Book Board Chat

Reading Beneath the Lines

Palimpsests are recycled handwritten books from the Middle Ages. Their interesting parts are always the original text that the recycler tried to erase in order to write a different book. A palimpsest that contains previously lost writings of not one, not two, but three significant texts dating back to antiquity is a freak. One such freak is about to go on exhibit at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. It is a palimpsest that mostly contains recovered writings of Archimedes, but it also includes two other recovered texts that exist nowhere else.

In 1229, a monk in Jerusalem wanted to make a prayer book. He took existing handwritten books, removed the binding, and used a knife to scrape off the ink as much as possible and started writing on them. Eventually he added a new binding, and this palimpsest was born. The monk had used parchment from several books, one a tome of Archimedes's treatises on math. Two others included entire speeches of the Athenian orator Hyperides, a contemporary of Demosthenes, as well as a detailed commentary on Aristotle's Categories. By the turn of the last century the palimpsest was in a monastery in Constantinople, where it was identified as the work of Archimedes. The prayer book later turned up in a private collection in Paris. But forgers had painted images of saints on seven pages.

In 1998 the daughter-in-law of the Parisian collector brought the Archimedes palimpsest, to Christie's in New York, where it was sold at auction for $2 million. Abigail Quandt, senior conservator of manuscripts and rare books at the Walters, wondered who was going to have to deal with it. She got an answer a few months later, when the anonymous buyer deposited the palimpsest with the Walters. Ms. Quandt was put in charge of preparing the work for digital imaging. The preparation, however, demanded a level of excruciating care. Just removing the binding and separating the 174 fragile folios took four years alone, followed by countless hours of carefully lifting mold and dirt. The worst was removing the paintings of saints, which lay atop the prayer book writing, which in turn lay atop the Archimedes undertext.

When a team of four digital-imaging experts from around the country began submitting folios to different wavelengths of light and the palimpsest began to give up its secrets.
Only the Archimedes text had been identified to that point, but now they started to see there were others. The others included entire speeches of the Athenian orator Hyperides, a fourth-century B.C. contemporary of Demosthenes, as well as a detailed commentary on Aristotle's "Categories," a fundamental text of Western philosophy.

The big find remained the Archimedes' math treatises; far more than previously known, and two exist that in no other form: the concept of absolute infinity; the other, combinatorics, a segment of math that plays a role in statistical physics and modern computing. No one knew Archimedes had ever broached either subject.

Hyperides was among the most influential orators of his time, but until now only fragments of his speeches existed. Already available for review, the recovered full speeches provide new evidence for the politics and legal practice of Greek city-states. Not much has survived regarding "Categories," which scholars know was the subject of intense philosophical debate in the first-century B.C. The commentary found in the palimpsest has offered a wealth of details about that debate, and as a result it enriches our understanding of an ancient and medieval interpretative tradition.

Whether you study philosophy or science or whatever, the Archimedes palimpsest breaks down boundaries between disciplines. It contains history, philosophy and mathematics. Because of all these things, history is still being written.

Yadayadayada
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204612504576608960149816094.html