The Monastery of St. Catherine on Sinai was founded in the 6th cent. It had a multicultural community prior to the Ottoman period when it became entirely Greek. Alongside its Greek, Georgian, and Arabic mss., the monastery preserves the most important collection of early Syriac mss., after that of Dayr al-Suryān . The most famous of its manuscripts is Syr. 30, the palimpsest Old Syriac Gospels (unlike many of the monastery’s mss., which are now in western libraries, this ms. remains in Sinai). After a fire in 1975 a blocked up room with further fragmentary mss. in different languages, including Syriac, was discovered. Whereas Dayr al-Suryān has transmitted Syr. Orth. mss., those of St Catherine’s Monastery are almost all Melkite.
See Fig. 32c.