Tales of a Manuscript that Escaped the War

A 14th–15th-century illuminated paper manuscript (Sidrā) from the Church of the Virgin Mary in Qaraqosh (Iraq) had been hidden, along with 200 other volumes, by the Church’s Christian priests in a walled-in undercroft to save it from the iconoclastic fury of ISIS, which ravaged those territories from 2014 to March 2017. The manuscript contains prayers for the ritual of the Easter festivities. It consists of 116 pages, has a leather binding with wooden boards and is written in Aramaic-Syrian in red and black ink. Diagnostic analyses on the volume covered inks, biological contamination, an unusual number of wax drops and other very peculiar aspects. Different techniques (DNA extraction and sequencing, FTIR, SEM and EDX and Raman) were used for this purpose. The effort to integrate the acquired information on a multidisciplinary level, both for the preservation and archaeology of the manuscript, is discussed.