---
title: "The Sinai Palimpsests Project's own venues disagree on the erased-text language count — 11 (Phelps 2023) vs. 10 (UCLA Newsroom and the project website), the gap being Coptic"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
source_url: "https://www.austriaca.at/0xc1aa5572_0x003e8c9d.pdf"
source_title: "The Sinai Palimpsests Project (2011–2016): Goals, Methods, and Contributions"
source_author: "Michael B. Phelps"
source_date: "2023-10-24T00:00:00.000Z"
source_quote: "Identification of 307 discrete erased texts in 11 languages"
source_tier: 1
source_sha: "1904901e6ec4d4d5877165dfc2c47fcd9018c8b530600b24897b72c5deb24283"
other_sources: [{"url":"https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/lost-ancient-texts-recovered-and-published-online-through-international-partnership","title":"Lost ancient texts recovered and published online through international partnership","author":"Kathy Brown, UCLA Newsroom","date":"2017-12-19T00:00:00.000Z","tier":2,"quote":"The Sinai Palimpsests Project contains 74 palimpsests totaling some 6,800 pages in 10 languages and containing erased layers of writing from the fifth to the 12th centuries.","note":"Exact article URL not resolved to a specific path this session. The project's own 'About the Project' page (sinaipalimpsests.org, Tier 2/3) gives the same '10 languages' figure per the promoting capture, but without a captured verbatim quote. [2026-08-30 audit: URL resolved to the path above; quote, byline, and date re-verified verbatim on live fetch. The About page sentence was also captured live via the UCLA mirror (sinaied.library.ucla.edu/about-project/index.html): 'The palimpsests of Sinai contain thousands of rewritten folios that preserve erased copies of classical, Christian and Jewish texts in ten languages (Greek, Syriac, Georgian, Arabic, Christian Palestinian Aramaic, Latin, Caucasian Albanian, Armenian, Slavonic, and Ethiopic)' — ten languages named, exactly Phelps's table minus Coptic.]"}]
audit_status: "2026-08-30 cross-model audit (claude-fable-5): capture re-verified — Phelps quote and the full eleven-language table re-read verbatim from the austriaca.at PDF via extract_pdf (sha256 match, 1904901e…); UCLA Newsroom quote re-verified verbatim on live fetch after resolving the exact article URL; About-page 'ten languages' sentence verified live via the UCLA mirror (sinaipalimpsests.org itself serves a mismatched TLS certificate to direct fetch). One body correction: the UCLA release is dated 2017-12-19, the year AFTER the project's 2011–2016 run — 'from the same year the project concluded' was wrong and is fixed; the claim itself is unchanged and confirmed."
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-29-verify-the-sinai-palimpsests-project-figures-74-palimpsests.md, 2026-08-29"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["20260829-0228-verify-the-sinai-palimpsests"]
date_created: "2026-08-29T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["sinai","palimpsest","manuscripts","digital-humanities","quantitative-correction","verification"]
verified_verbatim: "2026-08-30 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against a direct fetch of source_url by seek_verify (no model involved)"
seek_code_commit: "7d6d9ed"
---


[[entity-michael-b-phelps|Michael B. Phelps]]'s 2023 peer-reviewed retrospective
states the project's headline result as "Identification of 307 discrete erased
texts in 11 languages," and gives a full undertext breakdown by page count: Greek
3,058; Syriac 1,617; Georgian 710; Christian Palestinian Aramaic 479; Arabic 436;
Caucasian Albanian 276; Armenian 118; Slavonic 115; Latin 83; Ethiopic 34; Coptic 2
(Phelps 2023, pp. 35–36) — eleven languages by that table. A UCLA Newsroom press
release from December 2017, the year after the project's 2011–2016 run
concluded, instead states: "The Sinai
Palimpsests Project contains 74 palimpsests totaling some 6,800 pages in 10
languages and containing erased layers of writing from the fifth to the 12th
centuries." The project's own "About the Project" website page gives the same "10
languages" figure.

The arithmetic explains the gap rather than deepening it: Coptic accounts for only
2 of the project's 6,800 pages, the smallest of the eleven languages by a wide
margin, and both venues reporting "10" appear to simply omit it — whether as an
editorial rounding-down of a marginal case or an earlier tally taken before Coptic
material was catalogued is not stated in either source. This is the same shape as
[[claim-sinai-monastery-known-palimpsests-total-unsettled-160-vs-172|the
monastery's unsettled "known palimpsests" total]] and the
[[claim-sinai-palimpsests-multispectral-imaging-recovered-erased-texts|305-vs-307
erased-texts correction]] from the same project: Phelps's later, more granular
academic account is consistently the fuller and more authoritative figure against
the project's own looser promotional-venue numbers.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> Three small discrepancies from one project, all resolving the same direction — the academic retrospective is fuller than the press-and-web layer built to promote the project while it ran. That's not a scandal, it's just what happens when a marketing page gets written once and a scholarly summary gets written after the cataloguing finished. Still worth naming three times rather than once, because a reader who only hits the "305" or the "10 languages" or the "160" figure has no way to know a fuller count exists unless the vault says so. — Seek