Researchers have discovered a long-lost page from a treatise by Ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes in the archives of a French museum.
The document was found among the archives of an art museum in Blois, central France.
Victor Gysembergh, the researcher at France's National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) who tracked down the missing page, told French news agency AFP it was a "treasure trove of lost texts from antiquity".
As well as Archimedes's mathematical breakthroughs, the manuscript contains his "philosophical, literary and religious" writings, Gysembergh said.
Archimedes, considered one of history's greatest mathematicians and inventors, lived in the third century BC in the city of Syracuse in Sicily. Among his many discoveries was the principle of buoyancy, which he struck upon while stepping out of a bath – famously prompting him to shout "Eureka!"
Many of his treatises survived the centuries on palimpsests – handwritten parchments that have had their original text scraped off before being written over, sometimes multiple times.
The rediscovered page was not written by Archimedes himself but was instead copied during the 900s AD. Around two centuries later, the text was erased and re-used as a Christian prayer book.
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It was just the beginning of the journey for this unique manuscript, which was preserved first in Jerusalem and then Constantinople, today's Istanbul.
In 1906, Danish historian Johan Ludvig Heiberg found the manuscript in a library there and took photographs of every page.
However, at some point during World War I, the document vanished without a trace.
It wound up in the private collection of a French family, which eventually put it up for auction in the 1990s. It was purchased by an anonymous businessman.
Sources quoted by Germany's Der Spiegel newspaper claimed the buyer was Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, although those reports are unconfirmed.
Today the manuscript is housed at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, in the United States.
But compared to Heiberg's photographic record, three of its 177 pages have disappeared.
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Discovered through a joke
"I am interested in palimpsests because they are a way to discover lost texts," said Gysembergh, who described his find in an article for a German journal published this week.
Sometimes the researcher searches for palimpsests in the libraries of different cities for fun. The lost Archimedes's page was discovered "due in part to a joke", he said.
One day he was chatting with his office colleagues, when he mentioned that the old kings of France had kept part of their library in the city of Blois.
"Hey, let's see if there's a palimpsest in Blois," he recalled telling his colleagues.
To his surprise, Gysembergh hit on an online catalogue of digitised manuscripts in the city's museum of fine art.
"It was very unexpected to stumble upon a Greek manuscript," he said. "And even more so to find a 10th-century scientific treatise!"
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Hope for other lost texts
The researcher then compared the pages to the photos of Archimedes's palimpsest taken in 1906. The handwriting, the diagrams and even the errors all matched perfectly, he said.
The newly discovered section is page 123 of the manuscript, on one side showing geometric diagrams and a passage from On the Sphere and the Cylinder, the treatise in which Archimedes describes how to calculate the surface area and volume of shapes.
On the other side is a newer drawing, which is thought to have been added in the 1900s in an attempt to increase the document's value.
To decipher the text below the drawing, Gysembergh hopes to carry out high-tech analysis including multispectral imaging in the coming year.
He also hopes that this breakthrough will help find the other two missing pages of the palimpsest.
"Until this discovery, we had no reason to hope we would ever find them," he said.
"Now, if institutions or private collectors have this kind of manuscript, they should think about whether it could be one of the other lost pages."
(with AFP)
