The Repository Ancient Paths Faith

Saint Catherine's at Sinai: Why It Was Never Destroyed

October 17, 2026 · Runtime 15:12 · Watch on YouTube

Saint Catherine's monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai has never been destroyed: monks have prayed behind the same walls for about fourteen and a half centuries, while empires rose and fell around it. We read the two oldest witnesses in their own languages, the emperor Justinian's historian Procopius in Greek and the pilgrim Egeria in Latin, and set them beside the roof beams, the mosaic, the decrees in the archive and the icons.

Chapters

  1. 0:00 Never destroyed
  2. 0:32 The Sinai from space
  3. 1:10 Hermits before the walls
  4. 1:28 Egeria, a pilgrim around 383
  5. 2:44 Raids, and a tower
  6. 3:10 Justinian and Procopius
  7. 3:48 A rehearsal of death: melete thanatou
  8. 4:27 The fort was not for the monks
  9. 4:57 The roof beams and Stephanos of Aila
  10. 5:47 Eutychius tells it differently
  11. 6:56 The Transfiguration mosaic
  12. 7:25 The reading: Egeria's climb
  13. 9:59 The bush, then and now
  14. 10:16 Inside the lands of Islam
  15. 10:37 The covenant, as tradition
  16. 11:10 The archive of protection
  17. 11:29 A mosque inside the walls
  18. 11:47 Napoleon's letter
  19. 12:09 Icons beyond iconoclasm
  20. 12:43 The library and the palimpsest
  21. 13:37 John Climacus and the Ladder
  22. 14:09 Why it was never destroyed
  23. 14:47 Next: Julian of Norwich

Transcript

Never destroyed 0:00

Saint Catherine's monastery at Sinai has never been destroyed. For about fourteen and a half centuries, monks have prayed behind the same walls, at the foot of the mountain of Moses. Empires rose and fell around it.

So why did every power that ruled this desert leave it standing? We translated the Greek of Procopius and the Latin of the pilgrim Egeria ourselves. And the oldest answer, from the emperor's own historian, is not the one most visitors are told.

The Sinai from space 0:32

This is the Sinai peninsula, seen from the International Space Station. A triangle of rock between two arms of the Red Sea, the Gulf of Suez and the Gulf of Aqaba.

The monastery stands in the south, in a high valley, under a granite peak the Arabs call Jebel Musa, the mountain of Moses. Christian tradition placed two scenes of the Book of Exodus here.

The bush that burned and was not consumed, where God first spoke to Moses. And the mountain where Moses received the Law. Painters in Europe drew both for centuries, without ever seeing the place.

Hermits before the walls 1:10

Long before there was a monastery, there were hermits. The deserts of Egypt had filled with monks in the fourth century, and by its end, monks lived in cells scattered through these valleys too, with a few small churches. And a visitor could find them, if she was determined enough.

Egeria, a pilgrim around 383 1:28

One visitor was. Her name was Egeria, a woman from the western end of the Roman world, and she reached Sinai around the year 383. She wrote her journey in Latin, for the women she called her venerable sisters back home.

She came the way pilgrims came, from Egypt. From Clysma, on the Red Sea, where the city of Suez stands today, across the desert to the oasis of Pharan. Pharan, she writes, was thirty-five miles from the mountain of God.

Her book survives in a single manuscript, now in Arezzo, in Italy, and its first pages are lost. It was first printed in 1887. Without that one copy, we would not know any of what follows.

Then the mountains opened. In our translation, she writes that they made a valley, immense, very flat and very beautiful, and across the valley appeared Sinai, the holy mountain of God.

She found no fortress. She found cells, small churches, and monks who walked her to every place named in the Book of Exodus. At each one, she says, the passage was read aloud from the book, in the place where it happened.

Raids, and a tower 2:44

But the hermits were exposed. Stories written in the fourth and fifth centuries tell of raids by desert tribesmen, cells emptied and monks killed. They are martyr stories, and historians debate how much in them is history.

In one of them, attributed to a monk named Ammonius, the survivors run to the only safe place in the valley. A tower. Remember that tower.

Justinian and Procopius 3:10

In the sixth century, the emperor Justinian came into the story. He built across his whole empire, and his historian, Procopius, wrote an entire book about his buildings.

Procopius gives Sinai one short chapter. A precipitous and savagely wild mountain, he writes, stands close to the Red Sea, called Sina. And on this mountain live monks.

Then comes the sentence we translated. Their life, he says, is a careful rehearsal of death, and so they enjoy without fear the solitude that is dearest to them.

A rehearsal of death: melete thanatou 3:48

Rehearsal of death. In Greek, melete thanatou. It is a phrase from Plato. In the Phaedo, Socrates calls philosophy exactly that, the practice of dying. Procopius describes the monks of Sinai in the words of the philosophers.

For these monks, he writes, Justinian built a church, and dedicated it to the Mother of God. Not on the summit, but far below it. No one can spend the night up there, Procopius explains, because of the constant thunder, and other, more divine sounds heard at night, which overwhelm a man's strength and mind.

The fort was not for the monks 4:27

And at the foot of the mountain, the emperor built a very strong fort, with a considerable garrison of soldiers. Procopius gives one reason for it, and it is not the monks. It was so that the Saracens could not use this empty desert to slip secretly into Palestine.

In the oldest source, then, the fort is frontier defence. The emperor was guarding Palestine. The monks happened to live exactly where he needed a wall.

The roof beams and Stephanos of Aila 4:57

The building itself helps with the date. Beams in the roof of the church carry three inscriptions from the sixth century. One names Justinian. One remembers the empress Theodora, who died in 548. So the roof is later than her death.

The third is a prayer for the builder. Lord God, who appeared in this place, save and bless your servant Stephanos, the builder of this monastery, from Aila, and Nonna, and give rest to the souls of their children, George, Sergius and Theodora.

Aila is Aqaba, at the head of the gulf. A local builder, who had buried his children, carved his grief into an emperor's roof. The monastery keeps a tradition that the work was finished in 557.

Eutychius tells it differently 5:47

Four hundred years later, a patriarch of Alexandria, Eutychius, told the founding differently. In his version, the monks went to Justinian themselves, and complained that raiders plundered their food, emptied their cells and broke into their churches.

The emperor's envoy was supposed to build on the summit. There was no water up there, so he built down by the bush instead, enclosing the old tower, and put only a small church on top. The change of plan, Eutychius says, cost the envoy his life.

So there are two stories. In Procopius, a church below the peak, and a separate fort for soldiers. In Eutychius, one walled monastery around the tower. What stands today looks like the second, a fortress with a church inside, and historians still argue whether it is also the fort Procopius meant.

Eutychius adds one more thing. To guard the monastery, a hundred families were brought from the Black Sea, and a hundred from Egypt. The Jabaliya, the Bedouin of the mountain, still trace their descent to them.

The Transfiguration mosaic 6:56

Inside the walls, above the altar, the builders left their masterpiece. A mosaic of the Transfiguration, Christ in light between Moses and Elijah, the two prophets of this mountain.

An inscription at its base names an abbot, Longinus, and a priest, Theodore. It dates the work only by a tax year, the fourteenth indiction. That could be 565, or fifteen, or thirty years later.

The reading: Egeria's climb 7:25

Before any of these walls, there was one pilgrim's morning on the mountain. Here is Egeria's climb, from her third and fourth chapters, in our translation from the Latin.

So on the Saturday, late in the day, we went into the mountains. We came to some cells, and the monks who lived there received us very kindly, and showed us every kindness, for there is a church there too, with a priest. We stayed there that night. And early on the Lord's day, with the priest himself and the monks, we began to climb the mountains one by one.

These mountains are climbed with endless labour, for you do not go up slowly, round and round, in what we call snail paths. You go straight up, as if up a wall. I had to climb on foot, because one cannot go up in a saddle at all. And yet I did not feel the labour, because I saw the desire I had being fulfilled, as God willed.

And so, at the fourth hour, we reached the summit of Sinai, the holy mountain of God, where the Law was given. In that place there is now a church, not large, because the summit itself is not very large. And yet the church has a great grace of its own. No one lives on the summit. There is nothing there but the church alone, and the cave where holy Moses was.

When everything had been read from the book of Moses, in that very place, and the offering made in its order, the priests gave us blessings, fruit that grows on the mountain. For though holy Sinai is all rock, without even a bush, there is a little soil near the foot of the mountains. And at once the holy monks plant little trees and set out little orchards beside their cells, so that they may gather fruit from the mountain itself, worked with their own hands.

And this I want you to know, ladies, venerable sisters. From where we stood, around the walls of the church, the mountains we had climbed with such labour looked like little hills below us. And Egypt and Palestine, and the Red Sea, and the sea that reaches to Alexandria, and the endless lands of the Saracens, we saw beneath us, so that it can hardly be believed.

Then we came down, to the head of the valley, where there were many cells of holy men, and a church, in the place where the bush is. And that bush is alive to this day, and puts out shoots. In front of the church there is a most pleasant garden, with plenty of excellent water, and in that garden is the bush itself.

The bush, then and now 9:59

Alive to this day, she wrote, around 383. Today a chapel covers the spot the tradition marks, and a bramble still grows in a courtyard inside the walls. The monks show it to pilgrims, as they showed one to Egeria.

Inside the lands of Islam 10:16

Now the question of this episode. Less than a century after the walls went up, the world around them changed. In the 630s and 640s, Arab armies took Palestine, Egypt and the Sinai. The emperor's garrison was gone, and the monastery was now inside the lands of Islam.

The covenant, as tradition 10:37

The monastery's own answer is a document. It keeps a copy of a covenant attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, promising protection to the monks, marked, the tradition says, with the print of his hand.

The tradition says the original was taken to Constantinople by the Ottoman sultan Selim, after he conquered Egypt in 1517, and that the monks were left certified copies. Scholars have questioned the document, and some defend it. We tell it here as what it is, the monastery's tradition.

The archive of protection 11:10

What is not tradition is the archive. The monastery holds decrees of the Fatimid caliphs of Cairo, eight of them published by the historian Samuel Stern, and dozens of documents from the Mamluk sultans after them. Each one is a fresh grant of protection, written down and kept.

A mosque inside the walls 11:29

And inside the walls, beside the church, stands a mosque. It was built in 1106, under the Fatimid caliph al-Amir, and its pulpit is one of only three complete Fatimid pulpits to survive anywhere. A church and a mosque have shared one enclosure for more than nine hundred years.

Napoleon's letter 11:47

Even Napoleon joined the list. In December 1798, as general in Egypt, he took the monks under his protection, freed them from taxes, and called them learned men, living in the barbarity of the desert. Soon after, French orders sent masons to rebuild part of Justinian's east wall, which had collapsed.

Icons beyond iconoclasm 12:09

The strangest gift of living outside the empire is in the icons. In the eighth and ninth centuries, Byzantine emperors sanctioned the destruction of religious images. Because of its geographic and political isolation, the Getty Museum writes, Sinai escaped.

So the monastery kept some of the oldest painted icons in the world, made in hot wax, like this Christ, probably from the middle of the sixth century, and this Saint Peter. The Getty calls the monastery the world's largest repository of Byzantine icons.

The library and the palimpsest 12:43

The library survived the same way. It holds manuscripts in Greek, Syriac, Arabic, Georgian and many other languages, and more than a hundred and sixty palimpsests, pages scraped clean and written over, whose erased layers keep texts from the fourth to the twelfth century.

In 1892, the Scottish scholar Agnes Smith Lewis, travelling with her twin sister Margaret, opened a Syriac book that was very dirty, its leaves nearly all stuck together. The upper writing was lives of women saints, dated 697. Underneath, she saw the Gospels.

And from this library came most of the Codex Sinaiticus, a Greek Bible of the fourth century, taken to Europe by Constantin von Tischendorf in the nineteenth century, and now mostly in London. That story needs an episode of its own.

John Climacus and the Ladder 13:37

One more book was written here. In the seventh century, the monks made an old man their abbot, John, later called Climacus, after the book he wrote, the Ladder. Thirty steps from the world to God. The monastery still has its icon, painted in the late twelfth century.

In the twenty-seventh step, on stillness, he wrote one sentence that we translated from the Greek. Let the memory of Jesus be united with your breath, and then you will know the benefit of stillness.

Why it was never destroyed 14:09

So why was Saint Catherine's never destroyed? Because an emperor needed a wall at this exact spot, and built it strong enough to outlast his empire. Because the rulers who came after him, caliphs, sultans, even a French general, put it under their protection in writing, and the monks kept every page. And because it was far enough from every capital that even its icons were left alone.

Procopius called the monks' life a rehearsal of death. Fourteen and a half centuries later, the rehearsal is still going on, behind the same walls, at the foot of the same mountain.

Next: Julian of Norwich 14:47

The desert taught the West how to withdraw, and in England one woman took it to the limit. In Norwich, a recluse lived enclosed in a cell beside a church, and in May 1373, at thirty and a half, she lay sick and saw what she called revelations. Next time, Julian of Norwich, a child of the plague years, who wrote that all shall be well.

Description and sources

Around 383 the pilgrim Egeria found no fortress at Sinai, only cells, small churches and monks who read Exodus aloud at every place it names. Two centuries later Justinian built a church to the Mother of God and, at the foot of the mountain, a very strong fort, and Procopius gives one reason for the fort: to stop raiders slipping through the desert into Palestine. A later patriarch, Eutychius, tells it as the monks' own petition. The roof beams date the church after the death of Theodora in 548. The episode reads Egeria's climb to the summit in full, then gives three answers to why the monastery survived: a wall built where an empire needed one, a chain of written protection from caliphs, sultans and even Napoleon, kept in the monastery's archive, and a distance from every capital that spared even its icons from Byzantine iconoclasm.

PRIMARY SOURCES

ARCHIVE PLATES — public-domain documents, with author, date, archive and licence.

  • David Roberts, The Convent of St. Catherine, Mount Sinai, 1839. Cleveland Museum of Art | CC0

... and 44 more plates, each credited on screen in the video and listed in this project's manifest.

Ancient Paths Faith reads the Christian contemplative tradition, East and West, from the primary source: the life, the rule, the letter, the codex.

About the material. Watercolours, lithographs and photographs: Cleveland Museum of Art, Rijksmuseum, Yale Center for British Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Library of Congress (Matson Collection) and other public collections, all public domain or CC0, credited on screen. Film: the International Space Station over Egypt and the Sinai, NASA, 2011, and Banks of the Nile, Kinemacolor by Charles Urban, 1911, both public domain. Book pages: Internet Archive scans of public-domain editions. Quotations from Procopius, Egeria and John Climacus are our own translation from the Greek and Latin. Every diagram is drawn in code from the sources listed. Nothing in this video is AI-generated imagery.

#AncientPathsFaith #SaintCatherine #MountSinai