The Archimedes Palimpsest
"On Floating Bodies" existed nowhere else in the world.
At a Christie's auction in October 1998, a battered medieval manuscript sold for two million dollars to an anonymous bidder, who then turned it over to the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore for further study. The manuscript was a palimpsest--a book made from an earlier codex whose script had been scraped off and the pages used again.1
Jeff Bezos is thought to be the anonymous bidder.2
It was the earliest surviving manuscript by Archimedes (287 b.c.-212 b.c.), the greatest mathematician of antiquity, penned in Syracuse.
The timeline of the manuscript’s odyssey from Syracuse to Christie’s:
Circa 287-212 B.C. In Syracuse Archimedes wrote treatises and equations onto a collection of papyrus scrolls in Greek.
212 B.C.-A.D. 1000.The original Archimedes scrolls are lost, but unknown persons copy them down at least once beforehand onto other papyrus scrolls.
Circa 1000. A scribe in Constantinople handwrites a copy of the Archimedes treatises, including their accompanying diagrams and calculations, onto parchment, which is assembled into a book.
Circa 1200. A Christian monk handwrites prayers in Greek over the Archimedes text, turning the old mathematical text into a new prayer book. The book is now a palimpsest, a manuscript with a layer of text written over an earlier scraped- or washed-off text.
Circa 1200-1906. For centuries the monk's prayer book is used in religious study, but eventually it is stored within the Mar Saba monastery in Constantinople. There it survives numerous abuses, including the Fourth Crusade in 1204, during which Constantinople is sacked and many of its books burned.
1906. Danish philologist Johan Ludvig Heiberg discovers the lost manuscript in in Istanbul, identifies the underlying layer of text as the work of Archimedes, and photographs every page. Heiberg transcribes what he can make out of the palimpsest's shadowy bottom layer, using a magnifying glass as his only aid. He publishes his transcription with the accompanying images. Heiberg incorporated his findings into an entirely new edition of the complete works of Archimedes, which he published between 1910 and 1915.
1907-1930. The palimpsest goes missing and is believed stolen. At some point during this period, probably after 1929, a forger paints copies of medieval evangelical portraits in gold leaf onto four pages in the book, presumably in an attempt to increase its value and perhaps unaware of the Archimedes text beneath.
Circa 1930. A member of a French family (Marie Louis Sirieix )3 who is an amateur collector of antiquities travels to Istanbul and purchases the manuscript from a local dealer. Unbeknownst to the outside world, it is kept in the family's Paris home for the next seven decades.
1991.The French owners of the Archimedes palimpsest confidentially approach an expert at Christie's in Paris to ask for an appraisal.4
There were many legal implications about the sale including the court case, “The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem v. Christie’s Inc.”5 Judge Kimba Wood ruled in favor of Christie's.
After its sale in 1998, the manuscript's anonymous billionaire owner loaned it to the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, where a team of restorers and scholars are cleaning, imaging, and translating the Archimedes palimpsest.
More details are online at The Archimedes Palimpsest.
The 2 volume publication, The Archimedes Palimpsest, discusses the pioneering imaging and post-processing techniques used to reveal the texts and includes detailed codicological descriptions of all eight manuscripts comprising the Palimpsest.6 A review summarizes this work:
This magnificent book contains, in volume 1, Noel’s Introduction (1–15); “Part 1: The Manuscripts” (17–77), a detailed codicological description of the components; “Part 2: History” (79–127), three contributions reconstructing the eventful history of the book from 1229; “Part 3: Conservation” (128–171); “Part 4: The Digital Palimpsest” (173–239), two contributions on imaging (optical and X-Ray, plus image-processing techniques), and one on digital records, especially 238 open standards; and “Part 5: The Texts” (241–320), on palimpsests in scholarship (Tchernetska and Wilson) and on the place of this palimpsest in Archimedes scholarship (Netz). Volume 2 provides facing-page high-quality images and diplomatic transcriptions, for Archimedes (12–287), Hyperides (290–309), and the Aristotle commentary (312–39).7
Netz, Reviel, and William Noel. The Archimedes Codex: Revealing the Secrets of the World's Greatest Palimpsest. London: Phoenix, 2008;
Von Matthias Schulz (2007).The Story of the Archimedes Manuscript. Spiegel International. (Sept. 30).
Ibid.
Krock, Lexi. (2003) Inside the Archimedes Palimpsest. Nova. (Sept. 30).
Carver, Katherine J. “The Legal Implications and Mysteries Surrounding the Archimedes Palimpsest.” The American Journal of Legal History, vol. 47, no. 2, 2005, pp. 119–160.
Reviel Netz, William Noel, Natalie Tchernetska, and Nigel Wilson (eds.). The Archimedes Palimpsest. Vol. 1: Catalogue and Commentary. Pp. 342. Vol. 2: Images and Transcriptions. Pp. 353. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Keyser, Paul. Review of The Archimedes Palimpsest. Classical World, v. 106 no. 4, 2013: 708-709.
I learned a new word today.