Treasures from Sinai

For 14 centuries the Greek Orthodox monastery of Saint Catherine has stood serene and safe beneath the shoulder of Mount Sinai. Founded in 527 by the Emperor Justinian, it is in one of the world's most inhospitable places. A traveler must drive 100 miles southeast from Suez across jagged wilderness, then turn off along a succession of dry stream beds for an eight-hour climb to the gates, 5,000 feet above the Red Sea. Its one tiny door swings open only for men bearing letters of introduction from the Greek Archbishop of Cairo.

The few travelers who reached it came back with reports of a fabulous treasure-trove of art hidden behind its 50-ft.-thick walls. But no one was allowed to photograph or even to catalogue it. Then last year a team of scholars and technicians, jointly sponsored by Princeton, Michigan, and Alexandria universities, got permission to make the first complete record of Mount Sinai's treasures. This week TIME publishes an unprecedented sampling of the expedition's finds.

Sacred to Three. What the scholars found almost passed belief. There were 3,000 manuscripts, many illuminated. In the apse of the basilica there was a 6th century Transfiguration of Christ, 20 feet across, one of the earliest, most splendid, and best preserved of all Byzantine mosaics. There were more than 2,000 ancient icons, by far the world's largest and also greatest collection.

The fact that so huge a stockpile of ancient art has survived is in part due to the fact that, remote and detached, Mount Sinai has long been a still point in a turning world. It marks a spot sacred to three religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. There Moses heard the voice of Yahweh out of the burning bush, commanding him to go down to Egypt and set Israel free. On the journey to the Promised Land, Moses stopped again at Sinai, climbed to the peak and received the Tablets of the Law. Among Christians, Mount Sinai is also revered as the shrine and resting place of Saint Catherine of Alexandria. To Moslems, it is sacred as the spot where, on a boulder near the peak, the camel bearing Mohammed to heaven left the imprint of one foot.

The site of Mount Sinai at the confluence of contending religions was responsible for the fact that the monastery contains nearly all the icons which survive from before the 8th century. In 726, the Emperor Leo the Isaurian ordered all icons within the Byzantine realm destroyed to discourage idolatry. Only those at Mount Sinai escaped, since the monastery had fallen under Omayyad rule. The Moslems left the monastery in peace; in return, the monks allowed the Moslems to build a mosque within the monastery.

New Window. For Princeton Professor Kurt Weitzmann, 55, the expedition fulfilled a long-frustrated dream. He first tried to get to the monastery in 1932, but was turned back by an attack of typhus. A second try was stymied by the start of World War II, and a third by the Suez crisis. In 1956 Weitzmann got to the monastery at last, but all his color film was spoiled by the heat. This time everything worked. Aluminum scaffolding and an electric generator were sent from the U.S., and enough material was gleaned to fill a projected ten-volume treatise on Saint Catherine's monastery. The expedition packed in their own food supplies, since the 13 monks that keep the monastery cannot spare any food from the sparse yield of their parched garden patch.

Among the icons that illuminate the place like so many gems of the spirit, one representing the soldier-saint Demetrius is outstanding. It dates from the 11th century, and is made of tiny mosaic cubes pressed into hot wax. Moses Receiving the Law makes infinity seem very near as the hand of God breaks out of the stars down through the gold-leaf sky. Saint Nicholas compresses a lifetime into twelve scenes that surround the saint like a doorway. Finest of all is the 6th century Virgin, painted with hot wax and a palette knife, deathlessly sparkling.

The monastery's crowning glory, the Transfiguration, was saved from disaster when the expedition's mosaic expert, Paul Underwood, noticed that the cubes composing the face of Christ were beginning to come loose. Importing craftsmen from Istanbul, Professor Underwood supervised a repair job that secured the work for centuries to come. The mosaic, says Weitzmann, "is extremely subtle. I believe that it was conceived by Justinian's finest artists sent down from Constantinople."

No camera has ever captured the whole of a work of art--only human eyes and hearts can do that. But the expedition's three months' labors did succeed in bringing Saint Catherine's treasures startlingly near and clear. The pictures of the Transfiguration, in particular, go far to prove, as words cannot, Weitzmann's contention that it is among the most exalted blossomings of the Byzantine genius.

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