A medieval parchment from a monastery in Egypt has yielded a surprising treasure. Hidden beneath Christian texts, scholars have discovered what seems to be part of the long-lost star catalogue of the astronomer Hipparchus — believed to be the earliest known attempt to map the entire sky.

Scholars have been searching for Hipparchus’s catalogue for centuries. James Evans, a historian of astronomy at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington, describes the find as “rare” and “remarkable”. The extract is published online this week in the Journal for the History of Astronomy. Evans says it proves that Hipparchus, often considered the greatest astronomer of ancient Greece, really did map the heavens centuries before other known attempts. It also illuminates a crucial moment in the birth of science, when astronomers shifted from simply describing the patterns they saw in the sky to measuring and predicting them.

Umberto Eco could have told us to look here.

The Sinai Palimpsests Project is a collaboration of St. Catherine’s Monastery of the Sinai and the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library, generously funded by Arcadia over a five-year period.

Arcadia is a charitable fund co-founded by Tetra Pak heiress Lisbet Rausing.

Built between 548 and 565 CE, St. Catherine’s Monastery is the world’s oldest continually operating monastery, and its library holds an exceptional collection of manuscripts from the first millennium CE. Among these are more than 160 known palimpsests, the erased layers of which preserve unstudied texts from as early as the 4th century.

You can get an account and zoom in on Arabic NF 68 which contains content from the Euchologion. The same folios have an undertext written in the Estrangela variant of Syriac titled "Philosophical treatise on the four elements" described as "Greek philosophy, with many philosophers' names (especially pre-Socratic, Aristotle). Not yet identified."