Is geraldo hosting?

but if it was scraped off, how can it still be seen--by any means? layers of the parchment are actually gone because of the scraping, no?

and don't we already have existing copies of his writings? this is just a written-over 10th century copy, no?

No, it's the Archimedes Palimpsest, discovered and mightily publicized by my old friend Will Noel, curator of manuscripts at the Walters Art Museum. All the text has been seen for years by conservators at the Walters - this TV show & Geraldo is full of shit if they think they're the first to see it.

amberglow - vellum was valuable and constantly reused from the end of the Romans unto and through the Middle Ages. Older vellum = even better to your medieval scribe: easier to write on & less smelly. That's what really happened to a lot of the books in the Alexandria library and many another fabled ancient library - they got disassembled, cleaned, and written over.

However, when you scrape a sheet of vellum preparatory to placing another text on it, you don't really scrape it that hard, because you don't want to make the vellum too thin or risk a hole. So under the new text (in Archimedes palimpsest case, IIRC, a German treatise) you're left with an impression embedded in the vellum itself. As in many noir movies & 20s detective novels: the impression on the blotting paper. With x-rays and other nifty modern techniques, this original impression can be read through subsequent paintings. Sometimes, the newer stuff even flakes off, revealing the impressed original work beneath.

The Archimedes palimpsest is actually believed to be the hand of Archimedes himself, or at the very least a student, or so Will says, and that's why it's so amazing and so very valuable. Definitely the text & images underneath the medieval stuff are ancient Greek. It demonstrates the Archimedean screw, which I don't pretend to understand, but which is pretty big cheese in the world of Archimedean mathematics or screws or whatever. And it's been buzzing around for about 7 years now, since Will found it on a manuscript in the Walters library, or bought it for the library, or some such. At any rate, no, it isn't a 10th century copy, it's the real thing.

I wrote the family guide to the palimpsest the very first time it was ever displayed, right after it was discovered some 7 years ago

me hearts mgl!

*looks forward to the x-rays revealing a badly drawn picture of a penis and the legend "Archemedes 4 Sappho 4evar (heart) heart) (heart)"*

(In Greek obviously)