X-rays reveal Archimedes secrets

[helena nilo]

02.08.2006

A series of hidden texts written by the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes are being revealed by US scientists.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/5235894.stm

... "The writings include the only Greek version of On Floating Bodies known to exist, and the only surviving ancient copies of The Method of Mechanical Theorems and the Stomachion."


12.07.2000
The text was sold at auction for $2m in 1998 and the scientists are hoping their work will persuade the museum where it is now kept that they should be given the entire manuscript to restore.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/829803.stm

[tsunami]

This is highly interesting, lets hope that simple people like us will get the chance to peek on that ancient knowledge.

The article is more about the method used rather than the manuscript itself.

[helena nilo]

"This document, now called a palimpsest (writing material used several times after earlier writing has been erased), has a long and fascinating history. Archimedes, who lived between 287–212 B.C., wrote the original text and diagrams on papyrus. That document was lost, but other papyrus versions survived. A scribe copied Archimedes’s writings onto sturdier goatskin parchment, probably in the second half of the tenth century A.D. In the thirteenth century, the manuscript was taken apart by Greek monks and the Archimedes text was scraped off. The parchment was recycled into a prayer book in a process called palimpsesting. The Archimedes manuscript then effectively disappeared for centuries, obscured by its new life as liturgical writings. For many years, it was in a monastery library in Constantinople (now Istanbul).
...

The Archimedes Palimpsest contains seven of the Greek mathematician’s treatises. Most importantly, it is the only surviving copy of On Floating Bodies in the original Greek, and the unique source for the Method of Mechanical Theorems and Stomachion.

http://www.exploratorium.edu/archimedes/about.html

the imagebank

http://www.archimedespalimpsest.org/imagebank_frame1.html