The Archimedes Palimpsest, is a Byzantine prayer book

Pages from the Archimedes Palimpsest.

   LOST for centuries. FOUND by the Walters Art Museum. Discover how an international team of experts resurrected the hidden manuscript of the ancient world's greatest thinker, Archimedes of Syracuse.
   In Jerusalem in 1229 AD the greatest works of the Greek mathematician Archimedes were erased and overwritten with a prayer book by a priest called Johannes Myronas. 

   In the year 2000 a project was begun by a team of experts at the Walters Art Museum to read these erased texts. 

   By the time they had finished, the team that worked on the book had recovered Archimedes' secrets, rewritten the history of mathematics and discovered entirely new texts from the ancient world. 

   This exhibition will tell that famous story. It will recount the history of the book, detail the patient conservation, explain the cutting-edge imaging and highlight the discoveries of the dogged and determined scholars who finally read what had been obliterated.

   Known as The Archimedes Palimpsest, the manuscript is a Byzantine prayer book from the 13th century which was assembled using pages from several earlier manuscripts – one of which contained several treatises by the Greek mathematician Archimedes that were copied in 10th-century Constantinople. 

   These were first discovered in 1906 by the Danish Archimedes scholar Johan Ludwig Heiberg, but as the text had been scraped away to make room for the prayer book he was only able to partially read them, and the book then went missing until it was auctioned – in a much more damaged state – at Christie's in New York in 1998. 

Archimedes palimpsest, 1229, Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.

   Bought by an anonymous American collector for $2m (£1.25m), it was deposited at Baltimore's Walters Art Museum, where scientists, conservators, classicists and historians have been working on uncovering the secrets of oldest surviving copy of Archimedes' works.
   Since that date (1998) the manuscript has been the subject of conservation, imaging and scholarship, in order to better read the texts. The Archimedes Palimpsest project, as it is called, has shed new light on Archimedes and revealed new texts from the ancient world. It has also generated a great deal of public curiosity, as well as the interest of scholars throughout the world.

   Left, an image of folio XXX. Right, IR image which succeeded in separating the Archimedes ink (carbon black ink) from the parchment underneath it, and from the prayer book ink (ferro-gallic ink) on top of it. 

   Using multispectral imaging and an x-ray technique which picked up the iron in the ink that had been scraped away, they discovered that Archimedes, working in the third century BC, considered the concept of actual infinity, something thought to have only been developed in the 19th century, and anticipated calculus. 

   As well as seven treatises by the ancient Greek mathematician, including the only surviving copy of his The Method of Mechanical Theorems and Stomachion, new speeches by the classical Athenian orator Hyperides and a lost commentary on Aristotle's Categories from the second or third century AD were also found beneath the text of the prayer book.

   After centuries of mistreatment, the Archimedes palimpsest is in bad shape. During its thousand-year life, it has been scraped, singed by fire, dribbled with wax, smeared with glue, and ravaged by a deep purple fungus, which in places has eaten through its pages. 

   Without the use of computer technology, the Archimedes palimpsest would be largely illegible. But modern imaging technologies, similar to those that helped experts read portions of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1996, allow for astonishingly precise views of faded text. 

Image source: Nova.

  
   The exhibition Lost and Found: The Secrets of Archimedes will conclude with two galleries that ask "What will we discover next?" 

   In six interactive learning stations, conservation staff will present artworks from the Walters' collection to illustrate the very real questions that start the process of learning and discovery through research. For example, you will be invited to consider why a Kentucky Long rifle is associated with a pastoral 19th-century drawing by Rosa Bonheur, to explore what Ethiopian painting and manuscript illustration have to do with colorful minerals on display, and to ponder how silver preservation could be revolutionized by recent advances in nanotechnology.

   This exhibition has been generously supported by an anonymous donor and by leadership gifts from the Selz Foundation and the Stockman Family Foundation.
   The Archimedes Palimpsest is a manuscript of extraordinary importance to the history of science. This thirteenth century prayer book contains erased texts that were written several centuries earlier. These erased texts include two treatises by Archimedes that can be found nowhere else, The Method and Stomachion.

   On 29th October 2008, we celebrated the ten year anniversary of the project. What was erased text, in terrible condition, impossible to access, and yet foundational to the history and science of the West, is now legible, and instantly available.

  * Archimedes, The Greek mathematician was born in the Greek colony of Syracuse on the island of Sicily in 287 BC. He was the son of an astronomer and mathematician named Phidias.

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