Last week Dr. William Noel, curator of manuscripts at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore and director of the Archimedes Palimpsest Project, gave a talk at Penn State discussing his work with the Archimedes Palimpsest Project. It just happened to be my birthday and the last thing I wanted to go before our basketball game at 7:15 was sit in a lecture hall for 2-hours (I had been on campus since 8:00 am). Part of being a graduate student is going to these talks and I typically find them interesting. So with a little encouragement from a fellow graduate student I decided to go and boy was I happy I did!
In 1997 a badly damaged book of prayers with was sold at Christie's in New York to an anonymous buyer for two million dollars. Scholars knew that some of Archimedes was beneath the Christian text. A Christian scribe had scraped the goat hide clean to compose his work. After the auction the buyer deposited the work at the Walter's Art Museum in Baltimore for conservation and study. Noel discussed the methods employed to make the Archimedes text legible. After years of various forms of photography and x-ray, scholars identified seven of Archimedes' treatises on mathematics including the Stomachion and the Method. Both of which are not known to exist anywhere else. The best part is all the transcriptions and images of the text are available online for free at: http://www.archimedespalimpsest.org/ It is not very often that new versions of ancient texts are discovered and made available to the public for free.
