A page from the Archimedes Palimpsest, one of the most important surviving manuscripts from antiquity, has been rediscovered at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Blois, central France. The page was one of three lost decades ago, and was only known from photographs taken in 1906.
The Archimedes Palimpsest is a collection of papers by the 3rd century BC Greek mathematician and inventor Archimedes of Syracuse. Archimedes was famous for his inventions such as war machines and the screw pump that bear his name during his lifetime and in antiquity, but his mathematical treatises were more obscure. The first of these compilations was copied by Isidore of Miletus, architect of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople in 530 AD, a copy of this compilation was created in Constantinople in 950 AD when Byzantine culture inspired a renaissance of mathematical interest with the Thessoniokimeter of the former Gessoniokimeter.
The 10th-century manuscript was sent to a monastery in Palestine after the sack of Constantinople in April 1204 to save it from being destroyed by the anti-Greek zeal of the crusaders who sacked the city. Unfortunately, even the remote monastery was not a safe haven. In 1229 a monk extracted the ink from the parchment with lemon juice, cut the animal hide pages in half, turned them 90 degrees, and filled them with prayers and liturgical texts.
This practice of washing and reusing the parchment and vellum of old manuscripts was common in the Middle Ages because it was too expensive to produce new pages made from animal skins. They were also durable enough to withstand this rigorous form of recycling, and the ink itself proved to be able to withstand the effort of removing it. The cleaned parchment pages still had ink marks beneath the surface, and over time, the shadow of the original writing would reappear. Texts containing ghosts of past texts are called palimpsests.
The Archimedes Palimpsest remained in the hands of the Greek Orthodox Church for another 700 years. It was cataloged in Istanbul in the early 20th century, and was fully documented and photographed in 1906 by the Danish historian Johan Heberg. A large part of the original Archimedean text was blurred but visible, and could be read with a magnifying glass. Heiberg published a translation of the original texts that he was able to decipher in 1915.
The manuscript disappeared in 1922 when the Ottoman Empire collapsed and the Greek Orthodox library in Istanbul had to be evacuated. A year later, it was in the hands of Marie-Louise Serreux, a Parisian businesswoman who acquired it under very precarious circumstances. He claimed to have bought it from a monk, but there was no proof. He or someone he allowed access to the manuscript added four illustrations of the evangelists in a false Byzantine style, apparently in an attempt to make it look like a medieval illumination.
Sirix never resold it, and it remained hidden in his cellar until the 70s, subject to water and mould, with three pages missing after 1906. His daughter finally put it up for auction at Christie’s in 1998. It was bought by an anonymous person who won it. gave it to the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore for preservation and analysis. A few years later, the manuscript, minus the three lost pages, was scanned with multispectral imaging technology to reveal the new original text.
Among the missing pages was a leaf identified in Blois by Victor Gasemberg, a CNRS researcher at the Center Lyon-Robin for Research on Ancient Thought (CNRS/Sorbonne University): comparison with Heiberg’s photographs, now preserved in the Royal Danish Library, made it possible to confirm without ambiguity that it was number le123.
On one of its two sides, a prayer text partially covers geometric diagrams and an excerpt from the treatise “On the Sphere and the Cylinder” from Book I, Propositions 39 to 41, most of which is legible. The other side is covered by a 20th-century illumination, depicting the Prophet Daniel surrounded by two lions, beneath which the ancient text is still inaccessible using traditional methods of analysis.
Now that the missing leaf has been identified, researchers hope it will allow them to use state-of-the-art synchrotron-based X-ray fluorescence analysis to fully uncover the original inscription.
