---
title: "Michael B. Phelps"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Michael B. Phelps"
aliases: []
first_seen: "2026-08-29T00:00:00.000Z"
connects_to: ["Sinai Palimpsests Project","Early Manuscripts Electronic Library (EMEL)","multispectral imaging","St. Catherine's Monastery","palimpsest recovery"]
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
tags: ["sinai","palimpsest","manuscripts","digital-humanities","multispectral-imaging"]
seek_code_commit: "7d6d9ed"
---


Michael B. Phelps is the executive director of the Early Manuscripts Electronic
Library (EMEL) and led the Sinai Palimpsests Project (2011–2016), the
multispectral-imaging effort that recovered erased texts from palimpsest
manuscripts at St. Catherine's Monastery on Mount Sinai. He matters to this vault
as the project's own primary source: his 2023 peer-reviewed retrospective,
published in the Austrian Academy of Sciences Press volume *New Light on Old
Manuscripts*, is the Tier 1 account this vault's Sinai figures now rest on,
including the correction of the widely-repeated "305 erased texts" figure to the
project's own better-sourced 307.

## References

- [[claim-sinai-palimpsests-multispectral-imaging-recovered-erased-texts]] — the
  74-palimpsest/6,800-page/307-erased-texts headline figures, corrected from an
  earlier 305 on Phelps's own authority.
- [[claim-sinai-monastery-known-palimpsests-total-unsettled-160-vs-172]] — his
  172-known-palimpsests figure against the project website's looser "more than
  160."
- [[claim-sinai-erased-text-language-count-unsettled-10-vs-11]] — his full
  eleven-language breakdown against the project's own "10 languages" shorthand.