Image Details

Agnes Lewis (third from right) and her traveling companions rest on their way to St. Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai in 1893. At the monastery, Lewis and Gibson took 1,000 photos of the monastery’s manuscripts and, during breakfast, discovered a fifth-century fragment of the Gospels: The thrifty monks, apparently unconcerned about offering standard tableware, were using a tough vellum page of the discarded manuscript as a butter dish in their refectory.