The digital outputs of the AHRC-funded project The Syriac Galen Palimpsest based at the University of Manchester from 2015 to 2020 are now available. Our multidisciplinary team used cutting-edge imaging techniques to recover the erased text from a unique manuscript and restore a valuable witness to the scientific heritage of the Syriac Christian world.
The dataset, which is accessible in Open Access, includes a critical edition of Books 6–9 of Galen’s On Simple Drugs, presented in PDF, RTF, and Mellel formats, along with processed images of the manuscript. Further information on our editorial approach will be published in the forthcoming volume The Syriac Galen Palimpsest: A New Paradigm for Cross-Disciplinary Research (Proceedings of the British Academy), stemming from the project’s international British Academy Conference held in 2019.
Consult the files on Figshare: Pormann, Peter; Sellers, William; Bhayro, Siam; Afif, Naima; Smelova, Natalia (2025). Galen: On Simple Drugs in Syriac Translation. University of Manchester. Collection. https://doi.org/10.48420/c.7641374.v1