More than 4,500 invaluable ancient manuscripts at the renowned St. Catherine’s Monastery on the Sinai peninsula will again emerge from obscurity with the help of cutting-edge digital scanning and computer enhancement.
According to a Reuters dispatch this past week, a team of experts from Greece is photographing thousands of fragile manuscripts, including some of the earliest copies of the Christian gospels, using a complex process that includes taking images in red, green and blue light and merging them with computer software to create a single high-quality color picture.
“Although the monastery has survived centuries of warfare, it lies in a region where Islamist militants have destroyed countless cultural artifacts and documents in Syria and Iraq. Egypt’s Christian churches have also been targeted by an Islamist insurgency in the rugged and thinly populated northern Sinai,” Reuters notes.