matter of moment to your Library and to the world of scholarship. This is the project of photographing the Mount Sinai manuscripts. I understand that previous consulat ions with the Archbishop on this subject have met only with partial success. The fact that the permission was given to photograph small parts of the manuscripts rightly accounts for the alienation of your interest in the project. Since then, however, I was asked by my Rector and Mr. Wendell Phillips to approach the Archbishop, who is a personal friend of mine, in the hope of persuading him to alter his decision. I readily welcomed this request as * realised the immense possibilities of a collection which I had known for many years. At long last, my efforts have been crowned with success, and the Archbishop has given his approval to photograph the entire collection. We have to remember that the value of this collection is not limited to the well-known 3,000 volumes of which American scholars including yourself are well-aware. There are other documents in the form of ancient rolls which I myself discovered in the Monastery about ten years ago. These form a set of about 2,000 rolls emanating from the Courts of Sultans and Kings throughout the Middle Ages and down to the end of the Ottoman period. It is a unique set,and I issue this statement as a man who knows practically all the manuscript repositories of Europe, the Near East and North Africa. The new resolutions by the Archbishop must necessarily lead to the re-opening of the subject on a completely new basis. If the matter is carried to a successful issue, I believe that this will be one of the most formidable acquisitions in the history of the Library of Congress. I should therefore like to ask you to give the matter all due consideration before I move to the next point. In the course of the long discussions which I held with the Archbishop, we reviewed the actual state of the monastery which is becoming lamentable financially. In bygone days, the monastery depended for its resources mainly on its vast estates in Russia and the Orthodox Balkan Countries. Now the Soviets have swept all these, while revenues from Greece have become worthless owing to depreciation and inflation. So the monastery has been much Impoverished and its debts have mounted during and after the war to the terrific figure of £E-30,000 at a time when the monks addition tofe etlhe m olraarlgley u pbkoeuenpd otfo fteheedi r 40an0c ifeanmti lfieosun dofat iBoedno.u ins In Prom. |