The centrepiece of the exhibition is the University Library's famous Codex Zacynthius. This manuscript was originally made in the 8th century CE, and contains a copy of the Gospel of Luke, surrounded by an early commentary made up of extracts from writings of the early church, including many now otherwise lost.

Its leaves were erased, cut and rearranged into a new book in the 1170s or 1180s on the island of Rhodes. A monk named Neilos reused them to copy a Greek Gospel lectionary, containing passages to be read during Christian worship on each day of the year according to the Byzantine rite. 

The original manuscript is the only commentary where both the Gospel text and its commentary, called a ‘catena’, are in the older uncial Greek letters. Indeed, it is thought to be the oldest manuscript with this type of marginal commentary. It provides important evidence about the development of Greek scripts, since it dates to a period from which few manuscripts survive.

The original manuscript is incomplete: eighty-six full pages and three half-pages were reused in the palimpsest, which preserves an opening preface, a table of chapters and around 340 extracts commenting on passages from the first eleven chapters of Luke. The whole Gospel would have covered around 240 pages, although no other portions of this document are known to survive.

Presented to a British dignitary on the island of Zakynthos (now a popular tourist destination), it was for two hundred years in the collection of the British and Foreign Bible Society. In 2014 it was put up for sale and purchased by the library for £1.1million, following a successful public appeal.

In partnership with the University of Birmingham, a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council has helped to uncover the lost words of the Codex Zacynthius by using a technique known as multispectral imaging, using dozens of different wavelengths of light to reveal the original text and make it readable.

The application of multispectral imaging to the manuscript has allowed researchers to make the first complete transcription and translation of the catena commentary - literally a 'chain' of connected extracts of writings from the early Christian Church - freely available online alongside these state-of-the-art images on the Cambridge Digital Library.

Cambridge University Library is home to a single leaf from the Archimedes Palimpsest, a now world-famous medieval copy of previously lost works by the great Greek mathematician. The palimpsest was put into the spotlight in 1998 when it was sold to an anonymous buyer at Christie’s, New York for $2,000,000.

The overtext of the palimpsest is a Byzantine prayerbook, written in Greek around 1229, probably in Jerusalem. Although the manuscript was known to preserve Archimedes’ works, and had been read by various scholars using nothing more than a magnifying glass, it is only through the advances of imaging technology today that the text could be recovered in full.

Subsequent multispectral imaging revealed seven treatises from the Ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes in the undertext. Two of these had not survived anywhere else in the world.

The Archimedes palimpsest leaf at the UL is part of the Polonsky Foundation Greek manuscripts project, an ongoing project (2019–2021) based in the library to catalogue, conserve and digitise all the medieval and early modern Greek manuscripts in Cambridge including the UL, the Fitzwilliam Museum, and 12 Cambridge colleges, totalling over 400 manuscripts.

“All the Greek manuscripts in the exhibition are part of this project and have been digitised, conserved and catalogued,” says Suzanne Paul. “There is a huge range of texts from scientific (like the Archimedes palimpsest) to religious (like Zacynthius)."

The fourth standout palimpsest featured in Ghost Words is the Mingana-Lewis Palimpsest, purchased by the legendary twin sisters Agnes Lewis Smith and Margaret Dunlop Gibson, on their travels in Egypt in the late 19th century, and generously donated to Cambridge University Library in 1936.

This complex manuscript contains portions of two ancient Qurʼāns, probably written in the 7th or 8th century CE. A scribe of Saint Catherine’s monastery in Sinai, in the 9th or 10th century CE, wrote over these Christian homilies in Arabic that included texts from John Chrysostom and Saint Ephrem.

The codex remained at Saint Catherine’s until the 19th century, after which single leaves were torn from the codex, with the larger part, containing 162 leaves, ending up on the antiquarian market in Egypt where it was subsequently purchased by Lewis Smith. It was only on closer examination after purchase that Agnes discovered the numerous texts hidden beneath the homilies.

With the help of contemporary scholars, she successfully identified portions of several Greek, Syriac and Arabic texts, some of which she successfully transcribed and published in her Apocrypha Syriaca in 1902. 

In the last third of the codex, Agnes Lewis made a ground-breaking discovery: leaves from two ancient Qurʼāns, close in date to the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad and perhaps some of the oldest examples in existence.

The two copies of the Qur’ān are incomplete and out of order, but are precious survivals of Qur’ānic text from the first centuries of Islam. Lewis's edition, prepared with the Arabic and Syriac scholar Alphonse Mingana, caused a great stir among scholars, and even led to accusations that they were forged in Mingana’s adopted home of Birmingham.