Reusing Letters in manuscript Restoration at St. Catherine’s Monastery
Modern readers of the liturgical manuscript Sinai, Ar. 253 will encounter an interesting feature at its end. The inside of its backboard contains a large, pasted paper fragment pierced by leather threads. It appears to have been used as a support or cover for the board. This fragment displays horizontal Arabic text written in reversed directions. One line, written upside down, reads:
يسلم الى انبا سابا السرياني الصيدناي من القس ارساني الكركي
To be handed in to Anbā Sābā the Syrian of Ṣaydināyā, from the priest Arsenius of Karak.
We may gather from this statement that the fragment is part of a letter. The body of the letter, which is written in the usual direction, reveals a tense financial dispute:
امسك قلم (وتعرف؟) فراج ان ما اخدت شي من (السـ؟) لان العبد | قال في الوسط ماله الا عشرين فحلفت انهم ما يعبروا قلايتي لاني خجلت من كثره الكلام بين الرهبان وترد الي الجواب بسرعه | بعد السلام عليك وتسلم على الشيخ فراج الرب الاله يستره وتهنيه | بسلامه الشيخ الصفي (؟) | القسيس ارساني الكركي الطالب صلواته
Arsenius invites the recepient, anbā Sābā, to “hold a pen,” meaning to present the calculations to someone named Farrāj, insisting that he received nothing for a certain service or transaction. He reports that a servant claims that he (Arsenius) is owed only twenty (no currency specified). In response, Arsenius swears to sever contact, declaring that none of them will pass before his cell. He complains about harmful gossip among the monks and urges a swift reply. Toward the end, he attempts to restore goodwill, offering congratulations—perhaps on the occasion of a birth or another family event.
MS Sinai, Ar. 253, the inside of the backboard with a pastedown from letter. Image with permission of St. Catherine’s Monastery
Interestingly, Arsenius of Karak appears elsewhere in the Sinai manuscript collection as a patron and owner of manuscripts dated 1316 and 1319 CE.1 The profile of a merchant aligns well with that of a patron able to afford manuscripts. This suggests that the priest mentioned in the letter fragment may be the same individual. If so, he likely resided at St. Catherine’s and played an active economic and administrative role there.
MS Sinai, Ar. 253 likely dates to the thirteenth century and shows signs of heavy liturgical use, which may explain the need for rebinding. Numerous reinforcement strips in Arabic and Greek appear throughout the manuscript.2 One strip, between ff. 26v and 27r, contains the names al-Shawbak and al-Karak—cities closely linked to Sinai and known for supplying monks over the centuries. While we cannot prove that all Arabic fragments derive from the same correspondence archive, the recurrence of Karak strengthens the likelihood of a shared origin.
As I examine marginal notes in Sinai’s Arabic manuscript collections for my project, I repeatedly encounter fragments of this kind. These include strips, fragments, and even full pages reused in bindings, located as pastedowns, reinforcement strips, or flyleaves. Such materials are clearly foreign to the original manuscripts and were introduced during later processes of rebinding and restoration.
Was it common to recycle old documents?
After long periods of heavy use, manuscripts inevitably deteriorate. Rebinding and restoration were therefore routine procedures in churches and monasteries. Binding workshops required large quantities of durable material, and old documents offered a practical solution. Some studies have revealed special binding workshops, described their binding strategies and distinguished their methods.3
Reusing material for writing was a standard procedure for scribes everywhere,4 particularly in isolated monasteries as obtaining writing material was not an easy task. Scribes reused old manuscripts and documents in different ways. They erased old texts from parchments and reused them for new texts in what is now known as palimpsests. In other cases, older documents or manuscripts with blank pages or gaps were cut and assembled into new quires for writing.5 Full pages were also used to substitute damaged or cut leaves. More commonly, narrow strips of paper were pasted onto damaged leaves to stabilize weak areas, reinforce quire folds, or reconnect torn pages.
In St. Catherine’s Monastery, these reused materials frequently contain partial texts, written in Arabic, Greek, or Syriac with different degrees of legibility. Depending on how they were cut and reused, the surviving text may consist of anything from isolated letters and short phrases to long passages and near-complete pages.6 It depends on the space of the paper needed in the process of restoration and also on the direction of cutting, vertically or horizontally.
A Corpus of Correspondence
What stands out in the case of St. Catherine’s Arabic fragments is the unusually high number of reused letters, especially correspondence concerning finances, trade, and administration, alongside a smaller number of private communications. Even when fragments are highly damaged or incomplete, their epistolary nature can often be identified through:
- The frequent use of second-person address.
- Common epistolary formulas, such as greetings and blessings.
- References to requests, instructions, complaints, and negotiations typical of written communication.
Although this corpus is fragmentary, it offers valuable glimpses into monastic economic life, bureaucratic practices, literacy, formulas, and patterns of correspondence.
Which documents to reuse?
At St. Catherine’s Monastery, monks frequently preserved copies of official documents, particularly in the context of disputes with Bedouin tribes over land, crops, and trade routes. Written documentation therefore played a crucial role in safeguarding monastic rights and property. Against this background, the decision to reuse correspondence must have been taken with care and deliberation, suggesting that these letters had likely lost their immediate administrative value.
The presence of a substantial corpus of reused letters in Sinai manuscripts may thus indicate the recycling of a specific archival collection during a particular phase of restoration activity, or alternatively, the successive reuse of letters over an extended period. These letters do not appear to have been official documents; rather, they seem to consist of private correspondence between individuals concerning monastic affairs or commercial matters. Therefore, they might have taken priority in recycling.
These letters offer two layers for examination. First is the layer of the correspondence itself: its content, context, and time of writing. Second is the layer of their later reuse in a binding workshop, most likely centuries afterward. From this significant corpus of correspondence, I will focus on two additional fragmentary examples that were reused in manuscript restoration, alongside the example already discussed.
A Letter about debts?
MS Sinai, Ar. 47, a Psalter, has a curious feature between ff. 75v–76r, a paper strip has been pasted, most likely to hold the leaves together and prevent further tearing at this vulnerable point in the manuscript. The strip bears a fragment of a letter, now oriented vertically because of how it was inserted. The script is clear, but the text itself is truncated, cut from a longer document. Still, enough survives to reveal much:
…And if Brother Jirjis comes to visit the holy monastery, he should bring the money in full and complete. … He should send it with Jalīl. And if he comes on the second day of the feast but does not send it …. And we would be disgraced before the people, and this is not…
This strip comes from a sharply worded letter. The sender warns the recipient to instruct, or perhaps pressure, a man named Jirjis to settle a financial obligation. If Jirjis visits the monastery, he must bring the full amount. If he does not come, the money should be sent through someone named Jalīl. The incomplete final lines suggest that failure to comply would cause public embarrassment or scandal.
A Letter to the Archbishop of Sinai
Another fragment, preserved in MS Sinai, Ar. 23, also a Psalter. The letter occupies one page (f. 4v) of the flyleaves that constitute a quire sewed to the manuscript. Despite discussing also commodities and other monastery’s affairs, it reflects a very different tone. Here, an anonymous monk writes to a high-ranking church authority, probably the archbishop of Sinai. The letter expresses longing, emotional dependence, and communal vulnerability:
… وصلت شيا للاب الروحاني (؟) الفاضل | المكرم المبجل الخايف من الله العامل بوصاياه و | حين قابلته وشكرت الله تعالى (صحـ؟) | فالله يرينا وجهك في خير وعافيه ولم …| امين ولا يخلينا من مشاهدتك وتسميع طيب (؟) | لاننا قد بقينا مثل الايتام وغنم بلا راعي فالله….| الاجتماع بقدسك في كرسيك امين بصلوات من أ(جل) | […..] انهي لقدسك من اجل المن فالسنه ماكان | انا مالي منه علم الى حين تاريخه وجميل ما قلت لنا (عـنه) | (غير؟) سلما ولا بعلم بان لك عندهم شي فان (حظك/حضر؟) | (الـ؟) اخليه في القلايه او في الوسط
May God grant that we see your face in goodness and well-being, and may He not deprive us of your presence, amen! Nor may He deprive us of beholding you and hearing your kind (words), for we have become like orphans and sheep without a shepherd. So may God (grant us) reunion with Your Holiness upon your seat, amen!
The writer describes the monks’ deep yearning for their absent leader and expresses hope for reunion. At the letter’s conclusion, he refers to an expected delivery, which he will place either in the cell (qallāya) or in the middle of the monastery (al-wasaṭ), likely the central area of the monastery where manuscripts, or obviously other things were stored.
This specific letter raises questions about collecting the corpus as it was sent from the monastery to somewhere, probably the Cairo dependency of the monastery where the archbishop usually resides during the Ottoman times. The connection between the monastery and its dependencies, in particular the Cairo dependency, was strong. Therefore, it is not surprising to have documents from the dependency sent to the monastery and vice versa. Otherwise, this paper might have been a draft of the letter.
What do These Letters Reveal?
These recycled letters expose the intense bureaucratic and economic life of the monastery. Trade, administration, negotiation, and conflict resolution relied heavily on written communication. Although travel to and from Sinai never ceased, correspondence remained indispensable. They also reveal the monastery as a centre of functional literacy, embedded in wide economic and social networks. Even when fragments survive only in damaged form, they preserve traces of everyday concerns, emotional bonds, power relations, and administrative pressures.
Finally, the deliberate reuse of these letters raises intriguing archival questions about the evaluation of a certain archive to be recycled, and the duration after which it is recycled, and about the archival practices of documents related and unrelated to the monastery.
- See MS Sinai, Ar. 79, ff.2v and 273r; and MS Sinai, Ar. 156, f.1v. ↩︎
- For instance, see between ff.6v and 7r; 13v and 14r (in Arabic), and 17v and 18r, 28v and 29r, and between 127v and 128r (in Greek). ↩︎
- See the work on St. Catherine’s and St. Iviron’s rebinding workshops in George Boudalis, The evolution of a craft: Post-Byzantine Bookbinding between the late fifteenth and the early eighteenth century from the Libraries of the Iviron Monastery in Mount Athos/Greece and the St. Catherine’s monastery in Sinai/Egypt. PhD thesis, University of the Arts London, 2004. ↩︎
- The majesterial reference to archives and recycling materials would be Marina Rustow. The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020. ↩︎
- See the case of al-Maqrizi in “The Recovery of Mamluk Chancery Documents in an Unsuspected Place.” In The Mamluks in Egyptian and Syrian Politics and Society, edited by Michael Winter and Amalia Levanoni, 59–78. Leiden: Brill, 2004. ↩︎
- Hirschler, “Document Reuse in Medieval Arabic Manuscripts,” 36. ↩︎