My latest article has been published in the new issue of BABELAO – Electronic Journal for Ancient and Oriental Studies. It is now available through UCLouvain’s open-access journal platform: N. AFIF, “Jésus est-il mort volontairement selon le Coran? Une lecture historico-critique de Q 4:156-159”, BABELAO 14 (2025), pp. 107-130 In this publication, I discuss new
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
My contribution to the volume Retranslating the Bible and the Qur’an: Historical Approaches and Current Debates is accessible in Open Access. Edited by Pieter Boulogne, Marijke H. de Lang, and Joseph Verheyden, this publication brings together studies that highlight the complexity of retranslating canonical religious texts. My paper explores a double indirect Hebrew translation of
New publication: Naima Afif, Peter E. Pormann, William I. Sellers, Natalia Smelova, Siam Bhayro, “GalenQt. A New Software Tool for Recovering Lost Text and its Use for the Reconstruction of the Lacuna in Galen’s Simple Drugs, Book 8”, in C. Rapp, J. Gruskova, G. Kessel, G. Rossetto (eds), New Light on Old Manuscripts: Recent Advances
As part of my collaboration with the GREgORI Project (which provides scholars with lemmatized corpora in many languages!), I have worked with Bastien Kindt on the lemmatisation and morphological analysis of: Books 1 (ch. 1-10), 6, 7, 8 of the Greek text of Galen’s On Simple Drugs and Discourse 13 (S2 version) of Gregory of Nazianzus
The Congress ‘Humanizing Digitalization. Digitalizing Humanities’ organised by El Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) in Madrid took place online on the 20 and 21th October 2021. In the first session devoted to text analysis, I explained how to create a multilingual corpus (in Latin, Italian, Hebrew, Arabic) by using the textual analysis software Sketch
I am very happy to present you the result of my online collaboration with the John Rylands Library in 2020. I have compiled TEI XML descriptions of Syriac manuscripts from the John Rylands Research Institute and Library’s collection. This material was presented in the exhibition Seeing the Invisible (2019-2020) and is now accessible on the
New publication: Naima Afif, Peter E. Pormann, William I. Sellers, Natalia Smelova, Siam Bhayro, « The Syriac Text of Book Nine of On Simple Drugs. New Evidence from the Syriac Galen Palimpsest » in Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Sciences (Galen’s Treatise On Simple Drugs: Interpretation and Transmission), 70/184-185, 2020, pp. 130-149. Access through the publisher’s website.
Discover how our research team at the University of Manchester is uncovering the lost heritage of Syriac Christians through the exhibition ‘Seeing the Invisible’. Curated by Professor Peter Pormann and Dr Natalia Smelova, the exhibition will run from October 2019 to March 2020 at the John Rylands Library and will display the Syriac Galen palimpsest
The Syriac Galen Palimpsest is an exceptional manuscript containing the Syriac translation of a pharmacological treatise by Galen. Our team at the University of Manchester is organising a two-day conference under the auspices of the British Academy. This conference will gather scientists and humanities scholars who will discuss the methods employed to decipher the
Our latest paper in now published: A. Afif, S. Bhayro, P. E. Pormann, W. I. Sellers, N. Smelova, « On Digamma and the Armenian Earth », in Le Muséon, 131 (2018), p. 391-414. Abstract: The treatise On the Mixture and Power of Simple Drugs (Περὶ κράσεως καὶ δυνάμεως τῶν ἁπλῶν φαρμάκων) by Galen of Pergamum (129-216) is
Our team at the University of Manchester had the great opportunity to collaborate with the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory . The aim was to perform rapid-scan X-ray fluorescence (XRF) imaging of several folios from the Syriac Galen Palimpsest which were so far unreadable. The initiative has received press coverage