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He was able to get some manuscripts onto trucks and to safety in Erbil in the Kurdish Region of northern Iraq. In 2017, he and Father Najeeb Michaeel, director of the Digital Center for Eastern Manuscripts, traveled in northern Iraq to show Lesley Stahl of CBS’s 60 Minutes the devastation to monasteries and libraries wrought by ISIS and the subsequent damage caused during airstrikes to liberate Mosul.įather Najeeb, a member of the Dominican order, recounted how when ISIS attacked Qaraqosh in 2014, he and thousands of other Christians had to leave quickly. Countless writings have been destroyed across Iraq and Syria. “We’ve worked extensively in the shadow of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and its aftermath,” says Father Columba, who has been forming partnerships in the region since then despite the dangers. According to HMML, the Chronicle, which had been in Aleppo, is “safely hidden for now.” Among the things Michael recounted was the arrival of the Crusaders in the Middle East.
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From Ethiopia, there are the digital copies of the beautifully illuminated Abbā Garimā Gospels, which have been radiocarbon dated to the sixth century, and from Syria via Turkey, there’s a digital version of a sixteenth-century copy of the Chronicle of Michael the Great, the work of a church patriarch who wrote the original in the twelfth century. The online collection holds images of handwritten manuscripts created from the sixth century to the twenty-first they cover nearly 50 languages, among them Arabic, Armenian, Church Slavonic, Ge’ez, Latin, Syriac, and Turkish Garshuni. In its most recent grant to HMML, NEH has provided $323,958 to create vHMML 3.0.
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For scholars interested in learning more about paleography, the study of ancient writing, there are online teaching tools. The site includes an online reading room that allows visitors to discover new texts, compare versions of known texts in several languages, and trace the circulation of manuscripts over time. In 2015, HMML began making these manuscripts available virtually on vHMML. Since then, HMML has worked with more than 550 partner libraries throughout Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and India to photograph and digitize 250,000 manuscripts, ensuring that a record persists for future generations of scholars and those who are fleeing their homelands. The project was driven by a concern that those manuscripts might disappear forever if Austria came under attack during the Cold War. It all started in the 1960s with one of Father Columba’s predecessors, who walked, rode trains, and drove a VW minibus around Austria to convince abbots to allow him to microfilm the manuscripts in their abbeys. Their efforts are to make photographic and digital records of manuscripts threatened by war, neglect, theft, or that are so remote they are nearly inaccessible. In the centuries-old tradition of his Benedictine order, Father Columba’s mission is to preserve knowledge, but he and his colleagues do it with a modern twist. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. “Manuscripts at risk have always been in our DNA,” says Father Columba Stewart, executive director of the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library at St.