The Scholarship of the Palimpsest

The Archimedes Palimpsest: A Progress Report
by Nigel Wilson of Lincoln College Oxford

There are more abbreviations than was customary in most manuscripts of ancient texts written at that period. However, it should be noted that the contemporary scribe of a fragment of Anthemius preserved in MS Vaticanus gr. 218, folios 1-2, uses even more, and perhaps one should infer that books written for experts in specialised subjects had a tendency to greater use of compendia. Among the rare compendia in the Archimedes one may note that the word for parallel is represented by the sign = accompanied by the appropriate sign for the required grammatical inflexion. The word logos is occasionally abbreviated in an unexpected way; one might expect a lambda surmounted by an omicron, but the position of the two letters is reversed.15 The word meizon can also occasionally be represented by a large mu similar to a majuscule with a horizontal stroke above and a curved line descending from the centre of the middle stroke (folio 125 recto, column 1, line 3 from the bottom, and again a few lines later at folio 132 verso, line 1). It may be worth noting that the diacritic used to accompany a numeral indicating a fraction looks like a circumflex accent (delta is so found on folio 158 recto, column 1, line 9, and eta at folio 159 verso, column 2, line 7). A correction of the word order is also undertaken in an unusual way on folio 161 verso, column 2. The scribe at first wrote ouk estin ara and then realised that the correct order was ouk ara estin. Instead of writing beta and alpha above the words in question to indicate the true order he wrote two strokes at an angle of forty-five degrees above the line between ouk and estin followed by one above ara. Then in the margin he wrote what seem to be three such strokes at the same angle.

The current project is a collaborative effort. It is directed by William Noel of the Walters Art Museum, and managed by Michael B. Toth of R.B. Toth Associates. The texts are being studied by the present writer, Dr Reviel Netz of Stanford University, and Dr Natalie Tchernetska of Trinity College, Cambridge. The images are the product of new techniques developed by Dr R. Easton and Dr K. Knox of the Rochester Institute of Technology, and Dr W. Christens-Barry of Johns Hopkins University. There is reason to hope that the techniques are capable of still further improvement. The conservation of the badly damaged parchment leaves is directed by Dr Abigail Quandt of the Walters Art Museum, and the need to take every precaution means that the process is slow.

One unexpected moment in the history of the project was the recovery of the photos Heiberg had ordered in Istanbul. They were found in the Royal Library in Copenhagen, where they had been separated from other papers relating to Heiberg. Since the palimpsest has suffered a good deal since his examination of it they are of value, especially as digital reproduction of them has proved highly successful. Unfortunately they were never a complete set. But they can help us in one important particular: at some point the prayer-book was tampered with in a very strange way, by the addition of four portraits of the evangelists in Byzantine style, which were painted over the Archimedes text. Since the book contained liturgical texts and not the Gospels, the attempt to embellish the book, as one must suppose it to have been, can only be described as bizarre. When the pictures were added remains obscure; Dr Quandt kindly informs me that she has detected in them a pigment not available until 1939.

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15 What Heiberg, III p.lxxxv, says about abbreviations does not give the full picture, but later in the same volume he adds some more data at p.89 n.1.