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A Christian prayer book finished in 1229 hides lost works by Archimedes. Its maker scraped the ink from a 10th-century copy of his writings and wrote the prayers over it.

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A manuscript that has been scraped and written over is called a palimpsest. This one holds the only known copy of Archimedes's Method of Mechanical Theorems, in which he found areas and volumes by imagining shapes cut into countless thin slices, an idea close to later calculus. It also holds his Stomachion puzzle and the only surviving Greek text of On Floating Bodies. The parchment was reused in 1229, probably in Jerusalem. In 1906 the Danish scholar Johan Ludvig Heiberg spotted the mathematics beneath the prayers in Istanbul. The book then vanished for decades, suffered from mould, and had forged pictures painted over some pages. Sold at auction in 1998 for $2 million, it was studied at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore from 1999 to 2008, where ultraviolet, infrared and X-ray imaging recovered much of the hidden text.

Türkçe oku
1229'da tamamlanan bir Hristiyan dua kitabı, Arşimet'in kayıp yapıtlarını saklıyor. Kitabı hazırlayan kişi, Arşimet'in yazılarının 10. yüzyıldan kalma bir kopyasını kazıyıp duaları onun üstüne yazmıştı.

Yazısı kazınıp üzerine yeniden yazılmış el yazmalarına palimpsest denir. Bu palimpsest, Arşimet'in “Mekanik Teoremler Üzerine Yöntem” adlı yapıtının bilinen tek kopyasını içerir. Arşimet bu eserde alan ve hacimleri, şekilleri sayısız ince dilime bölünmüş gibi düşünerek bulur; bu yaklaşım, çok sonra ortaya çıkacak integral hesabına yakındır. Kitapta ayrıca Stomachion bulmacası ve “Yüzen Cisimler Üzerine”nin günümüze kalan tek Yunanca metni vardır. Parşömen 1229'da, büyük olasılıkla Kudüs'te yeniden kullanıldı. Danimarkalı bilgin Johan Ludvig Heiberg, duaların altındaki matematiği 1906'da İstanbul'da fark etti. Kitap sonra onlarca yıl ortadan kayboldu, küften zarar gördü, bazı sayfalarına da sahte resimler yapıldı. 1998'de açık artırmada 2 milyon dolara satıldı ve 1999–2008 arasında Baltimore'daki Walters Sanat Müzesi'nde incelendi. Mor ötesi, kızıl ötesi ve X ışınlarıyla yapılan görüntüleme, gizli metnin büyük bölümünü yeniden okunur hâle getirdi.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Archimedes Palimpsest
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