19

Oct. '11

thebygone:

Finding Archimedes in the Shadows

Now here’s a cool story.

This is a 10th-century prayer book. It is beautiful and precious, as all old books are, and its long and torrid history involved freedom fighters and anonymous millionaire benefactors and Nazis and ancient monasteries.

But this prayer book has a secret.

The pages it is written on are recycled pages…from Archimedes’ third-century BCE writings.

Using special lighting and optics, a team has spent twelve years studying every page of this book, searching for the ancient writings beneath the obvious words. There is a whole other story under the words of this codex. I’m so glad that somebody found them.

[Re: The lack of gloves in the first picture]

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    Something about this story is so beautiful. Secrets and discovery and something else. The hidden being found. The lost...
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