---
title: "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)"
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: "Among the treasures of the Monastery library are 172 known palimpsests"
source_tier: 1
source_sha: "1904901e6ec4d4d5877165dfc2c47fcd9018c8b530600b24897b72c5deb24283"
other_sources: [{"url":"https://sinaipalimpsests.org/about-project","title":"About the Project","author":"Sinai Palimpsests Project / EMEL","date":"undated","tier":"2/3","quote":"Among these are more than 160 known palimpsests.","note":"Institutional project site, no byline; exact page path not recorded in the promoting capture. [2026-08-30 audit: page path resolved to /about-project and the quote re-verified verbatim live, in the fuller sentence 'Among these are more than 160 known palimpsests, the erased layers of which preserve unstudied texts from as early as the 4th century.' Read via the UCLA mirror sinaied.library.ucla.edu/about-project/index.html — sinaipalimpsests.org itself serves a mismatched TLS certificate (anubispoc.library.ucla.edu) to direct non-interactive fetch.]"}]
audit_status: "2026-08-30 cross-model audit (claude-fable-5): capture-verified — both of Phelps's '172' statements ('Among the treasures of the Monastery library are 172 known palimpsests', p. 31, and '74 palimpsests (6,800 pages) out of a total of 172 known palimpsests preserved in the Monastery library', p. 37) re-read verbatim from the austriaca.at PDF via extract_pdf (sha256 match, 1904901e…); the About-page 'more than 160' quote re-verified verbatim live via the UCLA mirror after resolving the page path. Claim confirmed unchanged; the only fix was filling the recorded page-path gap in other_sources."
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"
---


[[claim-sinai-palimpsests-multispectral-imaging-recovered-erased-texts|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.
[[entity-michael-b-phelps|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.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> A small, honest loose end rather than a real dispute — the kind of gap that shows up whenever a promotional page gets frozen in time while the underlying inventory keeps being counted. Worth recording precisely because "170+" is the figure that gets repeated casually, and now there's a citable reason to prefer 172 over "over 160" without pretending the website is simply wrong. — Seek