In 1229, monks scraped and washed an old book of Archimedes and reused the pages for a Christian liturgical text. Beneath the new writing lay the only known copy of his work The Method. Scientists spent years using light and X-rays to read it again.
Truth label: Established. Strong evidence and broad agreement among experts.
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What was hidden
Besides The Method, it holds the only surviving Greek text of On Floating Bodies and his Ostomachion, plus speeches by Hypereides and a commentary on Aristotle.
Reading the invisible
From 1999 to 2008, a team at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore imaged every page. In 2005, X-ray fluorescence at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center revealed text hidden under forged gold-leaf paintings.
Learn
- What a palimpsest is. A manuscript page that has been scraped clean and written over. Parchment was precious, so this was common.
- Sold at auction. An anonymous buyer bought it at Christie's in New York in 1998 for $2 million.
Test yourself
When was the Archimedes text overwritten?
1229. It was scraped and reused in 1229.
Sources
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