The parchment once belonged to St. Catherine’s Monastery, but most of its 146 leaves are now in the possession of the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C.
Medieval Greek Orthodox parchment Monastery of Saint Catherine of Sinai in Egypt was hiding a big surprise: under the Christian text a part of the supposed lost star catalog of the ancient Greek astronomer Hipparchus, the world’s first attempt at a complete “mapping” of the night sky, was discovered.
Scientists are looking for it work of Hipparchus for centuries, so historians of astronomy have called the discovery rare and important. The relevant scientific publication was made in the journal History of Astronomy “Journal for the History of Astronomy”, according to “Nature.” The find proves that Hipparchus, considered the most important astronomer of ancient Greece, had indeed made a “map of the heavens” several centuries before anything similar was attempted.
The parchment belonged to the Monastery of St. Catherine, but most of its 146 leaves are now in the possession of the Museum of the Bible in Washington. The parchment contains the Codex Climaci Rescriptus, a collection of Syriac texts from the 10th or 11th century. The codex is a palimpsest, meaning an older text was written underneath.
Initially it was thought that this oldest text was also Christian. But when in 2012 biblical text expert Peter Williams of the University of Cambridge asked his students to study the Codex, he unexpectedly found a paragraph in Greek attributed to another important Greek astronomer, Eratosthenes. In 2017, new analysis was done with more modern multispectral imaging technology by American researchers, who photographed the pages of the parchment in different wavelengths of light and then used computer algorithms to read the text hidden underneath.
In this way, nine pages revealed astronomical material, which was dated – by the radiocarbon method and the analysis of the writing style – to the 5th or 6th century. The text contained, among other things, myths about the birth of the stars by Eratosthenes, as well as parts of a famous 3rd century poem, Phenomena, which describes the constellations.
What followed was even more interesting, as Williams identified star coordinates in the text and proceeded to further analysis, in collaboration with science historian Victor Gieseberg of the French National Institute for Scientific Research (CNRS) and Emmanuel Xing of the Sorbonne University in Paris. It was thus revealed that on at least one page of the parchment, precise coordinates were given for the stars at the four ends of the Corona Borealis constellation. Strong evidence has also been found that the source of these measurements was Hipparchus and that his calculations were made around 129 BC.
Until today, the only star list that had survived from antiquity was that of the astronomer Ptolemy in Alexandria, Egypt during the 2nd century AD. His Almagest (or Mathematical Syntax) was one of the most influential scientific texts in history, presenting a geocentric mathematical model of the Universe that had been widely accepted for over 1,200 years. Ptolemy had, among other things, given the coordinates of more than 1,000 stars.
But in the ancient texts there are many references that the first one who had made such stellar measurements was Hipparchus the Rhodian (190-120 BC) three centuries ago. Earlier Babylonian astronomers had measured the positions of some stars but only around the Zodiac, while Hipparchus was the first to determine the positions of the stars using two coordinates and attempted to create a “map” of the entire night sky.
“This list of stars that until now was floating around in the texts as almost something hypothetical has now become something very concrete,” said the historian of astronomy Matthieu Ossendriever of the Free University of Berlin.
Researchers believe that Hipparchus’ original list, like Ptolemy’s, would have included observations of almost every visible star in the sky. Lacking a telescope, Hipparchus probably used some other observational instrument such as a diopter and would certainly have “spent endless hours of work,” according to Gieseberg.
The Hipparchus-Ptolemy relationship has always been a murky issue. Some experts have gone so far as to claim that Hipparchus’ star catalog never existed, while others – first and foremost the 16th-century astronomer Tycho Brahe – have countered that Ptolemy simply stole Hipparchus’ pre-existing measurements and passed them off as his own. . The analysis of the revealed text on the parchment so far has led the researchers to the initial conclusion that Ptolemy did not simply copy the elements of Hipparchus. On the other hand, as they pointed out, Hipparchus’ numbers for the positions of the stars (with a deviation of at most one degree from the actual ones) are much more accurate than those of Ptolemy’s successor.
According to astronomy historian James Evans of the US University of Puget Sound, the discovery “enriches our picture of Hipparchus and gives us a fascinating idea of what he was really up to”. As he said, his work was decisive because it was a milestone for the “mathematicization of Nature”, i.e. the shift from the simple description of natural phenomena to their measurement, calculation and prediction.
Hipparchus had criticized his predecessors in astronomy for not caring about numerical precision. According to Evans, Hipparchus took advantage of the Babylonian tradition of precise astronomical mathematical observations and thanks to him the “marriage” with the Greek geometrical tradition took place, with the result that “this is how modern astronomy really began”.
Researchers hope that as imaging techniques improve, they will discover other star coordinates in the Code, several parts of which have yet to be read. They also consider it possible that additional pages of Hipparchus’ star catalog survive in the library of St. Catherine of Sinai, which contains more than 160 palimpsests. Related research has already brought to light unknown ancient Greek medical texts under the Christian ones.
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