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Show . 3 0 - Mt events msm moving fest beyond oar t d U in those resets regions, and I was lad from treasure to treasure, not knowing v&at was going to follow next. Exactly twenty-four hours before 1 had decided to leave the 14onastery after the completion of Wg task «lth the Rspedition, I was in th© course of essoining !•£;. So. 514 whan suddenly I began to notice BOS© w ry peculiar features JaS soae of its folios* Ihla is probably the oldest Codex in the Arable Collection, written in Knfic on brittle ancient parchment, tshioh I dated late 8th «arly 9th century, fro© the beginning, I had -known it to b© a Syriac paHiapsest, i.e., a Manuscript where one scribe erased an older text to write a new one in its place. This was dictated by the circffiastances of th© shortage of parchment in those days, and scribes generally chose older books th© value of which they did net know. Ho*jever, on subjecting this Codex to close examination, I found that it was not raerely a Syriac Palimpsest. It ims such acre. On the recto aid® of one folio, 1 noticed Greek uncials running through the page Into the Margins | and on the verso side of the saas folio, a saieh faded archaic Kufic also ran into the aargin, while the Syriac could just be seen froa a different angle across the folio. This -gave we the cine to th© extraordinary uatore of this strange Codex. It is tri-ltagaal sine© it contains Syriac, Greek and Arabic layers of writing. Other folios where the 8th century scribe failed to erase the original script sufficiently for re-^sing the parchment w©re left blank and showed two layers of Syriac script st^er-iEpo^d on en© another. Hence the parchment of this Palimpsest mast have been used and re-used five times as shown fey the existence of five layers of writing on its folios. These are one Greek, two Syriac and two Arabic layers - a record hitherto unknown la the world of manuscripts and the history of Palfcpseets. |