Recently this research uncovered one more such page in the Cairo Museum. Then from Beirut came word of a bound bellum text with similar symbols. The pages stand now as an early Christian Egyptian description of Ptolemy's "harmony of the spheres." This poetic and durable philosophy of sound-making planets dates back long before Christ - at least to Pythagoras and was already familiar when Shakespeare wrote "there's not the smallest orb which thou beholdest but in his motion like an angel sings."

What the bright circles on this page (14" by 15 3/4" ) mean no one absolutely knows. To Dr. Eric Werner of the Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati, and to Dr. Ludlow Bull of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the dots at the left of the page, seven plus five spheres, represent heavenly bodies and musically interpret the zodiac. 

The six words written on this page are in Coptic (a language diluted with Greek) once the common tongue of Egyptian Christians. The Words at the top mean "Spiritual Music". Those below and to the left mean "sacred hymnsinger." Below these, a brief word states simply, "beginning," and one at the foot of the page reads "end."

This extraordinarily beautiful manuscript came to the United States in 1896 among the family relics of H. Aram Gulezyan, who organized the long studies, then, early this year, sold the page at auction at Parke-Bernet Galleries to a private collector for $7,000. (From Vogue Magazine, September 1, 1952)