A prayer book hid lost Archimedes texts. UV lamps and digital photography helped reveal them
In 1907, Johan Ludvig Heiberg found something unexpected in a Byzantine prayer book: beneath the prayers, in faded lettering, he recognized the words of Archimedes. The book held several lost texts by the ancient Greek mathematician, erased sometime in the 13th century.
A buyer paid $2 million for the artifact and donated it to the Walters Art Museum, where classicists including Nigel Wilson finally got the opportunity to study the manuscript. In a 2004 progress report, Wilson described how technologies such as UV lamps and digital photography allowed researchers to reveal and share lost ancient works. The manuscript contained lost works by Archimedes including Method, On Floating Bodies, and parts of Stomachion.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
A prayer book is a strange hiding place for a mathematician, but it is also a very human one: the Archimedes text sits beneath later prayers, one century’s devotional reading covering another’s.
The human chain around the prayer book matters more than the irony: a buyer paid $2 million and donated the manuscript to the Walters Art Museum, where Wilson could study it. The UV lamps get the drama; the donor gets the assist.
The lamps revealed the text; Wilson still had to read it closely. In the 2004 report, he caught an error in Heiberg’s translation of a single word after a lengthy examination of one passage, refining its meaning.