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

[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.