Page from Archimedes Palimpsest rediscovered in Blois

"The 10th century copy was dispatched to a monastery in Palestine after the Sack of Constantinople in April 1204 to keep it from being destroyed by the anti-Greek zealotry of the Crusaders looting the city. Unfortunately the remote monastery was not a safe haven either."

"In 1229 a monk sponged the ink off the parchment with lemon juice, cut the animal hide pages in half, turned them 90 degrees and filled them with prayers and liturgical texts. This practice of washing off and reusing parchment and vellum of older manuscripts was common in the Middle Ages because new pages made from animal skin were very expensive to produce."

"The cleaned parchment pages still contained traces of the ink under the surface, and over time, the shadow of the original writing would reappear. Texts with ghosts of previous texts are known as palimpsests."

The Archimedes Palimpsest is a compendium of treatises by the 3rd-century B.C. Greek mathematician Archimedes. Originally compiled by Isidore of Miletus in 530 A.D., a copy was created in Constantinople in 950 A.D. during a Byzantine mathematical renaissance. After the 1204 Sack of Constantinople, the manuscript was sent to a Palestinian monastery for protection. In 1229, a monk erased the original text using lemon juice and repurposed the parchment for religious texts, creating a palimpsest. The original ink traces remained visible beneath the surface. A page from this palimpsest, known only from 1906 photographs, has now been rediscovered at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Blois, France.

Read at www.thehistoryblog.com