Neue paläographische Einblicke in einige palimpsestierte Handschriften aus den griechischen Beständen der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek

New Palaeographical Insights into Selected Palimpsests from the Greek Manuscript Collection of the Austrian National Library: The Austrian National Library in Vienna possesses a significant number of Greek palimpsests. Many of the lower texts were identified and the original manuscripts examined in the 1960s to 1990s, when the modern catalogue of Greek manuscripts was compiled. Other palimpsests were only studied in the past two decades, taking advantage of the digital recovery of erased writings. Since 2001, several projects have been conducted at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (Institute and then Department of Byzantine Research) in international co-operation. They have focused on deciphering, editing, and examining important Ancient Greek and Byzantine texts hidden in palimpsests as well as an in-depth palaeographical and codicological analysis. With the help of images derived from multispectral imaging and special image processing, the scholars have been able to decipher and study texts that had hitherto been partly or entirely invisible and to reconstruct the original manuscripts. This paper provides some recent insights into four unique Greek palimpsests of the Austrian National Library, with particular attention to palaeography: (1) fragments of De prosodia catholica, an important, but lost work on Greek accentuation by the 2nd-century CE grammarian Aelius Herodianus in Cod. Vind. hist. gr. 10; (2) the Scythica Vindobonensia in Cod. Vind. hist. gr. 73, new historical fragments on Gothic incursions into Roman provinces in the Balkans in the 3rd century CE, most likely parts of the lost Scythica by Dexippus; (3) a fragment of Eusebius’ Chronicle (Book I) in Cod. Vind. iur. gr. 18; (4) a significant legal palimpsest of the Basilica in Cod. Vind. suppl. gr. 200.