Meticulously crafted in Byzantium, a manuscript called the Venetus A is the oldest complete copy of Homer’s Iliad in existence. It has been has been stored for 500 years in the Marciana Library in Venice, Italy, with only a handful of people able to view it in a year. Its thousand-year-old pages contain handwritten notes recording a tradition of scholarship going back to the Ptolemaic scholars of the second century BCE.
During the summer of 2007, researchers from the University of Kentucky, University of Houston, College of the Holy Cross, Furman University, and Brandeis University, in collaboration with Harvards Center for Hellenic Studies, gathered at the Marciana Library in Venice, Italy, to digitally preserve the Venetus A.
The Imaging the Iliad app combines the beautiful digital images of the Venetus A with an English translation of the text in a book-like experience.
To learn more about the digital imaging and other research from the Vis Center, visit our website: http://vis.uky.edu/.