Archimedes in a prayer book

This genocide, which would never have happened without the war Christianity fought against the Greeks, ushered in an era of darkness in Greece and Europe while it was responsible for the catastrophic loss of most of the scientific, literary, artistic and philosophical works of ancient Greek thinkers and scholars. As a result, many of the works of Archimedes did not make it to our day.

Fortunately, the Greeks of New Rome or Byzantium, which included Greece, did not have an Inquisition. The campaigns of the church against the classics were severe but sporadic. The educated people of Byzantium considered themselves Greeks, so, despite paroxysms of clerical intolerance, they protected enough of the classical texts for the continuation of their culture.

Christian and Muslim enemies, however, surrounded Byzantium. Not only was Byzantium largely Greek in culture, but it was also wealthy and, in contrast to Rome and Western Europe that had been taken over by barbarians, Byzantium had kept the barbarians at bay - until 1204.

During that year, 1204, Christian armies from Western Europe sacked Constantinople, burning and looting the city with the ferocity of barbarians.

The surviving ancient Greek culture in Constantinople took a devastating blow from the European crusaders. It never recovered. Perhaps, the plunder and occupation of Constantinople by Christian Europeans who hated Christian Greeks led to the export of Greek books to other “safe” heavens.

Putting Archimedes in a tomb

One such ancient Greek book was that containing “The Method”, “The Floating Bodies” and “The Stomachion” of Archimedes, which ended up in the library of a Greek monastery in Jerusalem. Yet, the fate of Archimedes’ book, copied in 975 in Constantinople, was almost worse than death.

In 1229, monks ripped the Archimedes book and other ancient Greek books apart, folding their large vellum folios to create an Euchologion or prayer book. The monks used orange juice to delete the original writing on the vellum or scraped off the ancient Greek text with a knife and then used the “clean” folios for writing their hymns and prayers, thus manufacturing a cultural nightmare, which, in Greek, palimpsest, captures this cultural disaster: creating a book by the violence of rubbing or scraping off again the original writing. In this case, a prayer book palimpsest came into being in 1229 after its clerical publishers trashed the wisdom of Archimedes and other Greeks.

Next, after centuries of quiet existence as a prayer book, the Archimedes palimpsest ends up in a monastery in Constantinople. In 1906, the Danish philologist Johan Ludvig Heiberg put the prayer book under a magnifying glass. He transcribed as much of the Archimedes text as he could. His study was of inestimable value, especially for any future decipherment of the palimpsest text.

The plunder of the buried Archimedes

We don’t know what happened to the Archimedes palimpsest after Heiberg studied it in 1906 and published his findings in the 1910s. World War I, 1914-1918, and the war between Greece and Turkey in the early 1920s provided the perfect excuse for the continued indifference of the scholarly community for Archimedes and the horrendous treatment of the palimpsest at the hands of its “owners”.

According to Reviel Netz, classics professor at Stanford University, and William Noel, curator of manuscripts at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, the worst damage to the Archimedes palimpsest occurred during the 20th century.

In the 1920s, dealers of antiquities bought or stole the palimpsest from the monks of the Metochion monastery in Constantinople. The “owner” of the palimpsest brought the book to France and sold it to a Frenchman who passed it to his daughter who, in 1998, sold it to an anonymous American (Mr. B) for $ 2 million.

Noel had the admirable insight of convincing this wealthy man to let the Walters Art Museum exhibit the palimpsest and, above all, use the latest imaging technologies to read the Archimedes text lying under the Christian prayers.