This research seeks to reveal the important Vienna palimpsest of the lost ancient work De prosodia catholica by the Greek grammarian Herodian (2nd cent. AD) as completely as possible. The output will be a complete critical edition of the Vienna fragments with a translation and a full commentary. An international team of five scholars has been created and entrusted by the ANL and the other institutions involved with the task of further deciphering, examining and editing the Vienna palimpsest: Klaus Alpers † (Hamburg), Jana Grusková (Wien/Bratislava), Nigel Wilson (Oxford), Herbert Bannert (Wien), Oliver Primavesi (München). Special methods of state-of-the-art non-invasive digital recovery are being applied to make the poor remnants of the erased script visible.
The scholarly team has made significant progress in the decipherment and the analysis of this very important, but challenging palimpsest. However, the digital recovery and the extremely difficult decipherment of the severely damaged manuscript has proven particularly complex, necessitating further applications of the most advanced technical methods in order to fill the remaining gaps, which are scattered throughout all palimpsest pages. Furthermore, each new fully deciphered passage brings new insights and textual connections to light, requiring new thorough investigation and contextualization. This advanced research is going to be carried out and completed in the following years.
(FWF Project P 31939-G25: 01.02.2019 – 31.07.2025)
This FWF project has recovered, deciphered, and analysed up to 85 percent of the Vienna Herodian Palimpsest (Cod. hist. gr. 10, Austrian National Library) containing fragments of the important, but lost ancient work De prosodia catholica. It was written by Aelius Herodianus (2nd. cent. AD), one of the most influential Greek linguists of antiquity. It is a systematic presentation of accentuation in ancient Greek, in which quotations from ancient literature were regularly cited. Herodian dedicated this masterpiece to the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius. The work was frequently consulted by later scholars and is often cited in modern dictionaries of ancient Greek. Ten leaves of a 10th-century Byzantine copy have survived, but the Herodian text was later (12th/13th cent.) thoroughly washed and scraped off and the parchment was reused for a life of the Church Father John Chrysostom. The new text was written in large characters with intense black ink over the erased lines of Herodian. The international project team of five philologists – Klaus Alpers (Hamburg), Jana Grusková (Vienna/Bratislava), Nigel Wilson (Oxford), Herbert Bannert (Vienna), and Oliver Primavesi (Munich) – has deciphered the Herodian fragments letter by letter with great dedication and effort, thoroughly analysing the text. To render visible the erased and covered script, the project has employed state-of-the-art, non-invasive methods of multispectral digitization and X-ray fluorescence analysis, as well as specialized image processing. For this purpose, the scholarly team has been cooperating with experts in digital recovery of erased scripts. The scholars have thoroughly studied, translated and interpreted the deciphered text. Particular attention has been paid to the reconstruction and interpretation of the literary fragments. However, the digital recovery of the severely damaged manuscript has proven particularly complex, necessitating further applications of the most advanced technical methods in order to fill the remaining gaps, scattered throughout all palimpsest pages. Furthermore, each new fully deciphered passage brings new insights and textual connections to light, requiring new thorough investigation and contextualization. This advanced research is going to be carried out in the following years.
The Vienna Herodian Palimpsest was discovered 65 years ago by Herbert Hunger, a renowned Austrian scholar. Using the technology available in the 1960s (ultraviolet light), Hunger was able to decipher approximately 15-20 percent of the erased text. Since the beginning of the 21st century, the research on the Vienna Herodian palimpsest has been renewed and further carried out under several projects conducted at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and led by Otto Kresten and Jana Grusková.
