The Early Illustrated Apollonius of Tyre

Studies of a Sinai Palimpsest

Michelle P. Brown, Jessica J. Lockhart

• Publisher: Barkhuis
• Year: 2026
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9789493194762
• Subtopic: History of Ancient Art
• Index: Literature

This volume presents the extraordinary discovery at St Catherine's Monastery, Sinai of a fragment of an early illustrated codex of the Story of Apollonius, King of Tyre, one of the most enduring works of literature of the past fifteen centuries. On parchment first reused for an Athanasian Creed and, since the ninth century, bound into one of the earliest Arabic Gospels (Sinai, Arabic New Finds 8 and 28), the fragment preserves three layers of textual history. Here, essays by experts in codicology, palaeography, literature, art history, textual editing, and cultural heritage imaging illuminate this Sinai palimpsest, offering new perspectives on the ancient novel and on late antique and early medieval Mediterranean networks of language, religion, patronage, and trade. The essays are accompanied by high-quality images, edited transcriptions, and an appendix that describes all the fragments in the manuscript.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Introduction - A Scrap of Parchment
• Part 1 - The Fragment: Cultural and Scientific Contexts
• Chapter 1 - St Catherine’s Monastery, MS Arabic NF 8 and the History of Apollonius, King of Tyre–A Sojourn in the Sinai?
• Chapter 2 - The Sinai Palimpsests Project and the Recovery of Latin Undertexts in Arabic NF 8
• Part 2 - The Fragment’s Latin Layers
• Chapter 3 - An Illustrated Historia Apollonii under an Early Copy of the Athanasian Creed on a Sinai Fragment
• Chapter 4 - The Sinai Apollonius of Tyre and the Material and Literary Evidence for the Circulation of Novels in Late Antiquity
• Chapter 5 - Between Ephesus and Tarsus: The Illustration in the Sinai Apollonius
• Chapter 6 - The Palaeography of the Sinai Apollonius Fragment
• Part 3 - The Arabic Gospel Book
• Chapter 7 - St Catherine’s Sinai, MS Arabic NF 8: The Arabic Gospels Supratext
• Chapter 8 - Holding the Parts Together: The Codicology of the Sinai Codex Arabic NF 8
• Appendix
• Appendix 1 - Colour mapping of Sin. ar. NF 8 + Sin. ar. NF 28
• Editors and Contributors
• Indices