Saint Catherine Area
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How it came to be
The oldest record of monastic life at Mount Sinai is the travel journal of Egeria, a pilgrim who came around 381–386. Between 548 and 565 the Byzantine emperor Justinian I had a walled monastery built at the foot of the mountain, enclosing the chapel at the spot where Moses is said to have seen the burning bush.
Relics of Catherine of Alexandria, said to have been found nearby, later drew pilgrims and gave the monastery its name. Under the Fatimids a chapel was turned into a mosque, whose minaret dates from 1106. UNESCO calls it the oldest Christian monastery still used for its original purpose, and in 2002 listed it together with Mount Sinai, or Jebel Musa, sacred to Christians, Muslims and Jews.
The library, founded between 527 and 565, holds the second-largest collection of early codices and manuscripts after the Vatican Library. In 1892 Agnes Smith Lewis found an early palimpsest of the Gospels there, the Syriac Sinaiticus, which remains in the monastery.
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