Philistines ... er, monks

[unixronin]

The BBC reports that X-ray fluorescence techniques have just enabled the reconstruction of some original texts written by Archimedes and others.  The parchment contains works including the only Greek version of On Floating Bodies known to exist, the only surviving ancient copy of The Method of Mechanical Theorems and of a mathematical puzzle called the Stomachion, as well as treatises on the Equilibrium of Planes, Spiral Lines, The Measurement of the Circle, and Sphere and Cylinder.  These are important and groundbreaking texts, several of which form the foundations of areas of modern mathematics.

So why were these writings lost in the first place?

The original texts were transcribed in the 10th Century by an anonymous scribe on to parchment.

Three centuries later a monk in Jerusalem called Johannes Myronas recycled the manuscript to create a palimpsest.

Palimpsesting involves scraping away the original text so the parchments can be used again.  To create [the] book, the monk cut the pages in half and turned them sideways.

[...] Myronas also used recycled pages from works by the 4th Century Orator Hyperides and other philosophical texts.

Destroying and recycling the writings of Archimedes, among others, to create ... a book of prayers.  It's enough to make you weep.  One has to wonder what other wonders of knowledge have been lost or destroyed through the centuries for no better reason than so that some pious fool who did not understand (or did not care) what he was destroying could scribble paeans to the ineffability of his chosen deity.

Comments

[johnkzin.livejournal.com]

I don't think it matters what the intended use of the recycling was. I think that's specifically irrelevant.

I think the crime is "that he recycled original documents that were of important value to civilization as a whole". What they were planned to be used for after recycling doesn't change the nature of the crime one bit: whether they were being used by a pious fool, by a pious genius, for a prayer book, for the next secular scientific masterpiece, etc., all of those are the same crime. Same for wondering what other documents have been lost for similar reasons.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I don't disagree with that. I just feel that doing so for a purpose so ultimately useless makes it even worse.

[fatcook.livejournal.com]

The Archimedes Palimpsest was featured on NOVA last year. It's great to hear that they can recover works.
The program stated that if the Renaissance genii (sp?) had access to these works who knows where we would be today. The mind boggles.

[zeekar.livejournal.com]

genii (sp?)

The plural of genius in this case is geniuses. The Latin plural is spelled genii, but it's conventinally restricted to the original meaning, a sort of guardian spirit (yet oddly enough the word is not cognate with djinn/genie).

[fatcook.livejournal.com]

Oh.

[zeekar.livejournal.com]

Well, you did ask. :)

[yndy.livejournal.com]

Erm...
You're looking at it wrong.
Thank whatever that this monk did this.

Think of how many copies of these same works must've existed at some point - and yet... those copies are gone. Burned? Discarded? who knows, but gone nonetheless.

Instead, thanks to the clueless idolatry of this 10th century monk, these 3 precious tomes were preserved through the magic of disguise and trickery... until now - when we have the technology to reveal them.
Truly buried treasure!!!

When you think of it, by disfiguring those books, and 'palimpsetting' them into a prayer book, the monk created something that those who could not value Archimedes would still treasure and preserve...
All unwittingly, his stupid action has done what those who valued such literature did not do on their own - preserved it for a future generation such as our own... so that we CAN use the spectrometry to see it.

Therein lies the beauty.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I suppose that's one way of looking at it. But how do you know that those books wouldn't have survived if not for that monk? How can you know they wouldn't have long since been found sitting in a back corner of the monastery library? There may be dozens, maybe hundreds, of other precious manuscripts hidden among palimpsests on dusty shelves somewhere. But without taking possibly months each to examine each and every one using techniques such as this, we'll never know.

So I'm afraid I don't buy that. These volumes somehow survived in spite of Johannes Myronas, not because of him.

Remember, too, these books were written long before the invention of printing. There were probably never that many copies of any of them to start with. In the tenth century, if you wanted a copy of a book, you didn't just go out and buy one -- you tracked one down wherever you could find it, and requested permission of the owner to have a scrivener make an exact copy of the volume by hand. Then you hoped that he made a faithful copy without too many transcription errors, or too many diagrams copied wrong because he simply didn't understand enough of what what he was copying to realize he'd made a mistake.

[yndy.livejournal.com]

How you know is that they didn't.

Yes, I'm more than aware of how books were made for centuries... I'm also aware that the centuries of general illiteracy in Europe made for a populace that didn't particularly value books.
More likely is that there were a number of rare manuscripts (tangent: love that word... derives from 'hand-written') that were left to rot by those who possessed them but did not value them.

Consider the defacement to be a form of chrysallis for the books... if someone hadn't encased them in such a pious disguise we would NOT have them now...

[juuro.livejournal.com]

I have several times been to witness the situation where someone is discarding 50-year-old documents, for example the users manuals and maintenance instructions to the very first air surveillance computers. The person said "Oh, someone else sure has the museum copies, it is not necessary for us to keep these." I would insist on checking whether the relevant museum or archival organisations in fact do have exemplars, and if necessary, having the documents shipped to them instead of being shredded.

One can not be everywhere. I'm sure time and again someone discards a piece of junk, unthinking, or even perhaps thinking that it can not be the last or unique or that it is not their task to preserve history.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

There is that, indeed.

[7leaguebootdisk.livejournal.com]

Hey, at least he didn't burn them for fuel, as happend to the Library at Alexandria.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Alexandria had occurred to me. Was that really a case of scrolls being burned for fuel?

[7leaguebootdisk.livejournal.com]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria

Apparantly not. Looks like the christians wiped out most of it along with the rest of the pagan temples in 391AD, there is no reason to think there was much left when it was conquered by the moslems in 790 or so.

[mrmeval.livejournal.com]

It could have been considered common or valueless.

In the similar vein there are firearms that have been 'sporterized' or otherwise modified which almost completely removes their original value. In some cases these were turned into forgeries and now those forgeries are worth as much if not more than the original. Similar things are happening with any antique.

The tragedy in this case is the loss of the information. I've wondered how you could create a very long term storage medium for information that is better than animal skin or paper and there isn't much. You'd have to use something that would not be readily reusable or would become valuable as a raw material in a very long time. It would have to resist abuse and degradation over centuries. And you'd have to have enough copies to resist deliberate eradication.

[7leaguebootdisk.livejournal.com]

zillions of coppies etched onto stainless steel?

[mrmeval.livejournal.com]

It's a valuable metal worth more than plain steel. Even 'tainting' something so it would be worthless for salvage won't take into account improvements in technology.

The ideas I had are aluminum foil and high impact resistant ceramic. It probably should be in plain text with ordinary pictures, no encoding or compression.

I think printing on aluminum foil is possible with a dot matrix printer but it would have to be slow. A special type of dot matrix printer could be made that would make impressions in a wet ceramic then the ceramic baked.

There are plastics that might suffice but I'm not familiar with them.

[7leaguebootdisk.livejournal.com]

Aluminium burns nice, and corrodes, I doubt it is likely to be a good long term medium.

The ceramic plate idea is a good one, Corrianware is really tough, for instance, make sheets with the info molded into them. The molding ought to reduce the utility.

Granted, they would be handy for cooking on and with, also metal working.

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

I have trouble condemning the monk for doing something that was expected and common for his time and culture. Taking someone out of history and applying a different set of cultural values to them is the worst sort of bigotry. It assumes that your standards are superior to any others, instead of just different.

The finder of the text actually praises Johannes Myronas for saving the transcript for us. Without reporposing the book, it would have been lost to us, like all the others that we know of. I can't prove a negative, but how many of these texts do we know of? How many still exist? Stupid chance saved this one. Be grateful, not hateful.