![]() Has visited Deir al-Surian to advise, and she is the first outsider to have examined the entire library. There is a kitchen on the ground floor, which obviously poses an additional fire risk, and smoke alarms were only fitted two years ago. Conditions in the library fluctuate wildly, with temperatures inside the third-floor room ranging from 5 to 35 degrees Celcius and relative humidity from 30% to 80%. Extremesĭeir al-Surian's library was moved from the ancient tower to a new building in 1970. Despite the losses, what remains at Deir al-Surian is an astonishing collection, comprising 1,000 manuscripts and a further 2,000 or so fragments. Until two years ago, the 40 most important ancient Syriac texts were stored in a box in the personal cell of the bishop. The monks then closed the door to scholars, locking away the remaining texts. By the early 20th century, around 1,000 manuscripts had been removed, most of which ended up in the British Library, as well as in the Vatican Library, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and the St. As early as the 17th century, Deir al-Surian attracted the attention of European bibliophiles, and from then onwards there were numerous attempts to purchase manuscripts from the monks, sometimes above board and often by subterfuge. Although the library was probably established soon after the monastery's foundation in the 6th century, it was enlarged after a visit by abbotįrom the 11th century, Coptic, Christian-Arabic and Ethiopic texts were added. Inaccessibleĭeir al-Surian's manuscripts have never been properly catalogued or studied by Western scholars, and until a conservation project was initiated three years ago, its literary treasures had been inaccessible to outsiders. These have not yet been "reassembled," and the task has been likened to completing a double-sided jigsaw puzzle with hundreds of missing pieces. When this was recently separated, it ended up as 83 fragments. For instance, the remains of a 9th-century ascetical text were found in the form of a half-inch-thick block of stuck papyri. The fragments found in the rubble of the tower are in very poor condition and will now require considerable conservation. , an agent working for the British Museum, but he sold it to the Imperial Library in St. The main part of the Deir al-Surian manuscript had been acquired in 1851 by The earliest one identified, from around 500 A.D., is a single page from a hagiographical text, and this has now been linked with a manuscript in Russia. Of Duke University as a 9th-century Book of the Holy Hierothos.Ī painstaking sifting of the rubble removed from the ancient tower also led to the discovery of around 600 fragments of early manuscripts. (It is unclear if it was hidden there for safekeeping or got there by accident.) The parchment text has now been identified by Professor Recently the rubble of the earlier floor was removed during renovations, and curator Father Bigoul found a complete manuscript, embedded in a section of disused water pipe. The library had originally been established there, since it was the most protected part of the monastery, but the first floor collapsed around five centuries ago, and a new wooden floor was simply inserted above. Inside, the monastery is centered on the Church of the Holy Virgin, built in the 7th century.Ī single completed manuscript and hundreds of fragments were found when reconstruction work was undertaken on the ancient tower, which is probably well over a millennium old. Approaching it across the sands, the 40-foot-high walled complex, with its buildings and tower, appears like a ship-and hence the tradition that its architecture is based on the design of Noah's Ark. Established in the 6th century, it was soon occupied by monks from Syria and Mesopotamia and is currently home to 200 Egyptian Copts.ĭeir al-Surian is in what was once called the Holy Desert of Scetis, in Wadi al-Natrun, a valley 60 miles south of Alexandria. Set in the desert sands and virtually cut off from the outside world until recently, Deir al-Surian traces its roots back to the earliest period of Christian monasticism. The find was made at Deir al-Surian, the Monastery of the Syrians, which already has one of the richest ancient libraries in Christendom. A cache of manuscripts up to 1,500 years old has been discovered in a Coptic monastery in the Western Desert of Egypt.
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