The Archimedes Palimpsest

How do you read a two-thousand-year-old manuscript that has been erased, cut up, written on and painted over? With a powerful particle accelerator, of course! Ancient books curator William Noel tells the fascinating story behind the Archimedes palimpsest, a Byzantine prayer book containing previously-unknown original writings from ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes and others.


  
The Archimedes Palimpsest is a palimpsest (ancient overwritten manuscript) on parchment in the form of a codex (hand-written bound book, as opposed to a scroll). It originally was a 10th century copy of an otherwise unknown work of the ancient mathematician, physicist, and engineer Archimedes (c. 287 BC–c. 212 BC) of Syracuse and other authors, which was overwritten with a religious text. The manuscript currently belongs to an American private collector.




Archimedes lived in the 3rd century BC, and a copy of his work was made around 950 AD by an anonymous scribe.
It seems that at some point early in the year 1229, a Greek priest, Ioannes Myronas, needing parchment for a prayer book, took a collection of Archimedes’ works that had been written on parchment about 250 years earlier and erased, as best he could, the Archimedean text from those of its pages that were still usable. He then used these pages to write the text of a collection of Greek prayers at right angles to the much fainter Archimedean text underneath. Myronas in fact needed more parchment than the old Archimedes codex could provide, so he also recycled other important, now lost, texts in the same way. In 1229 the original Archimedes codex was unbound, scraped and washed, along with at least six other parchment manuscripts, including one with works of Hypereides.



The parchment leaves were folded in half and reused for a Christian liturgical text of 177 pages; the older leaves folded so that each became two leaves of the liturgical book. The erasure was incomplete, and Archimedes' work is now readable after scientific and scholarly work from 1998 to 2008 using digital processing of images produced by ultraviolet, infrared, visible and raking light, and X-ray.

In 1906 it was briefly inspected in Istanbul by the Danish philologist Johan Ludvig Heiberg. The Greek text was that of the edition of  J. L. Heiberg, who studied it in the library of the Metochion of the Monastery of the Holy Sepulcher in Constantinople. With the aid of black-and-white photographs he arranged to have taken, he published a transcription of the Archimedes text. Shortly thereafter Archimedes' Greek text was translated into English by T. L. Heath.

Before that it was not widely known among mathematicians, physicists or historians. It contains:
"On the Equilibrium of Planes"
"Spiral Lines"
"Measurement of a Circle"
"On the Sphere and Cylinder"
"On Floating Bodies" (only known copy in Greek)
"The Method of Mechanical Theorems" (only known copy)
"Stomachion" (only known copy)
The palimpsest also contains speeches by the 4th century BC politician Hypereides, a commentary on Aristotle's Categories by Alexander of Aphrodisias, and other works.

William Noel, is curator of manuscripts at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, where the codex is currently housed, and director of the Archimedes Palimpsest Project.