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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
from the April 15, 2008 edition
Page 2 of 3
"The method," the thesis of premier importance, writes Noel, "survives in the Palimpsest alone ... the Palimpsest is the only physical object in the universe to bear witness to this achievement of Archimedes."
Also found in the palimpsest, and there only, was an Archimedes treatise about an ancient game involving 14 flat pieces of various shapes that fit into a square in an uncountable number of combinations. This game, the Stomachion, possibly invented by Archimedes, reveals the beginnings of the science of combinatorics, which eventually evolved into the science of probability. Noel also regards the treatise on the Stomachion as "a major discovery."
Everyone knows Archimedes was ahead of his time. How far, no one could've imagined. He devised the mathematics for locating the center of gravity of plane figures, like triangles, then in more complicated three-dimensional shapes. He discovered the law of balance: two objects are placed on a plane, one weighing 10 pounds is placed one foot to the right of the fulcrum; the other object, weighing 2 pounds, is placed five feet to the left of the fulcrum. They balance. Why? Because their distances from the fulcrum are reciprocal to the differences in their weight, 5 to 1.
He discovered the law of the lever, based on the same principle, and allegedly boasted that with a lever long enough and a place to stand he could move the earth. No one ever proved him wrong. His mathematics had practical purposes: Engineers have been using Archimedean principles since time immemorial.
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Recently a new book came out, also named The Archimedes Codex. It's a history of the palimpsest and a narration of the work done on it so far, written by Noel, and Reviel Netz, of Stanford University, among the many scholars, technicians, and curators who helped rescue the codex.
The new book recounts how the old book survived wars, floods, fires, and who knows what other cataclysms its thousand years of history exposed it to. It also describes the abuse and mutilation it suffered, mostly during modern times, sometimes for benign but wrong-headed purposes, like the glue; other times for nefarious reasons, like the four forged images of ancient scribes, painted in gold over the Archimedean text within the past 70 years in an attempt to lure buyers.
The codex dodged extinction, abiding in safe collections or languishing in parlous circumstances. In fact, Noel, and film maker John Dean traced its fateful itinerary. They started where the ideas contained in it were conceived, Syracuse, Archimedes's home in Sicily. From there they went to Istanbul (Constantinople), where Archimedes's thoughts were transcribed, certainly not for the first time. They went to St. Sabas Monastery in the Judean Desert, where the codex was kept for 300 years and where 60 folios – a third of its content – disappeared.
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