alt Hacker NewsThis is not a very historically informed comment. This didn’t take place during the “dark ages,” for one, but in a Christian monastery in Islamic Sinai if the timing of the article is correct. It’s a shame that some of these discoveries were overwritten but this was a common practice in any culture because paper was so expensive.
The writings of St. John Climacus were also far more useful and interesting to people at the time since they dealt with what for them were practical matters of how to lead the life of their community. This isn’t because they were narrow-mindlessly religious. Monks also had to busy themselves with calendrical calculations — and therefore astronomy. These were works of what we would call practical philosophy or ethics, like the famous Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. It would also have been tragic to potentially lose those culturally significant writings in favor of astronomical or mathematical texts.
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What if Hipparchus originally charted stars that no longer exist in our sky, due to having gone supernova hundreds of year ago? A thousand year time difference is roughly 1/3rd of a complete equinox precession, which would also be interesting to compare against our modern day observations.
All of this is valuable, both the cultural knowledge and the scientific. I doubt the monks realized the gravity of their choice so long ago.
> Christian monastery in Islamic Sinai if the timing of the article is correct
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ladder_of_Divine_Ascent
According to this article his writings pre-date the Islamic conquest (639).
Of course, there was also this: https://www.sinaimonastery.com/index.php/en/history/mohammed
And St Catherine's is a fortress in the middle of the desert so who knows what it's status was, it was an interesting time (beginning of Islamic conquests).
Also, to add to this - the "dark ages" were kind of a misnomer. The center of culture and science in the West packed up and moved from Rome to Constantinople. What we think of as the "dark ages" were really the "barbarian" tribes of Europe (starting with the Franks), slowly becoming educated and cultured within the shadow of the old Roman empire.
Also, the monks and scribes creating palimpsest were not thoughtless. In the West we enjoy a very wide collection of ancient texts specifically through the diligent work of making and distributing copies. They were remarkably literate and intentional in their work.
A lot of these palimpsest were not entire books, but fragments or loose pages that had built up over centuries and then bound and repurposed. They were not any more sentimental with them than you would be with a pile of old journals from a thrift shop. A collection of celestial observations done by the eye were certainly not of particular interest to them.