I am delighted to announce that The Syriac Galen Palimpsest, published in the Proceedings of the British Academy by Liverpool University Press, is now available to order. Centred on Galen’s treatise On Simple Drugs, the volume features contributions from scholars working across different disciplines, including four chapters by our team at the University of Manchester, produced as part of the UKRI-funded Syriac Galen Palimpsest project (SGP, 2015–2020).

Establishing the Syriac Text of Galen’s Simple Drugs: Editorial Technique and Practical Principles (P. E. Pormann, N. Afif, S. Bhayro, W. Sellers, & N. Smelova) presents the method and guidelines used for our digital edition published on Figshare along with the processed images of the manuscript. The paper X-ray Fluorescence Imaging of the Syriac Galen Palimpsest (U. Bergmann et al.) is the result of our collaboration with SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford to recover more of the text from unreadable folios. Our article The Enigma of Who Translated Galen’s Simple Drugs, Book 9, into Syriac (N. Afif, P. E. Pormann, & N. Smelova) investigates the authorship of the Syriac translation of the section on stones of On Simple Drugs using stylometry. Finally, The Alexandrian Tradition: New Discoveries of Gesius’ Galenic Commentaries in Syriac (N. Afif, P. E. Pormann, & N. Smelova) presents our pilot study that laid the groundwork for the recently founded ERC Advanced Grant project Gesius, led by P. E. Pormann at the University of Manchester.

The volume is available to order directly from Liverpool University Press. ISBN: 9781805966692

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.