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

[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...