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player ready...In 1204, European Crusaders on their way to Jerusalem stopped off at Constantinople, the center of the Byzantine Empire, and ransacked the place, looting and burning libraries that were storehouses of most of the world’s accumulated knowledge.
What didn’t go up in smoke was carted off, robbing the modern world of an immense collection of ancient scientific, cultural and artistic literature. One volume that historians and scientists long feared had been lost forever–the sole copy of works by Greek mathematician and inventor Archimedes–did survive. Barely.
Known among scholars as the “Archimedes Palimpsest,” the elusive document has been viewed and transcribed only once by a qualified scholar in modern times, and that occurred early this century. Beginning next year, however, historians plan to scour it for new meaning with the help of such space-age wizardry as digital scanners used on satellites to probe the universe, medical electron imaging machines and ultraviolet light.
But before that occurs, the palimpsest (pronounced PAL-imp-sest) will go on public display in a special exhibition at the Field Museum from Wednesday until Jan. 3.
It is the oldest known copy of two of the most important treatises Archimedes wrote. The copies, in Greek, were written on parchment made from the skin of 44 goats in the 10th Century.
The contents of the book–Archimedes’ famous theory on flotation and his explanation of the “Method of Mechanical Theorems”–held little interest to the Crusaders. But Christian monks were very interested in the parchment itself. They needed writing materials, and tore apart the Archimedes volume, scraped off the writing and recycled it into a Christian book of religious instructions.
For 700 years, it remained in religious libraries in Palestine and Constantinople, until a Danish scholar found it in 1906 and discovered the barely legible original Archimedes text underneath. The book disappeared again around 1920 after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire. It did not reappear again until last year, when it was sold for $2 million at Christie’s New York auction house. The identities of the buyer and seller were not revealed.
William Noel, curator at Baltimore’s Walters Art Gallery, described the price as “a steal, when you realize this is probably the world’s most priceless surviving scientific manuscript from the antiquities.”
What excites scholars the most is the portion of the manuscript in which Archimedes explains in words and diagrams how his mind worked in devising his abstract theorems. Archimedes, who died in 212 B.C. at the hands of a Roman soldier in ancient Syracuse, is considered the father of calculus and antiquity’s greatest scientist. Many scholars believe his scientific genius is matched only by Galileo, Sir Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein.
“This book,” said Noel, “really is Archimedes’ brain in a box, showing exactly how his thought processes worked.”
The anonymous owner of the volume early this year commissioned the Walters Museum to conserve the badly damaged 177-page work, deteriorating from mold acquired in the 20th Century.
The document derives its name from the Greek word “palimpsest”, which means “scraped over.” In the Middle Ages, Christian scribes in need of hard-to-come-by parchment frequently recycled parchment works that nobody valued. They either scraped or washed off older texts and wrote over them, and such works became known as “palimpsests.”
In ancient times, before the invention of paper and the printing press, the contents of written works were saved from deterioration by copying them by hand.
Archimedes probably wrote his treatises on papyrus scrolls. Hundreds of years later, those documents were copied onto leather-based parchment and bound into book form. Extremely expensive to make and keep, only rich and powerful individuals–often religious leaders–could afford to keep and use books, which were so rare that often only one copy existed.
The Archimedes document is thought to have been sitting in a library in Constantinople, now Istanbul, in 1204 when armies of the Fourth Crusade plundered the city.
Monks who took possession of the book years later erased the Archimedes text to allow a scribe to write a collection, on the blank pages, of instructions to priests on how to perform rites such as baptisms, marriages and communion.
As such, the book spent at least 400 years in a library in the Mar Saba Monastery between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea in Palestine. In the 19th Century, it went back to Constantinople and became part of the collection in the library of the Greek Patriarch.
In 1906, Danish Archimedes scholar Johan Heiberg tracked it down there. Using only a magnifying glass, he made the discovery of the long-lost Archimedes text. The news was so electrifying that it made the front page of The New York Times when Heiberg announced his discovery on July 16, 1907. The work remained in the Constantinople library until it disappeared after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.
Somehow, it ended up in Paris, where it literally moldered for much of this century, hidden by its unknown owners. In the 1930s, the owners furthered the damaged by adding forged gold leaf miniature paintings to its pages, apparently hoping to increase its value.
The book again was nearly forgotten until it appeared on sale at Christie’s last October.
Scholars are eagerly waiting to see if conservators using space-age technology in the next century can glean more from the Archimedes texts than could Heiberg.
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That work will be done under the direction of Walters conservator Abigail Quandt. On display for much of this year at the Walters, the book remains intact for the Field exhibition, except for one loose page that is set in a box for ultraviolet viewing.
Getting the palimpsest for the last two months before it undergoes restoration is a coup for the Field, an arrangement worked out over the last six weeks.
“It’s amazing to find out this thing is going to be here in Chicago,” said Noel Swerdlow, a University of Chicago science historian. “I have talked about it in my classes many times, but this is a remarkable opportunity to actually see it.”