In a discussion about Pythagoras and the Hagia Sophia architecture I also mentioned the Sicilian Greek Archimedes whose murder was regarded as the end of Greek science in the Roman world. Maybe some might be interested in the discovery of 1998. An Archimedes palimpsest with unknown writings hidden under the surface of a 13th-century euchologion. Read more about it on the project's homepage:
http://archimedespalimpsest.org/
Reproductions made over the years can be downloaded here:
http://www.archimedespalimpsest.net/
Viewers
:1 X • Constantinople, a copy of Archimedes' treatises made by the school of Leo the Geometer (the pages are foliated according to the reconstructed composition of this manuscript, for instance "Arch53v" as the first page),
:2 another Anthology with speeches by Hypereides (Hype03r),
:3 Alexander of Aphrodisias: Commentary on Aristotle's Categories (Alex),
:4 Menaion (Mena), Life of St. Pantaleon (Pant), unidentified texts (UnkA/B)
:P 1229 • The palimpsests of the euchologion were created during the first half of the 13th century at Mar Saba, while the Court and the Patriarchat were in the exile of Nikaia.
About the forged illuminations made during the 20th century see the film Archimedes' lost book.
http://www.digitalpalimpsest.org/
Only the prayer book window is working. Please switch the colour off to read the Archimedes layer in red letters.
https://archive.org/details/TheArchimedesPalimpsest
The project
The subject of this website is a manuscript of extraordinary importance to the history of science, the Archimedes Palimpsest. This thirteenth century prayer book contains erased texts that were written several centuries earlier still. These erased texts include two treatises by Archimedes that can be found nowhere else, The Method and Stomachion. The manuscript sold at auction to a private collector on the 29th October 1998. The owner deposited the manuscript at The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, a few months later. Since that date the manuscript has been the subject of conservation, imaging and scholarship, in order to better read the texts. The Archimedes Palimpsest project, as it is called, has shed new light on Archimedes and revealed new texts from the ancient world. These new texts include speeches by an Athenian orator from the fourth century B.C. called Hyperides, and a third century A.D. commentary on Aristotle’s Categories.
The manuscript
The Archimedes Palimpsest is a medieval parchment manuscript, now consisting of 174 parchment folios. While it contains no less than seven treatises by Archimedes, calling it the Archimedes Palimpsest is a little confusing. As it is now, the manuscript is a Byzantine prayerbook, written in Greek, and technically called a euchologion. This euchologion was completed by April 1229, and was probably made in Jerusalem.
Firstly, and most importantly, they used a book containing at least seven treatises by Archimedes. These treatises are The Equilibrium of Planes, Spiral Lines, The Measurement of the Circle, Sphere and Cylinder, On Floating Bodies, The Method of Mechanical Theorems, and the Stomachion. Of these treatises, the last three are of the greatest significance to our understanding of Archimedes. While the other treatises had survived through other manuscripts, there is no other surviving copy of On Floating Bodies in Greek—the language in which Archimedes wrote, and there is no version in any language of The Method of Mechanical Theorems and of the Stomachion. The Archimedes manuscript was used for the majority of the pages of the prayer book. The Archimedes manuscript was written in the second half of the tenth century, almost certainly in Constantinople.
Replies
Here a description of the 13th-century euchologion by Santo Lucà: