The Archimedes Palimpsest

Authoritative account of the ten years of conservation, imaging and scholarship on the world's greatest palimpsest.

The result of a trailblazing project to recover lost texts from the ancient world, this book describes the discovery and recovery of erased texts in the Archimedes Palimpsest, the unique source for two treatises by Archimedes, lost speeches by the Athenian orator Hyperides and a commentary on Aristotle's Categories.The Archimedes Palimpsest is the name given to a Byzantine prayer book that was written over a number of earlier manuscripts, including one that contained two unique works by Archimedes, unquestionably the greatest mathematician of antiquity. Sold at auction in 1998, it has since been the subject of a privately funded project to conserve, image, and transcribe its texts. In this volume the scientists, conservators, classicists, and historians involved in the project discuss in full their techniques and their discoveries. These include new speeches by the classical Athenian orator Hyperides, a lost commentary on Aristotle's Categories from the second or third century AD, and substantial re-readings and reinterpretations of the works by Archimedes. The book discusses the pioneering imaging and post-processing techniques used to reveal the texts, and includes detailed codicological descriptions of all eight manuscripts that constitute the Palimpsest. It will be of interest to manuscript scholars, conservators, classicists, and historians of science.