palimpsest

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Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus from the Bibliothèque nationale de France , Département des manuscrits, Grec 9, fol. 60r

Palimpsest ( masculine , also neuter , from Latin palimpsestus , -i m from ancient Greek πάλιν palin "again" and ψάειν psaein "rub, scrape off") denotes a manuscript page or scroll that is written on, cleaned by scraping or washing was then rewritten ( lat . codex Rescriptus ). The term was already used in antiquity and the Middle Ages . It is the process of rewriting which - contrary to the etymological meaning - is called palimpsesting . In a figurative sense, surface structures are occasionally referred to as palimpsests that have been overprinted by recent influences and have become almost invisible - such as the ghost craters on the surface of the moon.

function

The reason for this approach was a prevailing shortage of new writing material or its high price. From late Christian antiquity onwards, practically only parchment was used for books . From around the 5th century, papyrus was hardly available in the west of the Roman Empire or in its successor states. Writing materials were prohibitively expensive, especially in the middle of the 7th century, so that parchment books were palimpsested especially at this time. This process primarily fell victim to ancient texts that had to make room for "antiphonaries or stories of saints".

Manufacturing

Since writing materials such as parchment were very valuable in the Middle Ages, written manuscript pages were often reused. The writing was scraped off or washed off. Chemical ink killers such as citric acid have also been used to remove the ink. Most palimpsests are made of parchment or papyrus . Traces of the original text are often preserved and can nowadays often be made visible by means of fluorescence photography (previously using Gallapfel or Gioberti tincture and X-rays ) so that the old text can be read again. Many ancient and medieval texts have only been handed down as such a "script under script" and are therefore incomplete. Some methods of making original texts visible were developed and used by Alban Dold .

Important copies

Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus

One of the most important palimpsests is the Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France , Département des manuscrits, Grec 9; in the editions of the Septuagint Sigle no C or 04 ( Gregory-Aland )), of which only about 203 folia (leaves) the original 238 have survived. The original text of a full Bible written in capitals in Greek (Septuagint + Greek New Testament), which had been produced in Egypt in the fifth century , was scraped off in the twelfth century and overwritten in Greek lowercase letters with sermons by Ephraem the Syrian . Today the Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus is kept in the Paris National Library.

De re publica (Cicero)

Even Cicero's De re publica from his first philosophical phase was long considered lost. The content was only known from fragments and quotations from other authors, while an original tradition could not be found. After Angelo Mai , the actual founder of palimpsest research, discovered and edited several palimpsests with previously unknown texts such as the letters of Fronto (ed. Milan 1815) and various speeches by Cicero with their commentary by Asconius Pedianus (ed. Milan 1814-1817) , he found another parchment palimpsest in the Vatican Library (BAV Vat. lat. 5757). This contained large parts of the first and second books, also excerpts from the third, fourth and fifth books, but no traces of the sixth. Most of this, however, was known from the separate tradition of the Somnium Scipionis in the commentary of the 5th century grammarist Macrobius . The writing is an uncial of the IV./V. Century, which was carried out by two different scribes and corrected by another scribe. Book I 1.1 – III 2.3 and IV 2.3 – V 3.5 come from Schreiber A, from Schreiber B III 3.4–35.48 and V 4.6–5.7. The title was Cicero's De re publica with commentaries on the psalm by Augustine . This text was also written in an uncial, albeit in a much smaller font size, which is dated to the 7th century.

Mai and his colleagues already recognized that the original code with the Cicero text consisted of layers of 4 sheets of paper that were placed on top of one another, folded once and then stapled. Each such Quaternio thus had 16 written pages. For palimpsestation, these quaterniones were taken apart, the leaves washed - they were too thin to scrape off - and the useful ones were then reassembled, that is, in a different order, and described with Augustine's commentary on the Psalms. Research succeeded in restoring the original quaterniones with the Cicero text from these leaves. It was possible to determine the gaps that resulted from the fact that whole sheets were no longer available, so that the corresponding 4 pages are missing; z. B. If the bottom sheet is missing, pages 1 and 2, as well as 15 and 16, for the second sheet, pages 3 and 4, as well as 13 and 14, etc. Also whole quaterniones are not included. Overall, about a quarter of what was believed to be lost was gained from the palimpsest. Fragments, quotations and table of contents handed down by other authors were tried to be classified according to the context.

Despite the surprising find, there was initially no intensive academic study of the content of this work. It was not until around the First World War that German research began, under the impression of the reassessment of Plato's Politeia propagated primarily by authors from the George circle and representatives of the so-called Third Humanism , to deal more closely with the content of the text and then Cicero to discuss the state model conceived strictly hierarchically by Plato as groundbreaking for society and the state of the present. From a different perspective (emphasis on the rule of law), research continues to this day.

The Palimpsest of Archimedes

Page from the Palimpsest of Archimedes, the original writing becomes visible under X-ray fluorescence

Another example is the Archimedes Palimpsest , a recently rediscovered book by Archimedes , in which Archimedes possibly describes the fundamentals of modern integral calculus . Archimedes was able to calculate the center of gravity of a massive hemisphere and a truncated paraboloid . Above all, he was able to determine the area that arises when a parabola is intersected by one of its secants . Area calculations have been studied since ancient times. In the 5th century BC, Eudoxus of Knidos developed the exhaustion method , based on an idea by Antiphon , which consisted of filling a body with regular polygons . He was able to determine the areas as well as the volumes of some simple bodies. Archimedes improved this approach, and so he succeeded in precisely integrating a parabola - without using a limit value concept. He proved that the ratio of circumference to diameter of a circle is greater than the ratio of 6336 to 2017¼ but less than the ratio of 14688 to 4673½.

Konstantin von Tischendorf discovered this text in 1846 . Although he did not understand it at the time, he still rated it as important. In 1907 it was partially translated by the Danish philologist J. L. Heiberg . The book was forgotten as a result of the First World War , until it was bought at auction at Christie's in 1998 by an unknown collector for $ 2.2 million and given to the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. For more than ten years, a team of experts worked to make recognizable and to translate the drawings and characters that were headed by a Byzantine Euchologion in Palestine in the 13th century . At the beginning of August 2006, a group of scientists led by the physicist Uwe Bergmann succeeded in making the original text visible with X-rays.

This so-called Codex C is currently the only known source for the methodology , the Stomachion and the Greek version of About Swimming Bodies and was probably written in the late 10th century due to the minuscule script characteristic of this period .

Figurative meaning

The technique of palimpsesting has been used several times as a metaphor for intellectual and creative processes since the mid-19th century .

The English essayist Thomas De Quincey , in Suspiria de Profundis (1845), compares the human mind and especially memory with a palimpsest:

“What else than a natural and mighty palimpsest is the human brain? Such a palimpsest is my brain; such a palimpsest, O reader! is yours. Everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen upon your brain softly as light. Each succession has seemed to bury all that went before. And yet in reality not one has been extinguished. "

“What but a natural and powerful palimpsest is the human mind? Such a palimpsest is my mind; such a palimpsest, O reader! is yours. Everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings have fallen on your mind as gently as the light. Each sequence [of thoughts] apparently burned everything that was before. And yet not a single one was actually wiped out. "

- Lit .: De Quincey, 2003, p. 150

80 years later, Sigmund Freud developed a related model of human memory in his note on the 'wonder block' (1925). In a children's toy (the so-called miracle block ), which enables characters to be repeatedly written on and erased on a pressure-sensitive wax plate, with traces of all previous inscriptions remaining as invisible depressions, he sees the two essential conditions that human memory perform for him fulfilled must "Unlimited capacity and maintenance of permanent tracks" ( Ref : Freud, 1968, p 4).

Structuralists and post-structuralists have used the palimpsest as a figure of thought to describe textuality and the function of writing: For them, the palimpsest emphasizes that writing only exists in the existence of other things that have already been written. Palimpsests undermine the concept of the author as the only real source of a work, and thus place the meaning of a work at the end of an infinite chain of many meanings. In German studies, an occupation with the palimpsest began at the beginning of the 1990s. Since the turn of the millennium, the palimpsest has enjoyed a particular boom in various fields of literary and cultural studies. In addition to work on intertextuality theory, literary theory and memory / memory theory, the figure of thought was used a few years ago in post-colonial studies in German studies to discuss the critical relationship between (contemporary) texts and older, colonial pre-texts.

In the literary avant-garde , the palimpsest is a central artistic process alongside collage and montage . A volume of poetry by the Ukrainian poet Wassyl Stus is entitled Palimpsests .

In abstract expressionism , especially with the artist group CoBrA , the principle of reusing paper (e.g. also maps) is also summarized under the term “palimpsest”, especially in the works by Pierre Alechinsky and Asger Jorn . Quotation from Pierre Alechinsky: “I work on different painting grounds ... pages from old cash books, notarial files, old invoices, Russian prints, outdated flight tickets etc., which I rework according to the palimpsest principle, guided myself by reading the everyday worries of other times that are so similar to ours. "

The titles of the autobiography by the American writer Gore Vidal and a composition by Iannis Xenakis are also Palimpsest .

In medicine , palimpsest is understood to be alcohol-related amnesia (the so-called "film tear").

In the restoration of wall paintings , areas are known as palimpsests in which layers of plaster and paint have been preserved under an existing wall painting.

See also

literature

  • Pierre Alechinsky quoted from: Pierre Alechinsky: Margin and Center. Kunstverein, Hannover 1988, (exhibition catalog. Kunstverein Hannover, February 28 - April 17, 1988; German version of the catalog for the exhibition in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1987).
  • Nobert Altenhofer : cipher, hieroglyph, palimpsest. Preliminary forms of deep hermeneutic and intertextual interpretation in Heine's work. In: Nobert Altenhofer: Poetry as an interpretation. Writings on hermeneutics (= Frankfurt contributions to German studies. 26). Winter, Heidelberg 1993, ISBN 3-8253-0090-0 , pp. 213-261.
  • Aleida Assmann : On the metaphor of memory. In: Aleida Assmann, Dietrich Harth (Hrsg.): Mnemosyne (= Fischer-Taschenbücher. 10724, Fischer-Wissenschaft. ). Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1991, ISBN 3-596-10724-5 , pp. 18-22.
  • Horst Blanck : The book in antiquity. Beck, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-406-36686-4 .
  • Sarah Dillon: The Palimpsest. Literature, Criticism, Theory. Continuum, London et al. 2007, ISBN 978-0-8264-9545-7 .
  • Hanna Eglinger : The body as a palimpsest. The poetological dimension of the human body in contemporary Scandinavian literature (= Rombach Sciences. Nordica series. 14). Rombach, Freiburg (Breisgau) 2007, ISBN 978-3-7930-9507-1 (also: Munich, University, dissertation, 2006).
  • Ángel Escobar (Ed.): El palimpsesto grecolatino como fenómeno librario y textual. Instituciòn "Fernando el Católico", Zaragoza 2006, ISBN 84-7820-873-9 ; ( Digitized version (PDF; 2.96 MB) ).
  • Sigmund Freud: Note about the “wonder block”. In: Sigmund Freud: Collected works. Volume 14: Works from the years 1925–1931. 4th edition. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1968, pp. 1-8.
  • Gérard Genette : Palimpsestes. La Litterature au second degré. Seuil, Paris 1982, ISBN 2-02-006116-3 (Gerard Genette: Palimpseste. Second level literature (= Edition Suhrkamp . 1683 = New series 683). Translated from the French by Wolfram Bayer and Dieter Hornig. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1993, ISBN 3-518-11683-5 ).
  • Joachim Jacob, Pascal Nicklas : Introduction: The Palimpsest and its readings. In: Joachim Jacob, Pascal Nicklas (Ed.): Palimpseste. In memory of Norbert Altenhofer (= Frankfurt contributions to German studies. 41). Winter, Heidelberg 2004, ISBN 3-8253-1614-9 , pp. 7-30.
  • David Ramón Kerler: Postmodern Palimpsests. Studies on the (meta-) hermeneutic deep structure of intertextual narrative methods in contemporary novels (= text & theory. 12). Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2013, ISBN 978-3-8260-5115-9 (also: Augsburg, University, dissertation, 2011).
  • Elias Avery Lowe : Codices Rescripti: A List of the Oldest Latin Palimpsests with Stray Observations on their Origin. In: Elias Avery Lowe: Paleographical Papers. 1907-1965. Volume 2. Edited by Ludwig Bieler. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1972, ISBN 0-19-818220-1 , pp. 480-519, plates 114-119, (list of Latin palimpsests up to about 800).
  • Otto Mazal : Greco-Roman antiquity (= history of book culture. Vol. 1). Academic Printing and Publishing Company, Graz 1999, ISBN 3-201-01716-7 .
  • Thomas De Quincey : Suspiria de Profundis. In: Thomas De Quincey: Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Barry Milligan. Penguin, London 2003, ISBN 0-14-043901-3 , pp. 89-190.
  • Reviel Netz , William Noel: The Code of Archimedes. The most famous palimpsest in the world is deciphered. CH Beck, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-406-56336-2 .
  • Julian Osthues: Literature as a palimpsest. Postcolonial aesthetics in contemporary German-language novels (= interculturality. 12). transcript, Bielefeld 2017, ISBN 978-3-8376-3718-2 .
  • Tatjana Petzer: history as a palimpsest. Memory structures in the poetics of Danilo Kiš (= Pegishah. 6). Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main et al. 2008, ISBN 978-3-631-56200-0 (also: Halle-Wittenberg, University, dissertation, 2006).
  • Harald Weinrich : Writings on writings. Palimpsests in literature, art and science. In: Harald Weinrich: How civilized is the devil? Brief visits to good and bad. Beck, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-406-56460-4 , pp. 23-34.

Web links

Wiktionary: Palimpsest  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Cf. Catullus, carm. 22, 5; Cicero, epist. ad fam. 7, 18, 2.
  2. ^ Ferdinand Gregorovius, History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages , Volume I, p. 690. ISBN 3-406-07107-4
  3. ^ M. Cornelii Frontonis Opera inedita cum epistulis item ineditis Antonini Pii, M. Aurelii L. Veri et Appiani, nec non aliorum veterum fragmentis; M. Cornelii Frontonis et aliorum aliquot veterum opera et fragmenta inedita, Milan 1815.
  4. ^ Trium orationum pro Scauro, pro Tullio, pro Flacco partes ineditae cum antiquo scholiaste item inedito, Milan 1814; Trium orationum in Clodium et Curionem, de aere alieno Milonis, de rege Alexandrino fragmenta inedita, Milan 1814; M. Tullii Ciceronis sex orationum partes ante nostram aetatem ineditae cum antiquo interprete ante nostram item aetatem inedito qui videtur Asconius Pedianus ad Tullianas septem orationes, Milan 1817.
  5. ↑ Manuscript - Vat.lat.5757 . Vatican Library. Retrieved September 17, 2019.
  6. ^ Jacobus Willis (ed.), Ambrosii Theodosii Macrobii commentarii in somnium Scipionis (Bibliotheca Scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana). BSB BG Teubner Verlagsgesellschaft, Stuttgart 1970.
  7. ↑ See Konrat Ziegler (Ed.), M. Tulli Ciceronis scripta quae manserunt omnia, fasc. 39 De re publica. Teubner, 7th edition Leipzig 1969, pp. V-XXXIV; Tab. (With p. 222, p. 250 of the Palimpsest); Codices Latini Antiquiores . A palaeographical guide to Latin ms. prior to the 9th century, ed. by Elias Avery Lowe , Vol. 1, Oxford 1934, No. 35.
  8. ↑ Quaternio (der, Plural Quaterniones ) is the technical term for four-layer codices.
  9. ↑ A representation of the completely or partially preserved quaterniones can be found e.g. B. in the (Latin) foreword to the edition of the work by Konrat Ziegler in the Teubner Verlag.
  10. ↑ Cf. Theresa Orozco, Platonic violence. Gadamer's political hermeneutics of the Nazi era, Hamburg Berlin 1995, pp. 36–45.
  11. ^ William Noel, Reviel Netz: The Codex of Archimedes . Verlag CH Beck, Munich, 1st edition, 2007, p. 60.
  12. ^ JL Heiberg: A new Archimedes manuscript. In: Hermes 42, 1907, pp. 235-303.
  13. ^ NG Wilson: Archimedes: the palimpsest and the tradition. in: BZ 92/1, 1999, pp. 89-101.
  14. ↑ FAZ.net - Archimedes' writing: “Heureka” in San Francisco
  15. ↑ See Roland Kany : Palimpsest. Conjunctions of a noble metaphor. In: Concepts, metaphors and imaginations in philosophy and the history of science. Edited by Lutz Danneberg , Carlos Spoerhase , Dirk Werle . Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 2009, ISBN 978-3-447-05938-1 , pp. 177-203.
  16. ↑ Cf. Nobert Altenhofer: cipher, hieroglyph, palimpsest. Preliminary forms of deep hermeneutic and intertextual interpretation in Heine's work. In: Poetry as Interpretation. Hermeneutic writings. Ed. Ders. Heidelberg: Winter 1993, pp. 213-261
  17. ↑ See the research overview by Julian Osthues: Literature as a Palimpsest. Postcolonial Aesthetics in Contemporary German-Language Novels. Bielefeld: transcript 2017, pp. 21-25; Joachim Jacob / Pascal Nicklas: Introduction: The Palimpsest and its readings. In: Palimpsests. In memory of Norbert Altenhofer. Ed. This. Heidelberg: Winter 2004, pp. 7-30.
  18. ↑ Cf. David Ramon Kerler: Postmoderne Palimpseste: Studies on the (meta-) hermeneutical deep structure of intertextual narrative methods in contemporary novels. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann 2013.
  19. ↑ See Sarah Dillon: The Palimpsest. Literature, Criticism, Theory. London: continuum 2007; Hanna Eglinger: The body as a palimpsest. The poetological dimension of the human body in contemporary Scandinavian literature. Freiburg: Rombach 2007.
  20. ↑ Cf. Tatjana Petzer: History as a Palimpsest. Memory structures in the poetics of Danilo Kiš. Frankfurt a. M. (inter alia): Peter Lang 2008.
  21. ^ Julian Osthues: Literature as a palimpsest. Postcolonial Aesthetics in Contemporary German-Language Novels. Bielefeld: transcript 2017.
  22. ↑ Palimpsest. In: Angela Weyer et al. (Ed.): EwaGlos. European Illustrated Glossary Of Conservation Terms For Wall Paintings And Architectural Surfaces . English Definitions with translations into Bulgarian, Croatian, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Spanish and Turkish. Michael Imhof, Petersberg 2015, ISBN 978-3-7319-0260-7 , p. 108 , doi : 10.5165 / hawk-hhg / 233 ( download ).