- Researchers identified a lost page of the Archimedes Palimpsest at a French museum.
- The leaf preserves geometric diagrams from Archimedes beneath later religious text written after the manuscript was reused.
- Scientists now plan advanced imaging to reveal hidden passages and reassess the entire manuscript.
A lost page from the Archimedes Palimpsest, among the oldest sources for the Greek mathematician in existence, has been discovered by researchers from France’s National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Blois.
The page in question contains geometric diagrams and a passage from Archimedes’s treatise on the sphere and the cylinder, albeit hidden beneath a layer of later religious writings. The compilation of Archimedes’s writings was created in Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul) in the mid-10th century before being smuggled to a monastery in the Judean desert following the sacking of the city by crusaders in 1204. A combination of religious orthodoxy and the high cost of parchment (it’s made from goatskin) saw monks wash, scrub, and overwrite Archimedes’s 3rd-century B.C.E. concepts with liturgical texts.
The missing page from the Archimedes Palimpsest found by CNRS researchers. Photo: courtesy Musée des Beaux-Arts, Blois.
CNRS researchers were able to connect the lost page with the surviving manuscript, which is today housed at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, on account of work by the Danish Archimedes scholar Johan Ludvig Heiberg who photographed the book in the Turkish capital in 1906. “A 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,” CNRS said in a statement. Two further leaves from the manuscript remain missing.
The other side of the leaf depicts a haloed Prophet Daniel with his palms to the sky having tamed a pair of lions. The illustration likely dates to the 20th century and evokes another chapter of the Archimedes Palimpsest’s dramatic 1,000-year history. By the 1930s, the manuscript was in the possession of a Jewish art dealer in Paris, Salomon Guerson, who, after failing to sell it in 1932, sought to increase its appeal and value by having forged Medieval illustrations added.
In 1998, the Palimpsest was put up for sale at Christie’s by Guerson’s daughter-in-law where it sold for $2 million to an anonymous buyer. In time, the buyer lent the manuscript to the Walters and funded its research and restoration—its edges are charred and centuries of poor storage led to mold covering portions of the text. In 2011, the Walters showcased its findings in the exhibition “Lost and Found: The Secrets of Archimedes.”
The Archimedes Palimpsest manuscript. Photo: Rick Maiman / Sygma via Getty Images.
In the coming year, CNRS plans to try and reveal the text hidden underneath the illustration of Daniel using X-ray fluorescence, an analytical technique that can determine the elemental composition of materials. The center has also suggested the discovery may lead to a reexamination of the complete Archimedes Palimpsest “using more powerful techniques than those employed in the early 2000s,” CNRS said. The hope is that new tools will help clarify pages that remained illegible more than a decade ago.
The Palimpsest contains seven treatises by Archimedes including two previously lost works, Method of Mechanical Theorems and Stomachion, and the only surviving Greek edition of On Floating Bodies, which introduces his laws of floatation.
