An Iron Gall Inquiry
> DC Waites
> Look up the Codex Sinaiticus. The original writing was made with a good batch of IG ink and is still hard and black...
Greetings!
Using Codex Sinaiticus as an ink exemplar is exceedingly problematic. There is simply far too much physical and historical evidence that it was actually produced int he 1800s.
Please take a look at this page.
http://codexsinaiticus.org/en/manus...lioNo=5&lid=en&quireNo=35&side=r&zoomSlider=0
In the vulgate history of the manuscript, this is a page that was supposed to have been used and started in a scriptorium with heavy use for hundreds of years, been moved to the desert clime, and then received another 1000 years including lots of heavy use, before being "discovered" in 1844.
Yet you have the following features:
1) white parchment, there is zero yellowing with age.
(this is a page that went to Germany, before the ms. was coloured, and thus they are totally consistent in their "snow-white" and "fine white parchment" colour)
2) parchment is flexible and supple, the ms. has life, easily bends, excellent conservation, it is not brittle. It is "exceptional" per the British Library (a word used again and again). Similarly, there is little concern about ink flaking (as e.g. If Alexandrinus, a truly old ms. is handled. And Alexandrinus was called "limp, dead" compared to the vellum of Sinaiticus by Skeat-Milne).
3) vellum on the coloured 90% is wildly inconsistent in colour and staining, unlike any truly old mss (putting aside water damage) The Codex Sinaiticus Project, without realizing the answer, even put up a special picture showing the "colour variance" to be studied. The answer: staining by hand after ink is applied can be rather amateurish, at least at first.
4) vellum the edges are clean as a whistle, the expected grime of handling and using is missing. (The top Russian scientist Nikolai Alexandrovich Morozov, 1854-1946, had pointed this out in 1910 as one of the factors contradicting the Tischendorf narrative. Morozov was made an honorary member of the Academy of Sciences right before Sinaiticus 90% was dumped on the Brits in the Russian fire sales of both authentic and fake items in the 1930s.)
5) the ink in some spots, as above, appears to be a virtual "super-ink" (there are retraced parts of the ms, there is no indication of retracing here)
No physical testing has ever been done on the parchment or the ink. The history was filled with controversy, and Constantine Simonides specifically claimed to have been involved in the production of the ms. on Mt. Athos, c.1840. (This is a whole fascinating history, including the specific accusation that the bulk of he ms, the yellower parts that left Sinai in 1859, had been coloured by hand, e.g. by lemon-juice. What you see above is a page from the part that went to Germany in 1844, before the colouring. That "Tale of Two Manuscripts" is what makes this history truly fascinating and unexpectedly easy to discern, as we are able to see the "before" and "after"!
So, can this seriously be claimed to be 1650 years old? For a manuscript with a contested provenance (no catalog entry, no nuttin, simply a "poof provenance") and no history before 1840? That shows that it was tampered? That is totally "exceptional" in ways that cry out "recent".
Even if you are not interested in the issues around Sinaiticus authenticity:
vellum and ink connoisseurs should be aware that the frequent use of Sinaiticus as a long-term example is, at best, questionable.
Steven Avery
Dutchess County, NY
www.fountainpennetwork.com