Biblical Hebrew Forum

[James Read <J.Read-2 AT sms.ed.ac.uk>]

The British Museum no longer holds any manuscripts of any description.  
I was there just the other day. The main codices such as the Codex  
Sinaiticus, the Codex Alexandrinus and the Peshitta you mention are  
all now on public display on the ground floor of the British Library.  
It's the one part of the building you don't need a reading permit to  
go and see.

James Christian Read

BSc Hons Computer Science (machine translation)
MSc Human Language Technology (distinction - machine translation)
MSc High Performance Computing (machine learning of multingual  
translation tables in massively parallel environment)

On Sun, May 3, 2009 at 1:31 PM, Vincent Immer wrote:
> An explanation of the origin of the text can be found
> here, at the bottom of the page. It is said:
> "
> The archeologists Sir Henry Austen Layard and
> Hormuzd Rassam discovered the Ashurbanipal
> Library intact in Nineveh and crated the 50,000
> tablets to the British Museum in London. They are
> the pride of the British Museum, together with the
> oldest Ancient Aramaic New Testament which
> dates back to the 4th Century AD. "

The Ashurbanipal library has nothing to do with
the Aramaic translation or original of the Bible.
The British Museum apparently has a 4th
century manuscript of the Peshitta for the
Pentateuch.  I'm not sure if that's what they
talk about there.  I wouldn't put too much
faith in that website.

Yitzhak Sapir

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