Liane's Corkey Trivia

Just this summer, Egyptian archaeologists announced the discovery of two wine presses carved with large crosses not far from St. Catherine’s monastery in the Sinai Peninsula. The monastery itself was built in 527-565 A.D. by the Roman emperor Justinian. Subsequently, one might suspect that the winery was a part of that nearby monastery. However, upon closer inspection the wine presses, clay storage jars(amphorae), grape seeds, and several gold coins come from an even earlier time, 364-378 A.D. So in fact, the winery’s Christian iconography pre-dates the monastery.

This particular monastery was actually built to protect the Chapel of the Burning Bush found today within its walls. The story of the Burning Bush is told in the Old Testament. St. Helena, mother of Constantine, commissioned the chapel between 306 and 330A.D. to commemorate the holy ground where the “burning bush” resided that spoke to Moses one day as he was herding his sheep and goats in the mountains. Clearly this was a holy mountain because Moses also received the Ten Commandments written on stone tablets from God on that mountain. Stone was one of the mankind’s earliest canvases for written communication. The site was also home to one of Christianity’s oldest bibles. Also found in St. Catherine’s monastery was the Codex Sinaiticus.

The codex is a Roman invention, known today as a book. Technically all books are codices but now the term is only used for hand written books (manuscripts) from Late Antiquity through the Middle Ages. Books replaced scrolls, which replaced stone tablets. Throughout antiquity, reading a scroll was the way people read their “books”. Scrolls were kept either upright in a box, or horizontally in a shelf, or in a pigeonhole. A tag was attached to the handle of the scroll called a titulus which identified its contents. The average book scroll was thirty to thirty-five feet long with writing only on the inside. You would unwind the scroll with your right hand and wind with your left hand. The written columns called paginae were on average between two and four inches wide so you would not have to unroll too much scroll at one time. The author and the title were at the end of the scroll where it would be more protected. This made it hard to identify the contents of the scroll if the titulus fell off which was not uncommon. Reading a book this way was a “linear” experience, kind of like watching a video tape. It was hard to do research since you had no way of knowing exactly which section of the scroll contained the information you were looking for.

It took a lot of papyrus to make a scroll so, due to shortages, they ramped up the production of parchment (made from the skins of cattle, sheep, and goats) and vellum (made from skins of younger animals). Parchment differed from papyrus in that it was easily foldable and provided a smooth non fibrous writing surface that could be used on both sides. So the Romans folded a large piece of parchment in half to make a “folio”. Folding it in half again gave four leaves or eight pages front and back called a “quarto” and folding again gave eight leaves or sixteen pages called an “octavo” which turns out to be the size of most notebooks. (These terms were still in common use in Shakespeare’s time and only occasionally in use today.) After folding you would add a cover, stitch it together, cut the pages free, and voila a codex!

The Greek name for the papyrus plant was biblos which came to mean the scroll made of it. From bilbos is derived book and ultimately, the Bible. The Codex Sinaiticus is a parchment manuscript bible. They made wine in that area because it was a holy place which therefore produced holy wine. I must say, holy wine tastes a lot better than holy water. Cheers!