THE SYRIAC GALEN PALIMPSEST: PROGRESS, PROSPECTS AND PROBLEMS Siam Bhayro, roBert hawley,

The Syriac Galen Palimpsest (SGP) is a remarkable manuscript that poses many challenges to scholars, yet also promises to yield much. Its undertext contains the Syriac translation by Sergius of Res ‘Ayna of Galen’s On Simple Drugs. A team of scholars met at the University of Manchester to exploit the advances in imaging technology to study this palimpsest. Some initial results are presented here. SGP possibly contains the text of the whole second part of On Simple Drugs (i.e., Books VI–XI); to date, only Books VI–VIII had been thought to survive, as they are preserved in another famous manuscript, London, British Library, MS Add. 14661. SGP’s importance, however, does not merely lie in the fact that it preserves text not found elsewhere, but also in that it offers many important variant readings; it is there-fore crucial for the textual history of Sergius ’ translation, as well as Galen’s On Simple Drugs more generally. Moveover, this Syriac trans