Recovery of Damaged Writing

Photo: Kyle Ann Huskin

The CSMC has partnered on several occasions with Dublin’s Chester Beatty to do multispectral imaging on hundreds of leaves of the badly damaged, mostly illegible Coptic Manichaean papyrus codices in their collection. The processed images have more than doubled the amount of text scholars can read.

One result from our 2019 imaging campaign is on display in the museum’s permanent ‘Sacred Traditions’ exhibit, which is viewed by over 400,000 in-person visitors per year and by even more people globally online. Imaging the rest of the Manichaean papyri at the Chester Beatty and other institutions is a key focus of our project on the ‘Recovery of Writing in Large Collections’ (RFA21), and additional public-oriented outcomes are expected once the recovered text has been published.