Jan Bartek – AncientPages.com – The Archimedes Palimpsest is one of the most significant surviving manuscripts from antiquity. It is a 10th-century Greek manuscript that preserves several treatises by Archimedes of Syracuse. In the Middle Ages, parts of the original text were erased so that the expensive animal-skin parchment could be reused for other writings, a common practice at the time.
Credit: Blois, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Inv. 73.7.52. Photography IRHT-CNRS
The manuscript was successively kept in Jerusalem and then Constantinople. In 1906, the scholar Johan Ludvig Heiberg arranged for it to be photographed, providing crucial documentation before it entered a private collection in France. In 1996, the French Ministry of Culture authorized its export and sale at auction to a private collector, who remains its current owner.
Today, the Archimedes Palimpsest is housed at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, USA. For many years, researchers could only study it through Heiberg’s 1906 photographs. In the early 2000s, multispectral imaging techniques revealed important Archimedean texts and previously unknown fragments of ancient literary and philosophical works. However, because the manuscript changed hands several times, three leaves visible in the 1906 photographs later disappeared and were considered lost.
Recently, one of these long-lost pages has been identified at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Blois, central France, by Victor Gysembergh, a CNRS researcher at the Centre Léon Robin for Research on Ancient Thought (CNRS/Sorbonne University).
Initial analysis shows that it corresponds to page 123 of the Palimpsest and contains a passage from Archimedes’ treatise *On the Sphere and the Cylinder*, Book I, Propositions 39–41. This discovery is detailed in an article published in Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik.
The leaf identified in Blois was among the missing pages: comparison with Heiberg’s photographs, now preserved at the Royal Danish Library, made it possible to confirm, without ambiguity, that it was leaf number 123.
Credit: Blois, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Inv. 73.7.52. Photography IRHT-CNRS
On one side of the manuscript, a prayer text partially overlays geometric diagrams and a passage from Archimedes’ treatise *On the Sphere and the Cylinder* (Book I, Propositions 39–41), a significant portion of which is still largely readable. The other side is covered by a twentieth-century illumination depicting the Prophet Daniel between two lions. Because of this later painting, the underlying ancient text cannot be accessed using standard examination methods.
With the appropriate authorizations in place, the researcher intends to begin the first imaging campaigns within a year. The plan is to use a multispectral imaging strategy, together with synchrotron-based X-ray fluorescence analyses, to recover the text hidden beneath the illumination.
This finding has renewed interest in re-examining the entire Archimedes Palimpsest using more advanced technologies than those available in the early 2000s, with the goal of producing a new reading of previously illegible pages.
Source: CNRS
Written by Jan Bartek – AncientPages.com Staff Writer