Palimpsests!

Wilson, Nigel.  ”The Archimedes Palimpsest: A Progress Report.”  The Journal of the Walters Art Museum 62 (2004), 61-68.

                This particular article is very interesting, and it shows the importance of palimpsests to historians.  This article deals with a particular manuscript found by a German Byzantinist, Heiberg, in Istanbul in 1908.  Soon after the First World War the manuscript mysteriously ended up in the hands of French family who, despite the beggings of various historians, did not sell the texts to any museums.  After unsuccessfully attempting to sell the manuscript, the French family finally sold it for a relatively low price to a museum where it was available to be studied by many historians. 

                The manuscript was shown to be a palimpsest.  The newer writing was a eucholion, or a collection of prayers.  The underwriting consisted of three books of Archimedes which were copied sometime in the latter half of the tenth century, probably under the reign of Constantine VII Porphyrogentitus (the purple-born).  The upper writing was from either the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century.  The three books of Archimedes are On Floating Bodies, Stomachion, and the Method.  On Floating Bodies, surprisingly, is about floatation and why some things can float and others cannot.  The Stomachion, due to a mistransliteration of a word due to the poor condition of the manuscript was thought merely to be about a children’s puzzle until new technology allowed a better reading.  This better reading allowed historians to figure out the manuscript was an essay about combinatorics (it is a branch of mathematics dealing with countable objects… look it up on Wikipedia if you are really that interested).  The Method deals with the Greek concept of infinity and an early form of calculus. 

                This manuscript shows that advanced mathematics were known to the Byzantines and that classical authors continued to be read, studied, and copied throughout the Byzantine period.  The fact that these manuscripts were scraped and then written over also suggests that they were in high enough quantity (or at least that multiple copies had already been made) to destroy the original. 

                Although this article was mostly about the nature of the palimpsest, Wilson also goes into some of the interesting points about the script.  The script does not make it clear where the Archimedes manuscript was written or even where the palimpsest process occurred.  The Archimedes scribe used more abbreviation than would be found in an ecclesiastical or even any other text.  Most of these abbreviations are of uncommon technical terms.  This means that the manuscript was copied for people knowledgeably in advanced (well, advanced for the tenth century) mathematics.  The scribe also made some odd correction when he made mistakes in word order.  When these kinds of mistakes are made, most scribes will put an alpha above the word that is first and a beta above the word that follows.  This scribe drew two dashes over the word that was supposed to be second and one dash above the word that was supposed to be first.  Corresponding dashes were also placed in the margins.