In the ninth century, a scribe in Constantinople copied a famous textbook by the ancient scholar Archimedes, centuries later it was rewritten – a palimpsest was created. Now, 1,100 years later, a historian in France has rediscovered a lost version of this Archimedes palimpsest. The sheet shows – badly faded – a section of text from Archimedes’ work “On Spheres and Cylinders”.
Archimedes, born in Sicily around 287 BC, was one of the most important scholars of antiquity. We owe him fundamental mathematical principles, physical laws such as the lever law and Archimedean principle, but also practical technical inventions such as the Archimedean screw or focal lenses. Many of his works were copied again and again and were preserved in copies; others are only known through quotations by later scholars.
The prehistory: From Byzantium to the USA
The importance of Archimedes’ findings and works was also recognized around the year 500 by the architect and mathematician Isidore of Miletus, the builder of Hagia Sofia in Constantinople. He had the ancient scholar’s writings available at the time collected and copied. This collection was maintained and copied again and again in the following centuries. In the ninth century, Codex C was created, which included geometric teaching texts by Archimedes. But when Constantinople was burned and sacked during the Fourth Crusade in 1204, the Archimedes copies initially disappeared.
But Codex C was not destroyed; it reappeared a few decades later in Jerusalem and was recycled there: In order to be able to use the parchment, which was valuable at the time, for other texts, the writing was scraped off and overwritten with Christian texts. This palimpsest was then kept in the Greek Patriarchate in Jerusalem until modern times. It was only at the beginning of the 20th century that its true value was discovered. In 1906, all pages of the Archimedes palimpsest were photographed and thereby documented. The manuscript then changed location and owner several times until it came to the USA in the 1990s. But in this confusion three pages were lost.
Found in the Museum of Fine Arts
A French historian has now rediscovered one of these pages in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Blois. While examining manuscripts in this museum, Victor Gysembergh from the French research organization CNRS came across a page that contained another text with geometric illustrations running across it underneath the Greek text. When Gysembergh compared this faded text with photographs of the 1906 Archimedes palimpsest, he found a match. The comparison revealed that it was the lost sheet 123 of the Archimedes palimpsest.
The rediscovered page contains a section from the first book of Archimedes’ work “On Spheres and Cylinders” along with diagrams. The copy of this ancient textbook made in Constantinople is heavily faded but still legible. The back of this sheet is covered by a modern Christian illustration showing Daniel in the lions’ den, as Gysembergh reports. Now that the lost page has been recovered, Gysembergh plans to examine this hidden portion of Archimedes’ text using multispectral imaging and X-ray synchrotron analysis. These techniques could make the original text hidden beneath the illustration visible again.
Source: CNRS; Specialist article: Journal of Papyrology and Epigraphy, March 6, 2026