- Netz, Reviel and William Noel.
The Archimedes Codex.
New York: Da Capo Press, 2007.
ISBN 978-0-306-81580-5.
-
Sometimes it is easy to forget just how scanty is the material
from which we know the origins of Western civilisation.
Archimedes was one of the singular intellects of antiquity,
with contributions to mathematics, science, and engineering
which foreshadowed achievements not surpassed until the
Enlightenment. And yet all we know of the work of Archimedes
in the original Greek (as opposed to translations into Arabic
and Latin, which may have lost information due to
translators' lack of comprehension of Archimedes's complex
arguments) can be traced to three manuscripts: one which
disappeared in 1311, another which vanished in the 1550s,
and a third: the
Archimedes Palimpsest,
which surfaced in Constantinople at the start of the 20th century,
and was purchased at an auction for more than USD 2 million by
an anonymous buyer who deposited it for conservation and research
with the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. (Note that none of these
manuscripts was the original work of Archimedes: all were copies
made by scribes, probably around the tenth century. But despite
being copies, their being in the original Greek means they are
far more likely to preserve the sense of the original text of
Archimedes, even if the scribe did not understand what he was
copying.)
History has not been kind to this work of Archimedes. Only
two centuries after the copy of his work was made, the
parchment on which it was written was scrubbed of its
original content and re-written with the text of a Christian
prayer book, which to the unaided eye appears to completely
obscure the Archimedes text in much of the work. To
compound the insult, sometime in the 20th century four
full-page religious images in Byzantine style were forged
over pages of the book, apparently in an attempt to increase
its market value. This, then, was a bogus illustration painted
on top of the prayer book text, which was written on top of the
precious words of Archimedes. In addition to these
depredations of mankind, many pages had been attacked by
mold, and an ill-advised attempt to conserve the text,
apparently in the 1960s, had gummed up the binding,
including the gutter of the page where Archimedes's text was
less obscured, with an intractable rubbery glue.
But from what could be read, even in fragments, it was clear
that the text, if it could be extracted, would be of great
significance. Two works, “The Method” and
“Stomachion”, have their only known copies in
this text, and the only known Greek text of
“On Floating Bodies” appears here as well.
Fortunately, the attempt to extract the Archimedes text
was made in the age of hyperspectral imaging, X-ray
fluorescence, and other nondestructive technologies, not
with the crude and often disastrous chemical potions applied
to attempt to recover such texts a century before.
This book, with alternating chapters written by the curator of
manuscripts at the Walters and a Stanford professor of
Classics and Archimedes scholar, tells the story of the origin
of the manuscript, how it came to be what it is and
where it resides today, and the painstaking efforts at
conservation and technological wizardry (including time
on the synchrotron light source beamline at SLAC) which
allowed teasing the work of Archimedes from the obscuration
of centuries.
What has been found so far has elevated the reputation of
Archimedes even above the exalted position he already
occupied in the pantheon of science. Analysis of “The
Method” shows that Archimedes anticipated the use of
infinitesimals and hence the calculus in his proof of the
volume of curved solids. The “Stomachion”,
originally thought to be a puzzle devoid of serious mathematical
interest, turns out to be the first and only known venture of
Greek mathematics into the realm of combinatorics.
If you're interested in rare books, the origins of mathematical
thought, applications of imaging technology to historical documents,
and the perilous path the words of the ancients traverse to reach us
across the ages, there is much to fascinate in this account. Special
thanks to frequent recommender of books Joe Marasco, who not only
brought this book to my attention but mailed me a copy! Joe
played a role in the discovery of the importance of the
“Stomachion”, which is chronicled in the chapter
“Archimedes at Play”.
August 2008 