Archimedes Palimpsest

Following the sack of Constantinople by Western crusaders in 1204, the manuscript was taken to an isolated Greek monastery in Palestine, possibly to protect it from occupying Crusaders, who often equated Greek script with heresy against their Latin church and either burned or looted many such texts (including two additional copies of Archimedes' writing, at least). The complex manuscript was not appreciated at this remote monastery and was soon scraped, washed and overwritten (1229) with a religious text (palimpsesting is the name of this process of cleaning and reusing old parchment). In 1899, nine hundred years after it was written, the manuscript was still in the possession of the Greek church, and back in Istanbul (the former Constantinople), where it was catalogued by the Greek scholar Papadopoulos-Kerameus, attracting the attention of Johan Heiberg. Heiberg visited the church library and was allowed to make detailed photographs in 1906. Most of the original text was still visible, and Heiberg published it in 1915. In 1922, the manuscript went missing in the midst of the evacuation of the Greek Orthodox library in Istanbul, during a tumultuous period following World War I. A Western businessman concealed the book for over 70 years, and at some point forged pictures were painted on top of some of the text to increase resale value. Unable to sell the book privately, in 1998, the businessman's daughter risked a public auction in New York contested by the Greek church; the U.S. court ruled for the auction, and the manuscript was purchased by an anonymous buyer (rumored to be Jeff Bezos). It was deposited by the buyer for conservation and study at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. The texts under the forged pictures, as well as previously unreadable texts, were revealed by analyzing images produced by ultraviolet, infrared, visible and raking light, and X-ray at Stanford University.

All images and transcriptions are now freely available on the web at the Archimedes Digital Palimpsest under the Creative Commons License CC BY.

History

Early

Archimedes lived in the 3rd century BC and wrote his proofs as letters in Doric Greek addressed to contemporaries, including scholars at the Great Library of Alexandria. These letters were first compiled into a comprehensive text by Isidorus of Miletus, the architect of the Hagia Sophia patriarchal church, sometime around AD 530 in the then Byzantine Greek capital city of Constantinople.

A copy of Isidorus' edition of Archimedes was made around AD 950 by an anonymous scribe, again in the Byzantine Empire, in a period during which the study of Archimedes flourished in Constantinople, especially at the Magnaura, a school founded by the mathematician, engineer, and former Greek Orthodox archbishop of Thessaloniki, Leo the Geometer, a cousin of the Patriarch.

This medieval Byzantine manuscript then traveled from Constantinople to Jerusalem, likely sometime after the Crusader sack of Byzantine Constantinople in 1204. There, in 1229, the Archimedes codex was unbound, scraped and washed, along with at least six other partial parchment manuscripts, including one with works of Hypereides. Their leaves were folded in half, rebound and reused for a Christian liturgical text of 177 later numbered leaves, of which 174 are extant (each older folded leaf became two leaves of the liturgical book).

The manuscript includes a colophon which was deciphered in 2002 and found to contain the date April 13, 1229, which is likely when the prayerbook was finished. This was notably only a few months after the implementation of the Treaty of Jaffa, which returned Jerusalem to Christian control, bringing the Sixth Crusade to its end. The volatile political situation in the region may have resulted in a shortage of parchment, possibly providing one reason the scribe may have recycled the earlier manuscript.

The palimpsest remained near Jerusalem through at least the 16th century at the isolated Greek Orthodox monastery of Mar Saba. At some point before 1840 the palimpsest was brought back by the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem to its library (the Metochion of the Holy Sepulcher) in Constantinople.

Modern

The Biblical scholar Constantin von Tischendorf visited Constantinople in the 1840s, and, intrigued by the Greek mathematics visible on the palimpsest he found in a Greek Orthodox library, removed a leaf of it (which is now in the Cambridge University Library). In 1899, the Greek scholar Papadopoulos-Kerameus produced a catalog of the library's manuscripts and included a transcription of several lines of the partially visible underlying text. Upon seeing these lines Johan Heiberg, the world's authority on Archimedes, realized that the work was by Archimedes. When Heiberg studied the palimpsest in Constantinople in 1906, he confirmed that the palimpsest included works by Archimedes thought to have been lost. Heiberg was permitted by the Greek Orthodox Church to take careful photographs of the palimpsest's pages, and from these he produced transcriptions, published between 1910 and 1915, in a complete works of Archimedes. Shortly thereafter Archimedes' Greek text was translated into English by Thomas Heath. Before that it was not widely known among mathematicians, physicists or historians.

The manuscript was still in the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem's library (the Metochion of the Holy Sepulchre) in Constantinople in 1920. Shortly thereafter, during a turbulent period for the Greek community in Turkey that saw a Turkish victory in the Greco-Turkish War (1919–22) along with the Greek genocide and the forced population exchange between Greece and Turkey, the palimpsest disappeared from the Greek church's library in Istanbul.

Sometime between 1923 and 1930, the palimpsest was acquired by Marie Louis Sirieix, a "businessman and traveler to the Orient who lived in Paris." Though Sirieix claimed to have bought the manuscript from a monk, who would not in any case have had the authority to sell it, Sirieix had no receipt or documentation for a sale of the valuable manuscript. Stored secretly for years by Sirieix in his cellar, the palimpsest suffered damage from water and mold. In addition, after its disappearance from the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate's library, a forger added copies of medieval evangelical portraits in gold leaf onto four pages in the book in order to increase its sales value, further damaging the text. These forged gold leaf portraits nearly obliterated the text underneath them, and x-ray fluorescence imaging at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center would later be required to reveal it.

Sirieix died in 1956, and, in 1970, his daughter began attempting quietly to sell the valuable manuscript. Unable to sell it privately, in 1998, she finally turned to Christie's to sell it in a public auction, risking an ownership dispute. The ownership of the palimpsest was immediately contested in federal court in New York, where the auction was to take place, in the case of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem v. Christie's, Inc. The Greek church contended that the palimpsest had been stolen from its library in Constantinople in the 1920s, during a period of extreme persecution. Judge Kimba Wood decided in favor of Christie's Auction House on laches grounds, and the palimpsest was bought for $2 million by an anonymous American buyer. The lawyer who represented the anonymous buyer stated that the buyer was "a private American" who worked in "the high-tech industry", but was not Bill Gates.

Imaging and digitization

The anonymous new owner loaned the book to the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, where the palimpsest was the subject of an extensive imaging study from 1999 to 2008, and conservation (as it had suffered considerably from mold while in Sirieix's cellar). This was directed by Dr. William Noel, curator of manuscripts at the Walters Art Museum, and managed by Michael B. Toth of R.B. Toth Associates, with Dr. Abigail Quandt performing the conservation of the manuscript.

The target audiences for the digitisation are Greek scholars, math historians, people building applications, libraries, archives, and scientists interested in the production of the images.

A team of imaging scientists including Dr. Roger L. Easton, Jr. from the Rochester Institute of Technology, Dr. William A. Christens-Barry from Equipoise Imaging, and Dr. Keith Knox (then with Boeing LTS, now retired from the USAF Research Laboratory) used computer processing of digital images from various spectral bands, including ultraviolet, visible, and infrared wavelengths to reveal most of the underlying text, including that of Archimedes. After imaging and digitally processing the entire palimpsest in three spectral bands prior to 2006, in 2007 they reimaged the entire palimpsest in 12 spectral bands, plus raking light: UV: 365 nanometers; Visible Light: 445, 470, 505, 530, 570, 617, and 625 nm; Infrared: 700, 735, and 870 nm; and Raking Light: 910 and 470 nm. The team digitally processed these images to reveal more of the underlying text with pseudocolor. They also digitized the original Heiberg images. Dr. Reviel Netz of Stanford University and Nigel Wilson have produced a diplomatic transcription of the text, filling in gaps in Heiberg's account with these images.

Sometime after 1938, a forger placed four Byzantine-style religious images in the manuscript in an effort to increase its sales value. It appeared that these had rendered the underlying text forever illegible. However, in May 2005, highly focused X-rays produced at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in Menlo Park, California, were used by Drs. Uwe Bergmann and Bob Morton to begin deciphering the parts of the 174-page text that had not yet been revealed. The production of X-ray fluorescence was described by Keith Hodgson, director of SSRL:

Synchrotron light is created when electrons traveling near the speed of light take a curved path around a storage ring—emitting electromagnetic light in X-ray through infrared wavelengths. The resulting light beam has characteristics that make it ideal for revealing the intricate architecture and utility of many kinds of matter—in this case, the previously hidden work of one of the founding fathers of all science.

In April 2007, it was announced that a new text had been found in the palimpsest, a commentary on Aristotle's Categories running to some 9,000 words. Most of this text was recovered in early 2009 by applying principal component analysis to the three color bands (red, green, and blue) of fluorescent light generated by ultraviolet illumination. Dr. Will Noel said in an interview:

You start thinking striking one palimpsest is gold, and striking two is utterly astonishing. But then something even more extraordinary happened.

This referred to the previous discovery of a text by Hypereides, an Athenian politician from the fourth century BC, which has also been found within the palimpsest. It is from his speech Against Diondas, and was published in 2008 in the academic journal Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, vol. 165, becoming the first new text from the palimpsest to be published in a scholarly journal.

The transcriptions of the book were digitally encoded using the Text Encoding Initiative guidelines, and metadata for the images and transcriptions included identification and cataloging information based on Dublin Core Metadata Elements. The metadata and data were managed by Doug Emery of Emery IT.

On October 29, 2008 (the tenth anniversary of the purchase of the palimpsest at auction), all data, including images and transcriptions, were hosted on the Digital Palimpsest Web Page for free use under a Creative Commons License, and processed images of the palimpsest in original page order were posted as a Google Book. In 2011, it was the subject of the Walters Art Museum exhibit "Lost and Found: The Secrets of Archimedes". In 2015, in an experiment into the preservation of digital data, Swiss scientists encoded text from the Archimedes Palimpsest into DNA. Thanks to its deciphering, some mathematicians suggest it is possible that Archimedes may have invented integration.

On 6 March 2026, the Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik reported the discovery of a lost page of the manuscript, now held by the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Blois. The text corresponds to page 123 of the Palimpset's version of the On The Sphere and Cylinder, Book 1, Proposition 39-41. The reverse depicts a painting of Daniel surrounded by two lions.