Archimedes Palimpsest

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A typical page from the Archimedes Palimpsest . The text of the prayer book runs from top to bottom, the original Archimedes manuscript as pale text from left to right.
Report of the discovery in the New York Times, July 16, 1907

The Archimedes Palimpsest is a parchment palimpsest - codex , which was originally a 10th century Byzantine - Greek copy of an otherwise not preserved work by Archimedes and other authors.

It was overwritten by monks in the 13th century with a Christian text, a Byzantine Euchologion . However, the erasure was incomplete so that Archimedes' text could be made legible after scientific research carried out from 1998 to 2008 using methods of digital image processing with ultraviolet, infrared, visible and grazing light and X-rays.

The palimpsest is the only known copy of the Stomachion and the Methodology and contains the only known Greek copy of About Floating Bodies . It is the oldest existing manuscript with texts by Archimedes in Greek, about 400 years older than the two other known (and lost) manuscripts Codex A and Codex B; Along with these, it is also referred to as Codex C.

history

Ancient and early Middle Ages

Archimedes (around 287 BC - 212 BC) wrote in Doric Greek . He sent his work as letters and scrolls on papyrus , his methodology z. B. to Eratosthenes of Cyrene , who since 235 BC. Directed the library of Alexandria ; Heron of Alexandria († after 62) quoted from the letter in his Metrica .

Eutocius of Ascalon wrote in the first half of the 6th century to some comments from Archimedes' works ( On the Sphere and Cylinder , Measurement of a circle and About Balancing Planes ), had it but already problems to get to the lyrics. Isidore von Milet (442-537), the architect of the Hagia Sophia , had the works of Archimedes compiled for the first time in the Byzantine Greek-speaking Constantinople , to which he wanted to add the commentaries of Eutokios. Codex C was written - judging by the script - in the third quarter of the 10th century, almost certainly in Constantinople. It contained on the equilibrium of flat surfaces (today only the end of it), the methodology , on spirals , on spheres and cylinders , circular measurements and the Stomachion (today only the first sheet); nothing is known about further texts before and after it.

The study of the writings of ancient scholars ended abruptly in 1204, when Constantinople was sacked during the Fourth Crusade , the city went up in flames, the libraries were burned down and many classical works were destroyed in the process. Known today as Codex C, the medieval manuscript escaped destruction, either by accident or because it was no longer in Constantinople at the time, and reappeared a generation later in the Jerusalem area. Here the original Archimedes Codex was taken apart, scraped off and washed, along with at least six other manuscripts, including works by Hypereides ; the sheets of parchment were folded in half and rewritten with Christian liturgical texts over 177 pages: from the older sheets one got twice as many sheets of the new prayer book. The place of the revision results from the fact that many of the prayers were specific for the rites of the Church of Jerusalem, the time from an entry on Folio 1 verso of the prayer book: April 13, 1229, which is generally regarded as the day of completion - a few weeks after Emperor Frederick II made the peace of Jaffa on his crusade with the Sultan of Egypt (February 18, 1229) and crowned himself King of Jerusalem (March 18, 1229).

Modern times

The theologian Konstantin von Tischendorf visited Istanbul in the 1840s, there the Metochion of the Holy Sepulcher in Istanbul, the branch of the Greek Patriarchate of Jerusalem , and its library. He was fascinated by the Greek mathematics that was visible on the palimpsest he found in the library and brought a page of it to Europe - this page was sold from Tischendorf's estate to the Cambridge University Library in 1876 (CUL Ms. Add. 1879.23) and identified by Nigel Wilson in 1968 as part of the Archimedes Palimpsest.

In 1899, the Greek researcher Athanasios Papadopoulos-Kerameus compiled a catalog with manuscripts from the library, including a transcription of some of the partially visible lines of the ancient text for Codex C (Ms. 355). Papadopoulos-Kerameus also found a note from the 16th century (which no longer exists today) that the prayer book belongs to the Mar Saba monastery near Bethlehem , whose library in 1834 still contained more than 1,000 manuscripts.

When the mathematician Johan Heiberg read the lines, he immediately discovered that they came from Archimedes' work On Sphere and Cylinder . He visited the Metochion in 1906, studied the palimpsest, and it was confirmed to him that it contained works by Archimedes believed to be lost. Heiberg was allowed to carefully take photographs of the pages of the Palimpsest, from which he made transcriptions that he published in an Archimedes Complete Edition between 1910 and 1915. Thomas Heath translated the methodology into English and published it in a supplement to his Archimedes edition of 1897 in 1912. Until then, he was hardly known among mathematicians, physicists and historians.

Odyssey

In 1920 the manuscript was in the library of Metochion. Shortly thereafter, during the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922) and the expulsion of the Greek-speaking population from Turkey , it disappeared. In 1932 the palimpsest was then owned by the Parisian antiques dealer Salomon Guerson. Two years later he put the manuscript up for sale, but was not satisfied with the offers from the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Bodleian Library .

After the war, Codex C was no longer in the possession of a Jewish antique dealer persecuted by the National Socialists, but in the possession of Marie Louis Sirieix, a businessman and traveler to the Orient who lived in Paris . Sirieix untruthfully claimed to have bought the palimpsest from a monk (who did not always have the right to this transaction), but could not produce any document relating to this sale (contract, receipt). The palimpsest was stored in Sirieix's basement for decades, where it was damaged by moisture and mold.

In the meantime, a forger had put medieval religious portraits of the evangelists in gold leaf on four pages in the code in order to increase the value, which also damaged the text (the models for the portraits were first found in Henri Omont's manuscrits Grecs de la Bibliothèque National from 1929, one of the colors used did not go on sale until 1938). These gold leaf portraits almost erased the text underneath, so that later x-ray fluorescence methods at Stanford University were necessary to make them visible again.

Sirieix died in 1956, and his daughter tried to sell the manuscript undercover from 1970. Failing to do this, she turned to Christie's about an auction , and accepted a legal battle over ownership. In fact, ownership of the palimpsest was acquired just before it was auctioned off in federal court in New York in the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem v. Christie's, Inc challenged. The plaintiff alleged that the palimpsest was stolen from his library in the 1920s. Judge Kimba Wood, however, ruled Christie's in favor of negligent default (i.e. plaintiff had not reported the theft since the 1920s), and the palimpsest went to an anonymous buyer on October 29, 1998 for $ 2 million (plus commission) . The loser at the auction was the Greek government, whose minister of culture, Evangelos Venizelos, organized a consortium of Greek private individuals for the auction.

The London antiquarian Simon Finch, who represented the anonymous buyer, stated that the buyer was a private American from the “high-tech industry”, but not Bill Gates . The statement almost certainly references Internet pioneer Rick Adams after blogger Michael Shermer said he saw him at a birthday party for James Randi at a collector's home in Falls Church, Virginia, where Adams (a sponsor and treasurer of James Randi Educational Foundation ) is alive.

Finally, Heiberg's photographs were separated from the rest of the philologist's estate at the time (Heiberg died in 1928). Both were in the Royal Library in Copenhagen, one as the Heiberg archive, but the other had been cataloged as Ms. Phot 38 . The photographs were only found again through a search in connection with the investigation of the palimpsest.

Digitization and image processing

A page from the palimpsest after image processing; the text by Archimedes can be clearly seen here

On January 19, 1999, the anonymous owner of the Palimpsest brought the Codex to the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore and made it available to science. This enabled the palimpsest to be preserved and intensively examined for the next ten years (1999–2008) after the mold infestation. The project was led by William Noel, the manuscript curator of the Walters Art Museum, and the conservation work was carried out by Abigail Quandt, the museum's manuscript curator. It quickly became apparent that of the 177 numbered folia, three were missing; H. 174 were present.

The most important project members from the field of imaging procedures were (in alphabetical order):

Up until 2006 they x-rayed the palimpsest in different spectral bands (ultraviolet, infrared and visible light) in order to make as much of the old text as possible visible and to process the results digitally. In 2007 the work was repeated with 12 spectral bands, additionally with grazing light : UV: 365 nm ; Visible light: 445, 470, 505, 530, 570, 617 and 625 nm; Infrared: 700, 735 and 870 nm; Side light: 910 and 470 nm. Heiberg's photographs have also been digitized. Reviel Netz of Stanford University and Nigel Wilson produced a diplomatic transcription of the text with which they could fill in gaps in Heiberg's results.

The Byzantine style miniatures painted sometime after 1938 seemed to have irrevocably destroyed the old text underneath. In May 2005, Uwe Bergmann and Bob Morton began using highly focused x-rays at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in Menlo Park to decipher the parts of the 174-page text that had not yet been clarified.

In April 2007 it was reported that a new text was found in the Palimpsest, an Aristotle commentary attributed to Alexander of Aphrodisias . Most of this text was visualized by applying principal component analysis to the three color bands (red, green, blue) of fluorescent light produced by UV illumination.

On October 28, 2008, all of the data, including images and transcriptions, was posted online under Creative Commons and posted in the original order as a Google Book. At the end of 2011, the exhibition Lost and Found: The Secrets of Archimedes took place at the Walters Art Museum . In 2015, parts of the text were encoded in DNA by Swiss scientists to ensure that it was preserved.

swell

Further literature

Official website

Remarks

  1. ^ Editions of Archimedes' Work . Brown University Library. Archived from the original on August 8, 2007. Retrieved July 23, 2007.
  2. ^ In the further course of the 13th century, the codes A and B were apparently in the possession of the curia. Wilhelm von Moerbeke , personal confessor of the cardinal (from December 1261) Guido Foucois, who was previously Archbishop of Narbonne and was Pope from February 1265 to November 1269 as Clement IV , translated some works of Aristotle from Greek into Latin and completed the work on December 10, 1269. Since the habitual residence of the popes at that time was Viterbo and not Rome, and William also lived in Viterbo in 1271, he must have done his translation there. (The manuscript made by Wilhelm von Moerbeke was rediscovered in 1881 by Valentin Rose in the Vatican library .) Two manuscripts come into question as sources for the translations, listed in a papal library directory from 1311 as No. 608 and No. 612 and which are the works known today as Codex B and Codex A. At no. 612, the word Angevin noted, suggesting that the Code A before 1269 owned by Charles of Anjou was that had been invested in 1265 by Clement IV. With the Kingdom of Sicily, out in the in Battle of Benevento the Emperor's son Manfred struck and thus took over the inheritance of the Hohenstaufen in southern Italy - the passing on of the code to the Pope would thus be part of Karl's thanks for the support of the church against the Hohenstaufen. The assumption that the codex previously belonged to the library of Frederick II is obvious, as is that he brought the manuscripts with him from his crusade and thus saved from being revised as well.
  3. ↑ cf. Tischendorf's report Journey to the Orient (1846)
  4. ↑ Although the codex still had 354 pages at that time, he only took photos of 103 rectos and versos, including 38 of open double pages
  5. ^ The Method of Archimedes, Recently Discovered by Heiberg: A Supplement to the Works of Archimedes, 1897 (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1912), by Archimedes, contrib. by JL Heiberg online
  6. ↑ That year he presented the theologian Harold R. Willoughby of the University of Chicago with a manuscript, which the curator of the Huntington Library had identified as the palimpsest described by Heiberg using a folium from the manuscript - no doubt it is about the Code C.
  7. ↑ According to French law, the verdict would have been the same, since the Palimpsest had been in the Sirieix family's possession for more than 30 years
  8. ↑ Shermer, Michael: Touching History . SkepticBlog.org. October 12, 2010. Retrieved December 29, 2014.
  9. ↑ Der Spiegel suspects Jeff Bezos to be the owner
  10. ^ The Digital Archimedes Palimpsest Released , Dot Porter, The Stoa Consortium, October 29, 2008. Retrieved December 29, 2013.
  11. ^ Archimedes Palimpsest (accessed March 31, 2009).
  12. ↑ Save for eternity . In: ETH Zurich . February 13, 2015.