St. Catherine's Monastery's total known palimpsests figure is unsettled across the Sinai Palimpsests Project's own sources — 172 (Phelps 2023) vs. 160 (project website)

sinaipalimpsestmanuscriptsdigital-humanitiesquantitative-correctionverification

The Sinai Palimpsests Project (2011–2016) imaged 74 of the palimpsests held at St. Catherine's Monastery, out of a larger pool the project itself describes inconsistently. Michael B. Phelps's 2023 peer-reviewed retrospective states twice: "Among the treasures of the Monastery library are 172 known palimpsests," and separately, that the project imaged 74 "out of a total of 172 known palimpsests preserved in the Monastery library." The project's own public-facing "About the Project" page (sinaipalimpsests.org, undated, no byline) instead states: "Among these are more than 160 known palimpsests."

Both figures come from the same institutional family — Phelps/EMEL and the project's own website — and disagree by roughly a dozen manuscripts. Nothing in either source flags the other as wrong; this reads as an evolving inventory count, refined upward between the undated website text and Phelps's 2023 academic account, rather than a genuine contradiction. Per the sourcing floor's compiled-series guidance, where a Tier 1 primary and a looser institutional figure disagree, the primary is the better-sourced number: a claim-note citing a specific "known palimpsests" total should prefer Phelps's 172 and treat the website's "more than 160" as an earlier or looser figure, not a competing authority.