The languages of the dying suns 

are themselves dying, 

but even the word for this has been forgotten […]

Translation was never possible. 

Instead there was always only 

conquest […]

the one language that has eaten all others.

— Marsh Languages, Margaret Atwood

In an auction house on the 29th of October 1998, a codex is set to be sold at Christie’s in New York. 

The listing reads as follows: 

At the time of auction, the ideas contained in the codex had survived over 2,200 years. Seven manuscripts detailing Archimedes’s works remain inside. Two treatises, The Stomachion and The Method, exist nowhere else but within the book. 

Five minutes into bidding, Archimedes’ lost codex is sold to an anonymous collector for 2.2 million USD. 

Part 1: The Auction 

The original codex was a transcription of Archimedes’ surviving manuscripts by a Byzantine scholar in the late 10th century. It was presumed to be held in the Imperial Library of Constantinople.

In 1204 AD, the manuscripts were relocated for the first time: raids by the Fourth Crusade caused the codex to be removed from Constantinople and relocated within Mar Saba, a monastery in a desert southeast of Jerusalem. By 1229, the seven manuscripts were rebound into a prayerbook, a process that involved tearing out the leaflets of the codex and writing over the original text with scripture. An abstract mathematical text held enough value for transcription in 10th-century Constantinople. But by the 13th century in Jerusalem, when parchment was rare, and leather binding was expensive, prayer took precedence. Archimedes’s great treatise was palimpsested—overwritten. The codex remained at Mar Saba for at least the next 400 years. 

By 1846, the manuscripts were acquired by the Metochion, or Daughter House, of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The Metochion of the Holy Sepulchre is in the Greek quarter of Constantinople, now Istanbul. How the present manuscript was transferred from northeastern Jerusalem to Constantinople is unknown. In 1899, the library of the Metochion was catalogued by Greek scholar Papadopoulos-Karameus. This catalogue drew the attention of Danish Classicist Johan Heiburg, who visited Constantinople in 1906 and managed to decipher four-fifths of the book. Heiberg examined the manuscripts again in 1908 and photographed the codex.

Following Heiburg’s investigation, the immediate movements of the palimpsest remain in obscurity. What can be said for sure is this: at some point in the 1930s, the manuscript found its way into the hands of French businessman Marie Louis Sirieix and remained under the care of his family until its purchase in 1998. Sirieix left the palimpsest to his daughter Anne Guersan in 1947. By 1998, the codex had deteriorated from decades of improper storage. In this diminished state, almost a thousand years after its initial transcription in the Byzantine Empire, the Archimedes Palimpsest entered the hands of its current owner. 

The codex that was auctioned is three leaves short of Heiberg’s initial count. The parchment leaves of the present manuscript are almost entirely palimpsest. 

Part 2: The Archimedes Palimpsest

The word palimpsest refers to a document scraped down and layered over with newer content. Often, the overwritten text becomes visible, revealed through the passage of time and chance. Herein begins a cyclical process of formation and reformation, wherein crafters and artisans, priests and scientists encounter the manuscripts and alter them to fulfil their myriad purposes. Cultural artefacts are stripped and then remade in line with the values of each successive society. The history of the Archimedes Palimpsest suggests several such acts of imposition. 

First, the ancient Archimedes treatise was transcribed, copied by a 10th-century scribe in its original Greek onto parchment and bound. The original manuscripts were most likely copied in Constantinople. Everything we know of Archimedes exists in three books. Like all of Archimedes’ surviving work, the codex is not a simultaneous reproduction of his writings. It is a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, surviving because a scribe in Constantinople saw value in Archimedes’ ideas and chose to transcribe them. As such, the codex, even in its original form, is an imperfect replication. We do not know what liberties the scribe took in their reproduction. What sentences or ideas were forgone because they took too much time to write or were not deemed valuable for the year or the century? 

Second, there is the geographical imprint left on the codex. Like any archaeological artefact, the palimpsest has undergone many changes over its nearly thousand-year lifespan. Take a cross-section of the manuscripts, and you’ll uncover traces of something ancient, the past emerging as fragments that lend themselves to our contemporary interpretations. In the case of the palimpsest, form and meaning interact: mathematical script in a Byzantine style is hidden beneath superimposed religious text contained in a book rebound sometime in the 18th century. The codex can be ‘read’ to reveal its history by looking within for symbols and meanings of the past. This, in turn, unveils a periodic exchange of conquest and submission over hundreds of years; as the manuscripts enter the control of each new owner, they are subjected to the epistemological demands of that entity and made to conform. By examining each changing iteration of the codex, we notice how the book increasingly diverges from the original text to reflect its contemporary environs. 

Shortly after its acquisition in 1998, the manuscripts were loaned to The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore and spent the next decade in a lengthy conservation process. The owner of the Archimedes Palimpsest funds the restoration campaign. The project’s goal is: “to digitally recreate the Archimedes Manuscript of the tenth century as closely as possible, as it was before it was palimpsested around the year 1200”. As a result of the Archimedes Project, you can find a fully digitised scan of the original Archimedes Palimpsest on Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library. Over two thousand years of unstable transit, the manuscripts have been digitised and are accessible to anybody curious enough to look. 

Part 3: Survival

That a copy of Archimedes’ treatise exists today, and a readable one no less, is the result of two thousand years of sheer luck. For every text like the Archimedes Palimpsest, many more were lost to war, decay, and indifference. Its survival is an anomaly. At every stage of transit or relocation, there is an alternate world in which the palimpsest perishes and is lost to history. The codex was held in The Imperial Library of Constantinople, which was decimated slowly through a series of sackings and fires. No considerable part of the library’s catalogue has ever been recovered, and as such, the majority of books housed alongside the codex have perished. Even into the 20th century, water damage almost rendered the palimpsest entirely unreadable. 

Without the work of conservators and restorationists, books like Archimedes’ codex would be lost. When the predominant culture does not place value on an abstract mathematical treatise, these works fade into obscurity. The knowledge that endures is often only a reflection of whether the survival of a text is worth the cost of its preservation.