Codex Sinaiticus is one of the two most ancient copies of the entire Bible in Greek.  It was produced in the middle of the fourth century, and still ranks as one of the most beautiful books in existence.  Until the nineteenth century, the whole manuscript was  in the Monastery of St Catherine, Sinai.  After the investigations of the great textual explorer Constantin von Tischendorf, the majority of it ended up in St Petersburg, with 40 leaves going to Leipzig.  After the Russian Revolution, the St Petersburg part was sold to the British Museum in 1934, the first cultural artefact to be acquired for the nation by public subscription.  In a dramatic new find in the 1970s, more pages were found in a blocked up room in St Catherine's.

The project will :

• create a new set of digital images of the whole manuscript, which will be published both as a facsimile volume and in association with the other main goal, to

• make a complete electronic edition, using and developing software pioneered by Peter Robinson .  This will be available on a a free-to-all website, maintained by the British Library, offering fully-encoded transcripts, with advanced search tools, specialized codicological and palaeographical information, highest-quality images and links to other scholarly materials.

• make an exhaustive physical analysis and description of every page, setting new standards in palaeographic analysis

• for the first time, make a full comparison of all the pages now extant.  Because the manuscript was copied by a team of three scribes, and then carefully corrected, the story of its creation has never been fully reconstructed

• undertake a full conservation project

The project will thus create a "virtual Codex Sinaiticus" providing a unique research tool for scholars and explaining it to the many non-specialists who are intrigued by this unique artefact.

A link to a full-quality image of a page of codex Sinaiticus can be found by clicking on the thumbnail on the left. Note that the full image is 11MB and will take some time to download. The first column on the left contains the end of Jeremiah and the other three columns the beginning of Lamentations in the Septuagint (an ancient translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek).

A full press release and description of the project can be found on the British Library website, here.

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