Lost Page From Archimedes Palimpsest Reappears In French Museum

Lost Page From Archimedes Palimpsest Reappears In French Museum

In an article published in Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik(Journal of Papyrology and Epigraphy) on March 6, researcher Victor Gysembergh reported the discovery of a long-lost piece of writing by Archimedes. According to theFrench National Center for Scientific Research(CNRS), which Gysembergh is affiliated with, the newly identified page, held at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Blois, France, is a piece of the Archimedes Palimpsest: a 1000-year-old manuscript containing treatises by the Ancient Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, and astronomer.

Using photographs taken by historian and philologist Johan Ludvig Heiberg in 1906, the researchers were able to confirm that the new page corresponds to leaf number 123 of the text. One side contains diagrams and a passage from the treatise “On the Sphere and the Cylinder,” partially covered by a text of prayers, although much of the text remains readable. The other side features a depiction a haloed Prophet Daniel, flanked by lions. This image is said to have been added by the owner of the manuscript in 1942, in order to increase its value. In Heiberg’s photographs, there were three other documented leaves which are now considered to be lost.

The Archimedes Palimpsest was not created by Archimedes himself, but a copy of his work produced in the tenth-century. The manuscript changed hands in Constantinople and Jerusalem before ending up in the private collection of a French family in the 1990s. Today much of the text is currently housed in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland and it is owned by an unidentified private collector.

While Heiberg’s photographs were the only means for researchers to access the manuscript for a long time, multispectral imaging made closer inspection possible in the 2000s. Gysembergh hopes that pending authorization, he will be able to undertake a similar study of this page using multispectral imaging along with synchrotron-based X-ray fluorescence analyses.