Archimedes Palimpsest     

The original manuscript was copied onto pages of parchment (treated animal skin) from an earlier manuscript that may have been a papyrus scroll -- the parchment manuscript is formatted in columns as a scroll would have been. The leaves of the original Archimedes codex were approximately the size of a sheet of standard notebook paper. The pages were bound into a book and kept in a library in Constantinople (now Istanbul).  In those days, parchment writing materials were so valuable that they were commonly reused when the book was considered "out of date" or if the subject was judged inappropriate or less valuable.

The book was disbound and erased in the 12th century, probably after Constantinople was sacked in April 1204 during the Fourth Crusade. The pages were erased by scraping the ink off with a solvent (perhaps orange juice), cut in half down the center, and rebound as a smaller book. The pages were overwritten with the text of a Christian prayer book, the Euchologion. Such overwritten manuscripts are called palimpsests, from the Greek word palimpsesto ("scraped again").  From the image of the colophon of the Euchologion made during this project, we have found that the prayer book was dedicated on April 13, 1229.

The book spent the next 700 years at various religious shrines in the holy land. Its existence first became known to western civilization in the middle 1800s when its existence was recognized by Constantin von Tischendorf, who is better known for discovering the Codex Sinaiticus (a Greek manuscript of the Bible) at Saint Catherine's monastery on Mount Sinai. The Archimedes Palimpsest was studied extensively by Johan Ludvig Heiberg in 1906. The book then disappeared again and was feared lost until it resurfaced in the late 1990s. It was sold at auction by Christies in 1998 to an anonymous American collector, who has made the book available for study. An international team of scholars, conservators, and imaging scientists is currently studying the palimpsest to recover the original writing.

The investigation and significance of the Archimedes Palimpsest is the subject of the program "Infinite Secrets" broadcast by PBS on NOVA on 30 September 2003. A low-resolution copy of the program is available on Google video.

The work was selected as one of the imaging "Solutions of the Year" by Advanced Imaging Magazine in January, 2003.

So far, we have successfully extracted approximately 80% of the text using multispectral imaging, which combines images taken under a variety of conditions and at different wavelengths. We also are using more exotic techniques to try to read the remaining text, including x-ray fluorescence imaging at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory. Some photos of the process at SSRL are shown below.

A book by the Project Director, Dr. William Noel of the Walters Art Museum, and one of the scholars documenting the text, Dr. Reviel Netz of Stanford University, on the history of the Archimedes Palimpsest and the efforts made to read the text is expected to be published in 2007.

Additional information is available at the Archimedes Palimpsest website, the cover story in the London Sunday Times Magazine of 17 June 2001, the cover story in Physics Today, of June 2000, and in an ABC News Report on 20 October 2000. Will Noel, Mike Toth, and I presented a talk at the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA, on 7 March 2006 that is available on Google video.

Diane Kucharczyk, formerly an undergraduate student at the Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science, and Russell Knox, then a student at Brighton High School, NY, developed a K-12 classroom activity based on the work to extract text from the Archimedes Palimpsest. This is available as an HTML Powerpoint file.

The Stomachion   
This treatise in the Archimedes Palimpsest had been thought to describe a game similar to "Tangrams". Reviel Netz of Stanford University has suggested that the Stomachion really is about geometrical "combinatorics", which is the study of the number of combinations of shapes that produces a specific result. This work was reported in a cover story in the New York Times of December 14, 2003.

X-Ray Fluorescence Imaging at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lab (SSRL)

Uwe Bergmann of the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (SSRL), which is part of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), is leading the effort to image the most difficult and important pages of the Archimedes palimpsest using X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF). A page of the palimpsest is raster scanned through the X-ray beam. The X rays are "scattered" by atoms in the palimpsest; the incident X ray ionizes an inner shell electron from the atom and another electron drops into the resulting "hole" while releasing another lower-energy X-ray photon.  The energy of the emitted photon is characteristic of the ionized atom. In this way, a map of the constituent materials in the palimpsest may be constructed. The results obtained thus far have been very encouraging, allowing much previously unreadable text on the first folio to be read.

Two imaging sessions have been held at SSRL-SLAC and two more are planned. In the session in March 2006, the name of the scribe who copied the Euchologion was read. The imaging run is rather intense, because the system is running 24/7 for nearly two weeks. By the end, we were rather beat (see photo of Mike Toth at end of the "death march," below)

Example of XRF imaging of a stub of an Archimedes leaf (click for larger image). The visible and pseudocolor images of the verso side show no text at all, but writings from BOTH sides of the page are visible in the the XRF image. There is a fragment of a diagram on the verso side (shown in white) and characters on the recto side (shown in cyan).

A few photos from the session of March 2006 are shown below. Click on each thumbnail to view a larger image.

  Entering SSRL; note the bright blue sky in March (this certainly isn't Rochester!)

  Pre-run conference at the SLAC Guest House: with Mike Toth and Will Noel (Photo by Bob Morton)

  with Uwe Bergmann in SSRL hutch 6-2.

  During the run: Uwe Bergmann, Abigail Quandt, Jennifer Giaccai, myself (what happened to my hair?), and Michael Toth

  Contrary to the apparently incriminating evidence, I am NOT using scissors to trim the edge of folio 021 of the Archimedes palimpsest; this was a test object to check beam and system alignment. Standing behind (L to R) are Will Noel, Mike Toth, and  Reviel Netz, Professor of Classics at Stanford University.

  Abigail in the hutch with folio 081, showing the forgery that was painted on this page (and 3 other existing pages, plus possibly 3 missing pages) after 1938.

 

  The members of the imaging team in front of hutch 6-2 at SSRL: (left to right) myself (RIT), Abigail Quandt WAM), Will Noel (WAM), Keith Knox (Boeing), Mike Toth (R.B. Toth Assoc.), Bob Morton (ConocoPhillips), Uwe Bergmann (SLAC), and Jennifer Giaccai (WAM).

  Mike Toth seems to be finishing a death march; actually he is adjusting the position of the table relative to the X-ray beam.

  On the last night of the run, Will Noel uses a champagne cork at the celebratory dinner to illustrate Archimedes' most famous achievement, as presented in "On Floating Bodies."

Temple Scroll:
The Temple Scroll was discovered in 1947 in Cave 11 near Qumran. It is the longest of the Dead Sea Scrolls -- originally 28' long in 67 columns. We processed color transparencies of images taken by Bruce and Ken Zuckerman. We projected the 3-D color data at each pixel (i.e., the RGB gray values) to an opponent color space (luminance, red-green, and blue-yellow) From these images, we have been able to distinguish 18 characters that had not been recognized previously by Biblical scholars.Our efforts to clarify the so-called Temple Scroll were reported in an article "Imaging the Dead Sea Scrolls" in Optics and Photonics News, 8(8), pp. 30-34, August 1997.  This article was awarded the Archie Mahan Prize for the best paper published in in OPN that year.

Khaboris Codex: 

The Khaboris Codex is the oldest known copy of the New Testament written in the original Aramaic, dating from the 10th century. We worked with Michael Ryce to image the manuscript and develop a public website where the images would be available for scholarly study. A webpage with the pages of the manuscript is available at http://www.cis.rit.edu/~rlepci/khaboris.html.

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We have collaborated with Evelyn Cohen from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America to reveal the writing on the Colophon (which is a page of dedication from the scribe to the patron) of a Hebrew Siddur copied in Florence, Italy. Evelyn published a paper on the significance of this work, Gallico's Identity Exposed: Revealing an Erased Colophon from a Renaissance Prayer Book, Ars Judaica, pp. 85-90, 2005.

A short summary of this work is available as a PDF document.

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