So an unknown "high-tech" person bought it in 1998 for $2 million, because a New York court ruled that the Greek church had no legitimate claim to it, despite possessing it for over 900 years. And since then, all this research has been performed to reveal the contents of the document but we still don't know who the unknown buyer is? Bizarre world.
"... manuscript was taken to an isolated Greek monastery in Palestine, possibly to protect it from occupying crusaders, who often equated Greek script with heresy against their Latin church and either burned or looted many such texts ..."
Depressingly reminiscent of Bishop Landa and the destruction of Mayan codices ("as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all"). How much of our common cultural heritage has been destroyed by religious zealots over the centuries?
Immense amounts. Christian monasticism in particular was responsible for the loss of the vast majority of classical texts in the late roman and early medieval periods. It was only by the ~12th century that the image of the "wisdom-loving monk copying the classics" truly existed, in the almost a millennium prior they were almost always zealots bent on destruction of non-christian heritage.
FWIW, it's not specific to religion. The exact same thing happens with political ideologies, too, and cultural differences in general. Historically, a lot of art, knowledge and people were erased in conflicts over those things - through wars and civil wars and reformations and such.
My take from this is that zealotry has a long proven, insanely high base rate of being disastrously wrong. It's also sheer idiocy on a theoretical level - it's the extreme case of using confidence to hide lack of understanding. If you feel you're becoming zealous about some cause or idea, this means you most likely don't understand much of it[0]. If you're in an environment that encourages zealotry, you're being used.
Something to keep in mind when evaluating your religious, political, social or technological beliefs.
--
[0] - It doesn't mean the idea itself is necessarily bogus. The idea is probably wrong in some ways - all ideas are - but zealotry is just stupid, regardless of the subject. To abuse a philosophical point, regardless of whether your belief is true or not, you ought not to be zealous about it.
I worked in St Catherine’s Monastery where these manuscripts are stored to make a 3d scan of the monastery, museum, and Mount Sinai summit if interesting: https://stcatherines.mused.org/en/
This place is seriously inspiring, and the monks and teams from Greece that do the manuscript scanning are awesome people.
Recommend going in early December for the Feast of Saint Catherine (they go on the old calendar).
There's a book (I believe it is "The Archimedes Codex : Revealing The Secrets Of The World's Greatest Palimpsest" by William Noel and Reviel Netz), that I read many years ago exactly about this topic. In the book they describe that they used a similar approach to the one used for the vesuvius challenge: they x-rayed the whole palimpsest and then looked for imprints below the pages for traces of the original treat that was copied by a previous scribe. Very interesting read.
The approach may be similar, but in this case you can at least separate the individual pages, whereas the Herculaneum scrolls are lumps of carbonized papyrus (lower quality than parchment) where you can't even be sure where the writing is located, so a much bigger challenge...
