ANCIENT WRITINGS REVEALED

About the document


This document, now called a palimpsest (writing material used several times after earlier writing has been erased), has a long and fascinating history. Archimedes, who lived between 287–212 B.C., wrote the original text and diagrams on papyrus. That document was lost, but other papyrus versions survived. A scribe copied Archimedes’s writings onto sturdier goatskin parchment, probably in the second half of the tenth century A.D. In the thirteenth century, the manuscript was taken apart by Greek monks and the Archimedes text was scraped off. The parchment was recycled into a prayer book in a process called palimpsesting. The Archimedes manuscript then effectively disappeared for centuries, obscured by its new life as liturgical writings. For many years, it was in a monastery library in Constantinople (now Istanbul).
In 1906, Danish classics professor Johan Ludwig Heiberg discovered the lost manuscript and identified the underlying text as unknown writings by Archimedes. Heiberg photographed many of the pages that showed the faint Archimedes text, but missed some important passages and was unable to photograph the parts of the pages beneath the palimpsest bindings. The parchment then fell into the hands of a private collector in France,who altered and damaged parts of the palimpsest. Lost again, it resurfaced at Christie’s auction house in 1998 and was purchased by an anonymous donor for $2 million. Since then, the Archimedes Palimpsest has been in the care of The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, where they’re conserving, imaging, and deciphering it.
The Archimedes Palimpsest contains seven of the Greek mathematician’s treatises. Most importantly, it is the only surviving copy of On Floating Bodies in the original Greek, and the unique source for the Method of Mechanical Theorems and Stomachion.

(Images provided by The Walters Art Museum)


Reading Ancient Texts using Modern Tools


How X-rays Read Medieval Ink Synchrotron radiation is a powerful tool for studying the Archimedes palimpsest. In contrast to an x-ray tube, the synchrotron beam is more intense, is collimated (parallel), does not need to be focused, can be polarized, and is very easy to tune.Iron has 26 electrons in different orbits around the nucleus. An X-ray tuned to an energy of 7.1 kilo-electron volts (keV) can knock out an electron from the innermost orbit of an iron atom. Missing an electron, the unstable atom immediately fills the hole by grabbing an electron from a farther out orbit. Since the replacement electron has less energy (it was less tightly bound to the nucleus), as it falls into its new place it emits x-ray fluorescence, a photon with 6.4 keV, exactly the difference between the two electrons.This creates a fluorescent signal at an energy specific to iron. The detector window is set to 6.4 keV to capture the iron signals. Like an old dot-matrix printer, the detector builds an image dot by dot, mapping out each spec of iron-containing ink.Extra ink in one spot causes a more intense signal. Generally, the ink from the Archimedes text is no more than a faint stain in the fibers of the parchment, while the thicker, unerased ink of religious text sits on its surface. Where the two overlap (the texts are written perpendicular to each other) the iron signal is stronger, which may allow researchers to separate the two texts.


Past Efforts to Read the Manuscript

Since 1999, an intense effort has been made to read the text hidden beneath the prayers using various imaging techniques. About 20 percent of its words remained an elusive mystery until it was discovered that the tools provided by SSRL and other x-ray technology could be used to see the remaining lines. Read more about the past imagine efforts at http://www.archimedespalimpsest.org/imaging_initialtrials1.html


Peering into the mind of Archimides

From the imaging work done so far on this important and unique manuscript, new discoveries have been made about Archimedes. He is considered the most important mathematician and engineer of ancient Greece, and his work resonates and remains relevant to this day. Archimedes, born in 287 B.C. in Syracuse on the island of Sicily, is famous for shouting “Eureka” (“I have found it”), and running naked from his bath through the streets of Syracuse declaring that he had discovered a method for determining the volume of bodies from the amount of water displaced when objects are submerged. He was also celebrated in his time—and is still celebrated in ours—for his practical applications of mathematics and physics to create war machines, used in the defense of the Greek city-state Syracuse from Roman invaders. (Syracuse eventually fell under the siege, and Archimedes was killed by a Roman soldier at age 75.)
But Archimedes remains scientifically relevant to this day for his concepts of abstract mathematics and his understanding of fundamental physical phenomena, which fuse together for the first time in Archimedes’s treatises and form the foundation for mathematical physics. In The Method of Mechanical Theorems, the most important essay known only by the Archimedes palimpsest, the Greek founder of physics shows the process he uses to derive geometrical properties from the ways in which objects can be balanced. Perhaps the most important insight into Archimedes mind is a passage in the Method in which he describes the concept of infinity. Infinity is a fundamental concept in all of mathematics, refined by Newton’s invention of calculus, but was previously considered a problem too difficult for ancient Greek mathematicians. From the palimpsest, we now know that infinity was understood and described by Archimedes twenty centuries before Newton.
Another unique passage contained in the palimpsest is the Stomachion, arguably the first-ever treatise on combinatorics, the branch of mathematics concerned with the selection, arrangement, and operation of elements within sets. In this passage, Archimedes describes a puzzle or game in which a square is cut into 14 pieces and shuffled. The game is to come up with the number of different ways the pieces can be arranged back into a square. It is not known whether Archimedes solved the puzzle—those pages have been lost—but modern “combinatorists” have tackled the problem and come up with the number 17,152, according to Greek scholar Reviel Netz, who has written extensively about the Archimedes palimpsest.
Although many Archimedes discoveries have been made, there were numerous passages in the palimpsest that remained beyond imaging techniques traditionally used to read ancient documents. In particular, it was impossible to decipher text on the pages that had been painted over with gold leaf (these paintings are believed to be forgeries, an apparent attempt by the private collector in the twentieth century to enhance the document’s value). Enter Uwe Bergmann, a physicist at Stanford’s Synchrotron Radiation Lab.

Under normal circumstances, Dr. Bergmann studies the ways in which spinach leaves take up water during photosynthesis. After reading an article about the Archimedes palimpsest, he realized that the same intense X-rays that allow him to peer into the molecular goings-on in spinach leaves could image iron-based ink under gold leaf. This work at SSRL continues to reveal new discoveries about Archimedes and the history of this amazing and unique document.

MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU