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The Library of Congress

Marveling at “the effect of the setting sun gilding on the high peaks of the pass,” David Roberts arrived at St. Catherine’s Monastery, in south cebtral Sinai, on February 18, 1839. Built by the Byzantine emperor Justinian (527-565A.D.) at the foot of Jebel Musa (the Mountain of Moses), traditionally thought to be the biblical Mt. Sinai, the monastery housed the earliest-known complete version of the New Testament: the fourth-century A.D. Codex Sinaiticus.