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At the end of the sixteenth century, a number of relics and artefacts were discovered in Granada, Spain. They included what became known as the Lead Books of the Sacromonte, twenty-one written artefacts made of circular lead leaves engraved in archaic Arabic characters. The authorship was attributed to some Arab disciples of St James the Greater considered to be the first evangelisers of the Iberian Peninsula. The texts, the materiality and the circumstances of the discoveries fuelled a debate surrounding their authenticity that lasted more than two centuries, a debate so fierce and controversial that not even papal condemnation in 1682 was able to stop it. Soon after the discoveries were made public, scholars highlighted the many contradictions and errors of a historical, linguistic and theological nature present in the texts, identifying members of the local Morisco community as possible forgers. This article focuses on how the scholarly community of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries handled these findings and looks at the methods employed by the scholars to evaluate the authenticity of the artefacts. It will also look at how the particular interests of the various authorities involved influenced the acceptance or dismissal of relevant academic results.
Parchment
(2019)
This lecture will present history of parchment based on written sources and chemical examination of antique, medieval and modern parchment.
Our studies of the Dead Sea Scrolls writing surfaces show that they can be divided roughly into three groups: leather, parchments of a light tint, and those of various shades of brown. The latter ones are invariably tanned, whereas the middle group is characterized by the presence of various inorganic salts. Some of the pale parchments, among them the Temple Scroll (11Q19), are remarkably similar to medieval European parchment. Therefore we have formulated the working theory that in the Judaea of the Hellenistic period two different parchment-making traditions existed side by side: an ‘eastern’ one (represented by the tanned parchments of Qumran, closely resembling Aramaic documents from the fifth century BC, and a ‘western’ one (represented by the untanned/lightly tanned ones similar to early Christian Greek parchments).
This division has found support during our studies of the Geniza fragments, in which Babylonian and Palestinian traditions seem to follow the “eastern” and “western” technologies, respectively.