Archimedes Palimpsest

The Archimedes Palimpsest is a parchment codex palimpsest, which originally was a 10th-century Byzantine Greek copy of an otherwise unknown work of Archimedes of Syracuse and other authors. It was overwritten with a Christian religious text by 13th-century monks. The erasure was incomplete, and Archimedes' work is now readable after scientific and scholarly work from 1998 to 2008 on images produced by ultraviolet, infrared, visible and raking light, and X-ray. All images and scholarly transcriptions with metadata are now freely available on the web at the Digital Palimpsest, now hosted on OPenn and other web sites for free use under a Creative Commons License.

The Palimpsest is the only known copy of "Stomachion" and "The Method of Mechanical Theorems" and contains the only known copy of "On Floating Bodies" in Greek.

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 were first compiled into a comprehensive text by Isidorus of Miletus, the architect of the Hagia Sophia patriarchal church, sometime around 530 AD in the then Byzantine Greek capital city of Constantinople. A copy of this text was made around 950 AD, again in the Byzantine Empire, by an anonymous scribe. This was a period during which the study of Archimedes flourished in Constantinople in a school founded by the Greek mathematician, engineer, and former archbishop of Thessaloniki, Leo the Geometer, a cousin to the patriarch. This medieval Byzantine manuscript then traveled to Jerusalem, likely sometime after the Crusader sack of Constantinople in 1204. There, in 1229, the original Archimedes codex was unbound, scraped and washed, along with at least six other parchment manuscripts, including one with works of Hypereides. The parchment leaves were folded in half and reused for a Christian liturgical text of 177 pages; the older leaves folded so that each became two leaves of the liturgical book. 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 their library (the Metochion of the Holy Sepulcher) in Constantinople.

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