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By Root 751 0

before 1229, the manuscript containing Archimedes’ works underwent a catastrophic act of recycling—it was unbound and washed so the parchment leaves could be reused for a Christian prayer book. The scribe Ioannes Myronas finished copying the prayer book on April 14, 1229. Fortunately, the washing of the original text did not obliterate the writing completely. Figure 12 shows a page from the manuscript, with the horizontal lines representing the prayer texts and the faint vertical lines the mathematical contents. By the sixteenth century, the palimpsest—the recycled document—somehow made its way to the Holy Land, to the monastery in St. Sabas, east of Bethlehem. In the early nineteenth century, this monastery’s library contained no fewer than a thousand manuscripts. Still, for reasons that are not entirely clear, the Archimedes palimpsest was moved yet again to Constantinople. Then, in the 1840s, the famous German biblical scholar Constantine Tischendorf (1815–74), the discoverer of one of the earliest Bible manuscripts, visited the Metochion of the Holy Sepulcher in Constantinople (a daughter house of the Greek Patriarchate in Jerusalem) and saw the palimpsest there. Tischendorf must have found the partially visible underlying mathematical text quite intriguing, since he apparently tore off and stole one page from the manuscript. Tischendorf’s estate sold that page in 1879 to the Cambridge University Library.

In 1899, the Greek scholar A. Papadopoulos-Kerameus cataloged all the manuscripts that were housed in the Metochion, and the Archimedes manuscript appeared as Ms. 355 on his list. Papadopoulos-Kerameus was able to read a few lines of the mathematical text, and perhaps realizing their potential importance, he printed those lines in his catalog. This was a turning point in the saga of this manuscript. The mathematical text in the catalog was brought to the attention of the Danish philologist Johan Ludvig Heiberg (1854–1928). Recognizing the text as belonging to Archimedes, Heiberg traveled to Istanbul in 1906, examined and photographed the palimpsest, and a year later announced his sensational discovery—two never-before-seen treatises of Archimedes and one previously known only from its Latin translation. Even though Heiberg was able to read and later publish parts of the manuscript in his book on Archimedes’ works, serious gaps remained. Unfortunately, sometime after 1908, the manuscript disappeared from Istanbul under mysterious circumstances, only to reappear in the possession of a Parisian family, who claimed to have had it since the 1920s. Improperly stored, the palimpsest had suffered some irreversible mold damage, and three pages previously transcribed by Heiberg were missing altogether. In addition, later than 1929 someone painted four Byzantine-style illuminations over four pages. Eventually, the French family that held the manuscript sent it to Christie’s for auction. Ownership of the manuscript was disputed in federal court in New York in 1998. The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem claimed that the manuscript had been stolen in the 1920s from one of its monasteries, but the judge ruled in favor of Christie’s. The palimpsest was subsequently auctioned at Christie’s on October 29, 1998, and it fetched $2 million from an anonymous buyer. The owner deposited the Archimedes manuscript at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, where it is still undergoing intensive conservation work and thorough examination. Modern imaging scientists have in their arsenal tools not available to the earlier researchers. Ultraviolet light, multispectral imaging, and even focused X-rays (to which the palimpsest was exposed at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) have already helped to decipher parts of the manuscript that had not been previously revealed. At the time of this writing, the careful scholarly study of the Archimedes manuscript is ongoing. I was fortunate enough to meet with the palimpsest’s forensic team, and figure 13 shows me next to the experimental setup as it illuminates one page of the palimpsest at different