The Archimedes Palimpsest

Book excerpt: The Archimedes Palimpsest is the name given to a Byzantine prayer-book which was written over a number of earlier manuscripts. This volume provides colour images and transcriptions of three of the texts recovered from it. Pride of place goes to the treatises of Archimedes, including the only Greek version of Floating Bodies, and the unique copies of Method and Stomachion. This transcription provides many different readings from those made by Heiberg from what he termed Codex C in his edition of the works of Archimedes of 1910-1915. Secondly, fragments of two previously unattested speeches by the Athenian orator Hyperides, which are the only Hyperides texts ever to have been found in a codex. Thirdly, a fragment from an otherwise unknown commentary on Aristotle's Categories. In each case advanced image-processing techniques have been used to create the images, in order to make the text underneath legible.