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ARCHIMEDES Revealed

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Bianca
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« on: February 16, 2009, 07:20:09 am »








Lost and Found



Like most other remaining texts of antiquity, the works of Archimedes survive only thanks to scribes who kept copying them on parchment throughout the Middle Ages.

But parchment was often recycled by "palimpsesting," a blunt washing procedure that left little, if any, of the old text.

In 1906 Danish classicist Johan Ludvig Heiberg discovered a 13th-century prayer book in a library in Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey). That book became known as the Archimedes Palimpsest.

Barely readable under the prayers was an older text—a tenth-century copy of ancient Greek texts. Heiberg recognized, painstakingly transcribed, and translated parts of seven works by Archimedes, two of which would have otherwise been lost.

Later, the Palimpsest disappeared, presumably stolen during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Badly damaged by mold and fire, it resurfaced at a New York auction in 1998.

Fake medieval paintings now completely covered four of its pages.

An anonymous collector bought it for two million U.S. dollars, entrusting it to the care of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. The collector has since funded the book's restoration and analysis.

Nigel Wilson, a historian at the University of Oxford in England, says the same technologies used on the Archimedes Palimpsest could shed new light on a number of other palimpsests conserved in libraries around the world.

"There are going to be plenty," Wilson said. A text recently discovered in the Vatican Library, for example, contains previously unknown fragments by the ancient Greek playwright Menander.

It may be some time before historians are able to assess the full importance of the new pages.

Meanwhile, Bergmann's team is performing a third round of imaging, which will end August 7. Slated for scanning are the four painted-over pages.



SOURCES AND RELATED WEB SITES


Exploratorium
Archimedes Palimpsest
Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory
« Last Edit: February 16, 2009, 07:21:32 am by Bianca » Report Spam   Logged

Your mind understands what you have been taught; your heart what is true.


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