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Christianity's First Centuries in Africa |
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| Outside In: Saint Catherine's Monastery and the Early Church in Egypt By Brandie Ratliff |
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 figure 1  figure 2 |
Note to the reader: The research for this paper comes from my Ph.D.
thesis, Image and Relic at Byzantine Pilgrimage Sites (in progress)
and will appear as part of my chapter on the Monastery of Saint Catherine
at Mount Sinai. The original footnotes for this paper have been converted
to parenthetical citations. For further information regarding sources
and citations, please contact the author. - Brandie Ratliff Please see the photoessay about the Monastery of Saint Catherine at Mount Sinai on the Metropolitan Museum's website. In the mid-nineteenth century, Francis Frith, an English photographer who traveled through the lands of the pharaohs and the Bible on three separate expeditions, said of the Monastery of Saint Catherine at Mount Sinai: “Its history has little of stirring interest” (Frith, n.p., text accompanying “The Convent of Sinai and Plain of Er-RáHá”). Having devoted a good deal of energy to studying the monastery over the past three years, even making the trek to the monastery, I hope to convince you that in fact the monastery has a long and rich history deserving of at least forty minutes. The environs of the monastery, Mount Sinai and its surrounding desert, have long been identified with Moses and the Israelites. God spoke to Moses through the Burning Bush at the foot of Mount Sinai, and on its summit, he received the Tablets of the Law. The Israelites camped in the Sinai desert, on the Plain of el-Raha, and celebrated Passover there. Sinai’s biblical significance is not limited to the Exodus. Saul and David fought the Amalekites in northwestern Sinai; the prophet Elijah took refuge from Queen Jezebel and heard the voice of the Lord in a cave on Mount Sinai; and the Holy Family fled from King Herod across the Sinai (Achtemeier, 1027–28). The history of the monastery itself, which goes back to its foundation by the Emperor Justinian (r. 527–65 A.D.) in the sixth century, is equally as compelling. Beginning in the seventh century, the monastic community at Mount Sinai was geographically isolated from the Byzantine Empire. This isolation meant that the monastery did not suffer the destruction of images that occurred during the period of iconoclasm (726–843 A.D.), and as a result, it is now home to a famed collection of early icons. Because of its remote location in a part of the world with a turbulent history, the monastery has received an extraordinary mixture of pilgrims hailing from Byzantium and neighboring states, western Europe, and Islamic lands, and maintained relationships with Byzantine emperors, Western aristocracy and the papacy, and Muslim leaders. |
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