The Vienna Basilica Palimpsests

The poster presents the Project "The Vienna Basilica Palimpsests" (FWF PAT9022724) that is being carried out at the ÖAW by Jana Grusková (Vienna/Bratislava) and Bernard H. Stolte (Groningen). One of the initiatives of Justinian (527–565) was the codification of Roman law – in Latin. This created problems for the Greek-speaking population of the empire and inevitably led to Greek translations, summaries and commentaries. In the 9th century, a renewed interest in the past also included the Justinianic legislation. The circulation of legal texts in separate collections and different versions had made it difficult to find the laws relevant for a given problem. The solution was sought in one consolidated form of the entire legislation: the Basilica, ‘imperial laws’. They were promulgated around the year 900 by Leo VI the Wise (886–912). It is the most extensive and comprehensive legislative text from the Byzantine Empire. It is also an important witness for Justinian’s legislation on which it goes back. Of the Basilica only a few manuscripts have survived, and sixteen of their sixty books are lost. The discovery of two new manuscripts of considerable age in two Greek palimpsests of the Austrian National Library in Vienna in 2003 opened new perspectives. These two witnesses are older than most of the other extant manuscripts of the Basilica and in part hand down texts so far unknown. A preliminary decipherment (J. Grusková) and a legal analysis (B. Stolte) have revealed that these witnesses are of great importance for filling numerous lacunae as well as our understanding of the formation, the transmission and the text of the Basilica and its use. The project aims at a complete decipherment of these two witnesses and their comprehensive exploration. State-of-the-art advances in digital recovery of palimpsests are being applied to render visible the erased scripts.