The Aleppo Codex, the oldest surviving copy of the Hebrew Bible that some experts believe all versions of the Old Testament stem from, has been recognized by UNESCO as an important world treasure.
I24News reported that the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization added the millennium-old Codex earlier this week to its International Memory of the World Register, which honors some of the most important discoveries relating to human history.
Adolfo Roitman, the head curator of the Shrine of the Book Museum in Jerusalem, which holds the Codex, explained its significance, stating that all current versions of the Old Testament stem, “in one way or another, from this ancient manuscript.”
The Codex is believed to have been written somewhere around the year 930 in the town of Tiberias on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. It has been moved around through several different cities, and as many as 190 pages are missing from the surviving copy, though scholars disagree where and when they were lost.
It was smuggled out of Syria and arrived in Israel in 1958, before it was eventually moved to the Israel Museum in the mid-1980s.
It is also not clear who precisely owns the Codex, though filmmaker Avi Dabach, who is planning to make a documentary about the ancient manuscript, believes that it belongs to the Jewish community that fled Syria.
“In the 1960s the Aleppo-Jewish community sued the people who brought the Codex to Israel. … The Israeli Authorities decided to confiscate this item and then, from a position of strength, force on the community an arrangement,” Dabach has said.
Although the Aleppo Codex is considered the oldest copy of the Hebrew Old Testament, there are much older fragments of biblical manuscripts in existence, such as the 2,000-year-old Dead Sea scrolls. . .
We walked beside the now dusty wash that once contained the mighty but ever shifting Indus River, puzzling out the names of long-deceased members of royal dynasties now barely remembered. I was visiting the necropolis of Makli Hills with Yasmeen Lari, a conservation architect and herself a national treasure of Pakistan. The monuments at Makli chart the history of Islam in Sindh province, one of the cradles of civilization, dominated by the alluvial plain of the Indus, from which Sindh gets its name. I was there to announce that the U.S. Government is helping to conserve two of its most magnificent monuments.
As the U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan, I live in a country facing political, military, and humanitarian challenges on many fronts. One front that has not received sufficient attention in Western media is the war on cultural heritage and how this matters to the people of Pakistan.
One of the ways in which ISIL has consolidated a reign of terror in Iraq and Syria is by erasing any heritage of religious diversity. Their atrocities are not confined to military battlefields. Groups like ISIS have another important ideological objective: they are threatened by the existence of a rich cultural heritage and a history of pluralism and tolerance. They seek to destroy it.
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Islam came to Sindh in 711 c.e. via the invasion led by Muhammad bin Qasim. And its dominance on the culture was fixed by the Sufi scholars who accompanied the central Asian invaders of the 16th century. The history of this long conversion is etched in the stone of tombs at Makli Hills. The oldest ones, at the north, show a robust Hindu influence, including elaborate rosettes, with the inscriptions written in the austere Kufic script of early Islam. The later tombs, to the south, become more Persianate, with the slanting script replacing the more linear Arabic and more delicate floral and venial depictions. These ancient monuments enrich and inform today’s Pakistan and connect us to our cultural origins.
Wind and sun have taken a severe toll on the monuments, as has vandalism and looting, all perhaps part of the toll that more than a decade of fighting terrorism has inflicted on Pakistan. Treasures of Moghul artistry lie scattered and broken on the ground. Some of the elaborate sepulchers have lost their foundations and are visibly splitting apart. Even the large tombs that are structurally intact have lost their turquoise tiled roofs and cladding and now reveal their baked brick skeletons. . . . .
The Cultured Muse 