The Archimedes Palimpsest is a medieval parchment manuscript that contains seven treatises by Archimedes - the Equilibrium of Planes, Spiral Lines, The Measurement of the Circle, Sphere and Cylinder, On Floating Bodies, The Method of Mechanical Theorems and the Stomachion. Of these treatises, the last three are of the greatest significance. While the other treatises survived in other manuscripts, there is no other surviving copy of On Floating Bodies in Greek - the language in which Archimedes wrote, and there is no version in any language of The Method of Mechanical Theorems and of this part of the Stomachion. The Archimedes manuscript was written in the second half of the tenth century, almost certainly in Constantinople, but the text was scraped from the parchment - the word Palimpsest comes from the Greek Palimpsestos, meaning "scraped again" - to be used as the pages in a prayer book, completed in 1229.
Another book in the palimpsest contains works by the 4th century B.C. Attic Orator Hyperides. Prior to the discovery of the Hyperides text in the manuscript, this orator was only known from papyrus fragments and from quotations of his work by other authors. The Palimpsest, however, contains 10 pages of Hyperides text.
The Biblical scholar Constantine Tischendorf discovered the palimpsest during travels in the region in 1846. Tischendorf did not know that the palimpsest contained the writings of Archimedes, however a few lines of the text underneath the prayer book text were transcribed by another scholar, who called them to the attention of John Ludwig Heiberg, the world's authority on Archimedes at the time. Intrigued by the text, Heiberg decided to see it for himself in 1906 and established it contained the text of Archimedes' works. Heiberg took photographs of the manuscript and used these extensively for a new edition of the complete works of Archimedes which he published between 1910 and 1915.
The day before the sale, the Greek Government and the Greek patriarch issued an injunction against Christie's in an attempt to stop the sale. They argued that the book was stolen. The injunction failed, and the sale went ahead. The court records of the injunction and subsequent proceedings make it clear that the manuscript had been in the French collection at least since the 1960s, and the family claimed that it had in fact, belonged to them since the 1920s.
The manuscript was bought at auction by an anonymous American collector who deposited the book at The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore for conservation, imaging, and scholarly study, in January 1999. Work on the Palimpsest, funded by the owner, has been ongoing ever since.
In February, 2006, the British Academy sponsored a colloquium of invited scholars that set out to review the discoveries in the palimpsest to date, and to see what could be done collectively to read and elucidate more text. Among the participants at the colloquium was the Hungarian philologist László Horváth, whose team of researchers later made a significant contribution to the deciphering of the text.
