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At a Christie’s Auction in October 1998, a battered medieval manuscript sold for two million dollars to an anonymous bidder, who then turned it over to the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore for further study. The manuscript was a palimpsest -- a book made from an earlier codex whose script had been scraped off and the pages used again. Behind the script of the thirteenth-century monk’s prayer book, the palimpsest revealed the faint writing of a much older tenth-century manuscript.
Part archaeological detective story, part science, and part history, The Archimedes Codex tells the remarkable story of this lost manuscript, from its creation in Constantinople to its sale on the auction block at Christie’s, and how a team of scholars used the latest imaging technology to reveal and decipher the original text. What they found was the earliest surviving manuscript by Archimedes (287 BC – 212 BC), the greatest mathematician of antiquity -- a manuscript that revealed, for the first time, the full range of his mathematical genius, which was two thousand years ahead of modern science.
Reviel Netz, Professor of Classics and Philosophy at Stanford University, specializes in ancient science.
William Noel is Curator of Manuscripts at the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, and Director of the Archimedes Palimpsest Project.
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