A page from the famous Archimedes Palimpsest, long thought to be lost, has been identified in the collections of the Blois Museum of Fine Arts. The discovery was made by CNRS researcher Victor Gysembergh and announced on March 9 by the research organization.
According to the CNRS, initial analyses have confirmed that this is folio number 123 of this ancient manuscript. It contains an extract from the treatise On the Sphere and Cylinder, one of the major texts of the Greek mathematician Archimedes.
A fragment of an exceptional ancient manuscript
The Archimedes Palimpsest is a 10th-century Greek manuscript containing several treatises by the scholar from Syracuse, one of the greatest mathematicians of antiquity. In the Middle Ages, part of the original text was erased to reuse the parchment, a material that was then expensive, to record other writings.
This practice explains why the original text is now difficult to read. On the sheet found in Blois, one side still shows geometric figures and a passage from Archimedes' treatise, while the other is covered by an illumination added in the 20th century depicting the prophet Daniel surrounded by two lions.
The identification was made possible thanks to old photographs.
To identify the page, Victor Gysembergh compared it to photographs taken in 1906 by the Danish Hellenist Johan Ludvig Heiberg. These historical photographs, preserved at the Royal Library of Denmark, had made it possible to document the manuscript before its dispersal.
This comparison made it possible to confirm without ambiguity the origin of the sheet, which was part of the missing pages of the palimpsest.
Towards new scientific analyses
Archimedes' palimpsest is now housed at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, USA. In the early 2000s, a multispectral imaging campaign had already revealed several previously invisible texts.
The leaf found in Blois could now be subjected to further analysis. The researcher is considering examinations using multispectral imaging and X-ray fluorescence in an attempt to decipher passages still hidden beneath the illumination.
This discovery also revives hope of finding the two other pages of the manuscript that are still missing, and could contribute to a better understanding of the work of the Greek scholar more than two millennia after it was written.
