Text by ‘Father of Medicine’ Found in Remote Egyptian Monastery

The discovery was made during restoration works at Saint Catherine Monastery.

Archaeologists now believe they may have found one of the ancient doctor’s medical recipes preserved by centuries-past scholars during the renovation of the world’s oldest continuously running library.



While conducting restorations on the St. Catherine Monastery in South Sinai, a remote region on a peninsula in northeast Egypt, monks claim to have found a 6th century recipe formulated by the doctor. The discovery was announced by officials from both the Egyptian and Greek governments, who worked with researchers from Greece.

The manuscript contains a medical recipe that the researchers attribute to Hippocrates’s work during the 5th and 4th century BC. The manuscript also contains three recipes with pictures of herbs that were created by an anonymous scribe.

The manuscript was one of the library’s notable Sinai Palimpsests. The palimpsests were made from a stretched leather that would have been laborious and expensive to produce at the time. As a result, the original content of many palimpsest parchments were erased or written over to allow for a new manuscript to be written.In the case of the recently found Hippocratic medicinal recipe, a second layer of Bible text known as the “Sinaitic manuscript” was written over the initial copy. Read More