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In October 1998, a battered manuscript of parchment leaves
sold for $2 million to an anonymous bidder at auction. The
thousand-year-old manuscript contains the earliest surviving
writings by Archimedes, a Greek thinker who is regarded as the
greatest mathematician of antiquity. The story of the 174-page
volume's journey from its creation in Constantinople to the
auction block at Christie's in New York is long and
convoluted. To wit:
circa 287-212 B.C.
Before his death at Syracuse in 212 B.C., Archimedes pens some
of his most important treatises and equations onto a
collection of papyrus scrolls in Greek. These include
On the Method of Mechanical Theorems,
On Floating Bodies,
On the Measurement of the Circle,
On the Sphere and the Cylinder,
On Spiral Lines, and
On the Equilibrium of Planes.
212 B.C.- A.D. 1000
The original Archimedes scrolls are lost, but fortunately
unknown persons copy them down at least once beforehand onto
other papyrus scrolls.
circa 1000
A scribe working in Constantinople handwrites a copy of the
Archimedes treatises, including their accompanying diagrams
and calculations, onto parchment, which is assembled into a
book.
circa 1200
A Christian monk handwrites prayers in Greek over the
Archimedes text, turning the old mathematical text into a new
prayer book. The book is now a palimpsest, a manuscript with a
layer of text written over an earlier scraped- or washed-off
text (see
What is a Palimpsest?).
circa 1200-1906
For centuries the monk's prayer book is used in religious
study, but eventually it is stored within the Mar Saba
monastery in Constantinople. There it survives numerous
abuses, including the Fourth Crusade in 1204, during which
Constantinople is sacked and many of its books burned.
1906
Danish philologist Johan Ludvig Heiberg discovers the lost
manuscript in the library of The Church of the Holy Sepulchre
in Istanbul, identifies the underlying layer of text as the
work of Archimedes, and photographs every page. Heiberg
transcribes what he can make out of the palimpsest's shadowy
bottom layer, using a magnifying glass as his only aid. He
publishes his transcription with the accompanying images.
1907-1930
The palimpsest goes missing and is believed stolen. At some
point during this period, probably after 1929, a forger paints
copies of medieval evangelical portraits in gold leaf onto
four pages in the book, presumably in an attempt to increase
its value and perhaps unaware of the Archimedes text beneath.
circa 1930
A member of a French family who is an amateur collector of
antiques travels to Istanbul and purchases the manuscript from
a local dealer. Unbeknownst to the outside world, it is kept
in the family's Paris home for the next seven decades.
1971
Nigel Wilson, a classics professor at Oxford, examines a leaf
from an old manuscript housed in a Cambridge University
library. He identifies it as a page from the missing
Archimedes palimpsest Heiberg had photographed and transcribed
65 years earlier. Wilson surmises that Constantine
Tischendorf, a German scholar who described a palimpsest he
saw in a Greek monastic library in 1846, tore out the page for
further examination.
1991
The French owners of the Archimedes palimpsest confidentially
approach an expert at Christie's in Paris to ask for an
appraisal. After the appraiser discovers that the manuscript
is the lost Archimedes palimpsest (in part by comparing it to
Heiberg's photographs), he values it at between $800,000 and
$1.2 million.
1998-present
Not long after its sale for roughly double the appraised
amount in the fall of 1998, the manuscript's anonymous
billionaire owner loans it to the Walters Art Museum in
Baltimore, Maryland, where a team of restorers and scholars
are cleaning, imaging, and translating the Archimedes
palimpsest at last (see
Imaging the Palimpsest). —Lexi Krock
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