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| Will Noel, a Walters Art Museum curator in Baltimore, handled its restoration, and co-wrote a book about the Archimedes Palimpsest. courtesy of the Walters Art Museum |
The Archimedes Codex unpeeled by modern technological sleuthing
Deciphering latent script on ancient parchment makes curator Will Noel's job an Indiana Jones-style adventure
By Richard O'Mara | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the April 15, 2008 edition
Page 1 of 3
Baltimore, Md. - This is about an ancient book called The Archimedes Codex, bought for $2.2 million in October, 1998, at an auction in New York City by an anonymous collector who sent it to the Walters Art Museum, here to be restored, conserved, and probed for its content. It was thought to contain mathematical theses conceived by the genius of Syracuse (287-212 BC), whose name it bears, ideas not found anywhere else in the world.
The Walters faced a daunting task: what arrived was a clump of folios, crushed, torn, punctured by worm holes, in the inflexible grip of old carpenter's glue, charred at its edges, and covered with mold and water stains.
It's a miracle it still exists.
It took four years just to remove the glue, and open the book sufficiently to allow experts on ancient Greek texts to access much of its content and, with the help of ultra sophisticated imaging systems, to read it.
"It was an extraordinary adventure to read the thoughts of a guy who lived over 2,000 years ago," says Will Noel, the young curator of ancient books at the Walters and leader of the nine-year restoration effort. Mr. Noel – tall, thin, buoyant, and bespectacled in a Harry Potterish way – adds: "In the field of old books nothing gets more romantic than that."
The Archimedes texts were copied in the 10th century by an unknown scribe in Constantinople, then a major center of the Christian world eventually to become a center of the Islamic world. Three centuries later, another scribe washed, scraped, and otherwise tried to remove the text from the book's parchment. This person undid the book, rebound it in the opposite direction, then, on the imperfectly cleared pages, wrote his Christian prayers in Greek over the original text, which was also in Greek, and still discernible in a faint rust-colored thread running beneath. This procedure was common in medieval times: Parchment was scarce. Thus, the Archimedes Codex became a palimpsest, a twice-used book.
The findings gleaned from it have raised Archimedes's status as a thinker higher than anyone might have expected. Noel describes him as "the most important scientist who ever lived."
Most significant among the discoveries was the knowledge that "Archimedes was the first to calculate with actual infinity in the mathematics of the West." That is to say, he was operating at an intellectual level that didn't become common in the mathematical world until the 17th century, nearly 2,000 years after his time. The Archimedean texts, Noel writes, make the mathematics of Leonardo da Vinci "look like child's play."
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