All posts tagged: Manuscript

Rare Manuscript of AA ‘Big Book’ Estimated at M. Heads to Auction

Rare Manuscript of AA ‘Big Book’ Estimated at $2 M. Heads to Auction

Published by Jenni Sidey

A rare working copy of Alcoholics Anonymous, the basic text of the 12-step program, also known as “the Big Book,” is coming to auction at Christies New York on July 1 at its Rockefeller Center salesroom. It comes from the collection of the late billionaire Jim Irsay. Bearing extensive handwritten notations and edits by the authors, it is estimated to sell for between $1 and $2 million. The proceeds will go to philanthropic causes that were important to Irsay. The manuscript has sold for various prices over the years; the next buyer may get it at a discount relative to its last outing. Irsay bought the manuscript in 2018 from auction house Profiles in History for $2.4 million, per ESPN; it had previously come to auction twice at Sotheby’s, ESPN reports: in 2004, when it went for $1.6 million, and in 2007, when it fetched $992,000. Related Articles “Our dad understood the struggles countless people everywhere face every day and wanted so badly to bring hope and relief to anyone who was suffering,” said Irsay’s …

New imaging uncovers hidden text in ancient Christian manuscript

New imaging uncovers hidden text in ancient Christian manuscript

Published by Sam Flores

(RNS) — An international research team has recovered 42 lost pages from Codex H, a sixth-century Greek New Testament manuscript of St. Paul’s letters, using multispectral imaging and carbon dating. The new discovery, led by Garrick Allen, a professor of divinity and biblical criticism at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, offers insight into how early Christians read and understood Scripture — and provides a point of connection for contemporary Christians. Monks annotated the letters of St. Paul with poems, prayers and reflections at the remote Great Lavra Monastery on Mount Athos in Greece. Codex H is also one of the earliest-known examples of the Euthalian Apparatus, a system of chapter lists and headings to organize Paul’s letters, relied on long before the chapter and verse system used today.  “We mark up our own Bibles or make annotations or think about the complexities of these texts that were part of a much longer tradition of people who have been doing this same activity for 2,000 years,” Allen told RNS in an interview Monday (April 27), …

Long-lost page from Greek manuscript discovered in French art museum

Long-lost page from Greek manuscript discovered in French art museum

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. The Archimedes Palimpsest is a Byzantine prayerbook written in 1229, but the artifact holds more than what immediately meets the eye. The original writing on its pages was erased and replaced—making it a palimpsest—a common practice during the medieval period for expensive writing materials made from animal-skin like parchment. In other words, the scribes reused parchment from other books.  As such, the palimpsest hosts a number of 10th century treatises by the Greek mathematician and inventor Archimedes of Syracuse (though the original texts would have been centuries older). Notably, among the palimpsest’s earlier erased works are the only known texts of two of Archimedes’ treatises in existence, The Method and Stomachion.  Today, the Archimedes Palimpsest is housed at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland and owned by a private collector. It’s “one of the most important surviving manuscripts of antiquity,” according to the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). There’s just one problem. The manuscript was photographed …

Missing Page of Archimedes Manuscript Found in France

Missing Page of Archimedes Manuscript Found in France

Published by José Betancourt

A page missing from The Archimedes Palimpsest, the oldest extant copy of writings by the ancient Greek mathematician, was rediscovered at the Museum of Fine Arts in Blois, France. One side of the page, which had been missing for 120 years, contains part of Archimedes’s treatise On the Sphere and the Cylinder, while the other was covered over with an illumination sometime in the 20th century. The Palimpsest dates back to the 10th century in Greece and features several written works by Archimedes, parts of which were erased in the Middle Ages so as to reuse the parchment for other material. “This practice of recycling was common at the time for such animal-skin writing materials, which were extremely costly,” according to the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), one of whose researchers made the rediscovery. Related Articles As noted in a story about the news in Scientific American, “Archimedes lived around 250 B.C.E. in Syracuse in ancient Greece and was among the world’s greatest thinkers, responsible for theories, experiments and inventions about math, physics …

Grammarly Offering Manuscript Reviews by AI Versions of Recently Deceased Professors

Grammarly Offering Manuscript Reviews by AI Versions of Recently Deceased Professors

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Grammarly is being accused of “necromancy” after users discovered a feature for reviewing manuscripts with AI versions of real professors — some of whom have already left this mortal coil. The issue was first flagged by Verena Krebs, a medieval historian and Ruhr-University Bochum professor. On Sunday, Krebs shared a screenshot showing the “Expert Review” tool allowing users to pick historian David Abulafia as one of the available “experts” to check their paper. If Abulafia objected to his inclusion here, we’ll probably never know, since he died in January. The news sparked a flurry of fiery responses across academic circles.   “Grammarly is now offering ‘expert review’ of your work by living and dead academics,” Vanessa Heggie, an associate professor in the history of science and medicine at the University of Birmingham, wrote in a LinkedIn post. “Without anyone’s explicit permission it’s creating little LLMs based on their scraped work and using their names and reputation.” “I have seen …

The Rohonc Codex: Hungary’s Mysterious Manuscript That No One Can Read

The Rohonc Codex: Hungary’s Mysterious Manuscript That No One Can Read

Published by José Betancourt

Image by Klaus Schmeh, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons Mag­yar, which is spo­ken and writ­ten in Hun­gary, ranks among the hard­est Euro­pean lan­guages to learn. (The U.S. For­eign Ser­vice Insti­tute puts it in the sec­ond-to-high­est lev­el, accom­pa­nied by the dread­ed aster­isk label­ing it as “usu­al­ly more dif­fi­cult than oth­er lan­guages in the same cat­e­go­ry.”) But once you mas­ter its vow­el har­mo­ny sys­tem, its def­i­nite and indef­i­nite con­ju­ga­tion, and its eigh­teen gram­mat­i­cal cas­es, among oth­er noto­ri­ous fea­tures, you can final­ly enjoy the work of writ­ers like Nobel Lau­re­ates Imre Kertész and Lás­zló Krasz­na­horkai in the orig­i­nal. Alas, no degree of mas­tery will be much help if you want to under­stand a much old­er — and, in its way, much more noto­ri­ous — Hun­gar­i­an text, the Rohonc Codex. “Lit­tle is known about this book before it was bequeathed to the Hun­gar­i­an Acad­e­my of Sci­ences in 1838,” writes The Art News­pa­per’s Gar­ry Shaw. “Its 448 pages bear illus­tra­tions cov­er­ing Bib­li­cal themes and an as yet unread­able text, writ­ten using around 150 dif­fer­ent sym­bols.” Like the famous­ly cryp­tic Voyn­ich Man­u­script, much cov­ered here on Open …