A 21st Century "Eureka"

I came across a medieval cultural treasure recently by way of an exhibit at The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore recently. That exhibit is now over, but the Archimedes Palimpsest, that was its focus and what it contains and its survival for a thousand years, makes for an amazing story.  A palimpsest is a scroll or manuscript from which text has been scraped off so that it can be used again, in most cases a document made of parchment (animal skins).

Author: The Walters Museum

Archimedes did his work between 263 and 214 BCE and it would have been written down on papyrus scrolls at the time and copied over numerous times as the scrolls deteriorated. Around 950 AD a scribe copied some of Archimedes work onto parchment and it remained in that form until 1229 when a Byzantine scribe in Jerusalem took parchment from seven ancient books including the Archimedes work, scraped them down and created a Christian prayer book. But a good deal of the earlier writing could still be seen under the later work.

That “recycled” book found its way to a monastery in Istanbul where it was finally recognized for being more than a prayer book by a Danish Archimedes scholar Johan Ludwig Heiberg in 1906. His discover made world-wide headlines. In the 1920’s the book somehow ended up with a French antiquities dealer and stayed in Europe where some of the pages were used to create forged illustrated manuscript pages to increase its value.  In 1998, and in terrible condition, it went to an auction at Christies in New York and sold to an anonymous American collector for $2 million. This anonymous donor turned over to the Walters Museum along with funding for scientists, conservators, classicists and historians to work on uncovering its secrets. It will be return to its unknown owner this year.

As it turns out, the manuscript pages the Byzantine scribe attempted to scrape off in the 13^th century included seven treatises by Archimedes including the only surviving copies of The Method of Mechanical Theorems and Stomachian, unknown speeches by the Athenian orator Hyperides and a lost commentary on Aristotle’s Categories.

Because of the poor condition of the book and the adhesive that had been used on the binding, it took conservators at the Walters four years to take the book apart, page by page, without causing any more damage. Then for another six years, they used multispectral imaging and an x-ray technique that picked up the iron in the ink that had been scraped away to get at all of the text from the earlier manuscripts. One of the more striking finds that no one had been aware of was that Archimedes had considered the concept of actual infinity. This particular part of the text had been completely unreadable by Heiberg and was only uncovered by the work of the conservators.

For us today it seems almost criminal that a work of such cultural importance would have been scraped off to make a prayer book, but by transforming it, was it saved? The scribe of 1229 created a book that was treasured by his church and its followers for 600 years. and its survival through the 20^th century means that we can now use 21^st century science to uncover its secrets. Had it not been transformed, would it have survived? It is a question for the ages.