Science: Classics: Eureka! Archimedes texts being decoded by special X-rays and experts in ancient scripts

A collector bawt at auction a palimpsest with a painting superimposed on an older document inscribed onto goathide - for 2 million dollars. A palimpsest? Yes, as mentioned, is an old scroll or book where the pages are made of fine leather. Onto the scroll / book, there were inscribed in ink a text. That's the meaning of scroll or book for much of the ancient Western world (altho papyrus was another medium, a scroll or book made of reed fibres). A palimpsest is an inscribed text that has been layered over with another inscribed text, and in the case at hand, a painting as well. In 1998, the anonymous collector loaned out his mysterious acquisition to the Walter Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, donating additinal funds to see what would come up from the obviously older bottom layer of text.

The whole story told from the hypothesized beginning is that Archimedes, a Greek-speaking Sicilian scientist, wrote the originals (which we don't have in this case) and they or copies thereof hung around for a long time, until they were copied for the first or more times onto the goathide book we have today of some 174 pages of Archimedes' text.

Scholars believe the treatise was copied by a scribe in the 10th century from Archimedes' original Greek scrolls, written in the third century B.C.

It was erased about 200 years later by a monk who reused the parchment for a prayer book, creating a twice-used parchment book known as a "palimpsest." In the 12th century, parchment -- scraped and dried animal skins -- was rare and costly, and Archimedes' works were in less demand. {Not accurate to say "orginal" here; we can't possibly know that what the scribe used was the actual "autographa" written by the hand of Archimedes himself or by an amanuensis to whom he dictated his thawts.]

In any case, to enhance the prayer book, a painting was added, much like a cover illustration for a book today.

Also contrary to the impression given by the Associated Press, Newsday, and other reports regarding the value of the amazing scientific processes brawt to bear on the palimpsest, the Archimedes text cannot be read by the chemical and X-ray techniques themselves. It takes experts in classical Greek to interpret the brush strokes of the individual letters of the Greek alphabet to decide just what any one letter and letter-combinations (word) means And apparently, the prayerbook text on top of Greek is Latin.

Another error occurs in the statement Newsday attributes to Dr William Noel of the Palimpsest Project at the Walter Art Museum. Where Noel says, "It's the only one that contains diagrams that may bear any resemblance to the diagrams Archimedes himself drew in the sand in Syracuse 2000 years ago," the truth is that Archimedes lived about two hundred fifty years earlier than that (287 BC - 212 BC) - not around the time of Jesus. Noel is off by 10%, a terrible error of magnitude for dating Archimedes stunning scientific achievement, now known to be more stunning than ever.

What's important is that we have now "the only copy of the treatise Method of Mechanical Theorems, outlining the experimental procedures that helped the scientist think thru his math theories and formulate them more precisely. and "also the only source" we have so far "in the original Greek" language used by Archimedes - but not the original Greek autographa, an assumption impossible to make on the evidence at hand and highly improbable - for the treatise On Floating Bodies, in which Archimedes deals with the physics of flotation and gravity," according to the Associated Press report by Alex Dominquez, in Newsday online. - Owlb



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