The Archimedes Codex

We learned, of course, something of the curious story of the oldest (by 400 years) surviving manuscript of some of Arch imedes ’ works, collected in a Byzantine codex that contained the end of Equilibrium of Planes , great parts of The Sphere and the Cylinder and Measurement of the Circle, a sizable portion of On Floating Bodies, one folio of The Stomachion, and a large portion of The Method. This codex had not been easy for Heiberg to read because it was a palimpsest. It seems that at some point early in the year 1229, a Greek priest, Ioannes Myronas, needing parchment for a prayer book, took a collection of Archimedes’ works that had been written on parchment about 250 years earlier and erased, as best he could, the Archimedean text from those of its pages that were still usable. He then used these pages to write the text of a collection of Greek prayers at right angles to the much fainter Archimedean text underneath. Myronas in fact needed more parchment than the old Archimedes codex could provide, so he also recycled other important, now lost, texts in the same way. (But that is another story.) Despite the obstacles to reading the text, Heiberg felt it was more than worth the effort, especially since the Greek texts of Floating Bodies, the Stomachion, and the Method, were unknown. Floating Bodies existed only in an incomplete Latin translation, only a short Arabic account of the Stomachion was known, and the Method was known only from its mention in a Byzantine lexicon and three brief citations, of results only, in Heron’s Metrika. Moreover, since the one extant folio of the Stomachion was almost The Archimedes Codex: How a Medieval Prayer Book is Revealing the True Genius of Antiquity’s Greatest Scientist Reviel Netz and William Noel Da Capo Press, 2007 US$27.50, 352 pages ISBN-13: 978-0306815805