April 26, 2007
Stranger than fiction
This is like something out of a summer day's potboiler beach reading.
Experts are "lost for words" to have found that a medieval prayer book has yielded yet another key ancient text buried within its parchment.
Works by mathematician Archimedes and the politician Hyperides had already been found buried within the book, known as the Archimedes Palimpsest.
But now advanced imaging technology has revealed a third text - a commentary on the philosopher Aristotle.
[...]
The prayer book was written in the 13th Century by a scribe called John Myronas.
But instead of using fresh parchment for his work, he employed pages from five existing books.
[...]
In 1906 it came to light that one of the books recycled to form the medieval manuscript contained a unique work by Archimedes.
And in 2002, modern imaging technology not only provided a clearer view of this famous mathematician's words, but it also revealed another text - the only known manuscript of Hyperides, an Athenian politician from the 4th Century BC.
So, more than 100 years after scholars thought they had found all that was hidden in the manuscript, another lost work, more than 25 centuries old, reemerges.
And, while the portion translated is a rather cerebral discussion of the intricacies of classifying different species, it's still strongly reminiscent of a real-life Da Vinci Code.
Which is both thrilling and humbling, for it means that -- despite our arrogant belief that we know everything -- there are mysteries all around us, waiting throughout the millennia for intrepid researchers to unlock their secrets.
And that's very, very cool.
Posted by Mike Lief at April 26, 2007 11:21 PM
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