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.

Where the Heck is Etruscany Anyway?

26 July 2005 Based on a map from The National Geographic Magazine

Vol.173 No.6 June 1988. NormanEinstein

Ok, I know the people that lived in that central part of Italy from the 9^th to the 3^rd centuries BC were the Etruscans and their land was called Etruria not Etruscany, and part of that area is today called Tuscany (go figure).  

Anyway, if you have any interest in seeing some of the stuff they left behind, you can go to the National Geographic Society Museum in Washington DC and see "The Etruscans: An Ancient Italian Civilization" before the end of September, 2011.

The Etruscans were the West-Central Italians before the Romans got up and running. They were defeated in battle by the Romans in the 3^rd century BC and were eventually absorbed by Rome. As the exhibit points out they were heavily influenced by the Greeks who were all over the Mediterranean during their heyday.

This is not a large exhibit, NatGeo is limited by their space, but there are some 400 pieces with lots of pottery, household items, weapons, jewelry and votive figures in clay, bronze and stone. The pieces that really stand out are the funerary sculptures. These Etruscans had a rich and complex view of the afterlife, and devotion to the departed was obviously a big part of their lives.

Visitors are greeted by a three dimensional sculpted funerary urn from the 4^th century BC with a not quite the life-size husband and wife sitting together the husbands hand reaching to touch his wife’s back, the wife’s right hand raised up. His torso is bare, she is covered with a cloak coming up over the back of her hair.

You can see them here at the exhibit site.

One of the more unusual items is a clay 7^th century B.C canopa or funerary vessel to hold cremated human remains. On the bottom is a small chair or throne, on top of it sits jar with handles and then on top of the jar is the is sculpted human head, a woman they say because of the earring holes. Experts also think that the protrusion on the back of the head was to hold a wig.

There are also a couple of life-size sarcophagus covers, one in terra cotta with a woman lying prone over the lower part that has a nice dolphin design and another in volcanic stone of a portly man lying in banquet pose, with his head resting on his arm, looking up as if he is about to speak.

Brian Mosley has some nice photos of the exhibit here.

As they say Rome wasn’t built in a day, and in terms of influence, they obviously had some help from the Etruscans. The exhibit closes September 25, 2011.