A page from the legendary Archimedes Palimpsest, considered lost for several decades, have been identified by a French national researcher at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Blois.
The leaf contains a passage from the treatise On the Sphere and the Cylinder, Book I, Propositions 39 to 41, much of which remains largely legible on the more than 1,500-year-old parchment.
It was identified in the museum’s collection by Victor Gysembergh, a researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), as being the missing page known from photographs made of the text in 1910, now preserved at the Royal Danish Library.
On one of its two sides, a text of Greek prayers partially covers geometric diagrams, while the other side is covered by an illustration added in the twentieth century depicting the Prophet Daniel surrounded by two lions, beneath which the ancient text remains to this day, but inaccessible using conventional methods of examination.
Subject to the necessary authorizations, Gysembergh and his colleagues at the CNRS’ Léon Robin Center for Research on Ancient Thought plan to conduct the first X-ray imaging studies within a year to document what was written beneath the illustration.
To understand both the value of the discovery, as well as why a single page was missing and stuffed in a French museum, and why there are passages that can be read hidden beneath an illustration, one must understand the incredible story of the text’s provenance.
Believed to have been written by the legendary Isidore of Miletus who designed the original structure that became the Hagia Sophia church-then-mosque in Constantinople-then-Istanbul, the parchment codex contained works of the Classical Greek mathematician Archimedes and others.
This compilation was later copied onto parchment in 950 CE, then evacuated to a Greek Orthodox monastery in Palestine before the crusader sack of Constantinople in 1204. There it lay for 900 years, during which it was washed and reused for Greek religious scripture, a process known as palimpsesting. In 1899 it was still in the hands of the Greek church, and was photographed by Johan Heiburg in Istanbul.
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In 1922, the manuscript went missing in the midst of the evacuation of the Greek Orthodox library in the city during a tumultuous period following World War I in which it entered a private French collection.
CNRS stated that the Ministry of Culture eventually approved its export and sale to Christie’s Auction House in New York City in 1998, which was contested by the Greek church. A US court ruled in favor of the auction, and the manuscript was purchased by an anonymous buyer, “Mr. B,” to be deposited for conservation and study at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. The German newspaper Der Spiegel reported that the buyer was most likely Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon.
Thus called the Archimedes Palimpsest, referring to the washed out, yet still visible text running left-to-right across the parchment, it contains two works of Archimedes that were thought to have been lost—the Ostomachion and the Method of Mechanical Theorems—as well as the only surviving original Greek edition of his work On Floating Bodies.
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The scientists plan to use a multispectral approach combined with a series of synchrotron-based X-ray fluorescence analyses to generate the text beneath the illustration of Prophet Daniel.
Archimedes was known in his day as the best mind around. He approximated pi, and formulated multiple theorems for determining the areas of various geometrical shapes.
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