Copyright ©2011 by Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
Distributed under an Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) License.
Palimpsest is the term used for a parchment ms. that has been written on
twice (or rarely, more times), where the original script has been erased. A
very high proportion of the older surviving texts in Christian Palestinian Aramaic (CPA) are under texts in
palimpsests. Palimpsests where Syriac is the upper text mostly date between
Syriac, and especially CPA, may also be the under text where the upper text
is in other languages, Greek, Arabic, Georgian, or Hebrew. Very occasionally
manuscripts are doubly palimpsest (
See Fig. 95.