Missing Page of Archimedes Manuscript Found in France, Shedding Light on Century-Long Mystery

A page missing from The Archimedes Palimpsest, the oldest extant copy of writings by the ancient Greek mathematician, was rediscovered at the Museum of Fine Arts in Blois, France. One side of the page, which had been missing for 120 years, contains part of Archimedes’s treatise On the Sphere and the Cylinder, while the other was covered over with an illumination sometime in the 20th century.

The Palimpsest dates back to the 10th century in Greece and features several written works by Archimedes, parts of which were erased in the Middle Ages so as to reuse the parchment for other material. “This practice of recycling was common at the time for such animal-skin writing materials, which were extremely costly,” according to the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), one of whose researchers made the rediscovery.

As noted in a story about the news in Scientific American, “Archimedes lived around 250 B.C.E. in Syracuse in ancient Greece and was among the world’s greatest thinkers, responsible for theories, experiments and inventions about math, physics and engineering that still intrigue scientists today. (Legend has it that Archimedes died doing math—at the hands of a Roman soldier while making a calculation in the sand—though this has never been confirmed.)”

As for the missing page, it had been unaccounted for since sometime after a historian photographed the tome in 1906. The Archimedes Palimpsest is currently housed at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, where it was the focus of an exhibition in 2011. At the time, the museum noted that the manuscript had been purchased by an anonymous buyer for $2 million at Christie’s in 1998—in a lot “considered by many to be the most important scientific manuscript ever sold at auction.”

In the early 2000s, research into The Archimedes Palimpsest using multispectral imaging made it possible to discern texts by Archimedes as well as other literary and philosophical texts. According to the CNRS, the researcher who rediscovered the missing page hopes to use a similar multispectral approach combined with “synchrotron-based X-ray fluorescence analyses” in an attempt to reveal the text of the recovered material.

In a press release, CNRS said, “This discovery sparks renewed interest in re-examining the complete Archimedes Palimpsest using more powerful techniques than those employed in the early 2000s, with a view to undertaking a new reading of the pages that remained illegible during the initial campaign.”