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

[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.