We're in the conservation lab at the National Museum of Asian Art looking at a very fragile and ancient manuscript that Charles Langfreer purchased in Cairo at the end of 1906.
Not knowing precisely what it was.
The manuscript is actually the third oldest complete book of the four Gospels.
It is in relatively good condition given how old it is.
The edges are very brittle and it's still somewhat in a bound format where there's still some remnants of the leather.
The text block is still connected.
This is a codex consisting of different gatherings of parchment.
We have 27 gatherings and two wooden boards, and the wooden boards have encaustic painting on it that very likely were added at a later time.
And when Freer brought the book back to the United States, a lot of scholarly attention went to what does the book say?
Is there anything new here that it could tell us about the Gospels, about the life of Christ?
And it turned out there was but, But.
Now you're at the very beginning of a long research project in understanding not what the writing in the book says, but what the materials of the book itself tell us, a field called codecology.
And that is where we're launching into all these different fields of expertise, of parchment experts, of bookbinding experts and experts that do advanced imaging and that do scientific analysis.
So we have the parchment and then wanting to identify the wood.
Can we understand where the wood came from?
Is it from the area of Egypt?
Was it possibly imported from Europe?
And understanding what kind of fiber we have.
Is it a hemp?
Is it a flax linen thread?
An analysis of the collation of the book, going through page by page and trying to understand.
Were there any pages that were removed in the binding that we can see now?
Because of the fragility and the age of the manuscript.
Simultaneously, we have to work to preserve it.
One part of this entire project is to obviously stabilize the edges that are fragile.
So we want to do as little as possible but still stabilize the object so it can be handled, because that's the whole point.
The object is there for people to be able to view it.
When we look at the manuscript, it's terrifying.
It feels as though any touching will cause some loss.
We have a flat bamboo spatula that is very thin.
That helps to go in between the pages and then to turn the page.
And the parchment itself can tell us so much.
One big part of the project is understanding, first of all, what kind of animal it is, understanding how many animals were used to make this manuscript.
One thing that we've been working on is measuring every single page.
So with a digital micrometer, we took nine measurements on every page.
This tells us that this is very fine, carefully prepared parchment.
There are places where we can see that as they stretched the parchment it became even thinner and in some places opened up gaps.
There are these poles that were repaired with patches from the peeling process.
So that also let us understand that this is very likely sheepskin, because you can only peel sheepskin.
And then we have the question of the chemical composition of the ink itself.
We will be able to see maybe, what kind of tool was used to write this manuscript and if the ink recipe changes and also just the concentration of the ink, to find patterns of how the scribe worked.
And I'm wondering if there are any previous investigations of manuscripts as old or nearly as ancient as this one that can guide the work that you do.
One that comes to mind is the Vienna Genesis, and then there's also the Codex Sinaiticus.
There are almost too many options of what can be done, and it's important that we frame it and also understand the limitations of what we can do.
All these questions that are being asked often lead into more questions.
I was reading and I was thinking about the idea of codecology, and then I read this term, biocodecology.
Just remembering, this is an animal.
And so we can bring the tools of biology and DNA analysis to this manuscript.
It's a very exciting project and there's a lot to be learned and it's great to be able to draw from so many different fields of expertise and trying to put this puzzle together of this one manuscript and hopefully be able to contribute to the story of book production in late antiquity.
