[HN Gopher] Archimedes Palimpsest
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       Archimedes Palimpsest
        
       Author : YeGoblynQueenne
       Score  : 82 points
       Date   : 2023-04-12 08:16 UTC (14 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
        
       | tragomaskhalos wrote:
       | "... manuscript was taken to an isolated Greek monastery in
       | Palestine, possibly to protect it from occupying crusaders, who
       | often equated Greek script with heresy against their Latin church
       | and either burned or looted many such texts ..."
       | 
       | Depressingly reminiscent of Bishop Landa and the destruction of
       | Mayan codices ("as they contained nothing in which were not to be
       | seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all").
       | How much of our common cultural heritage has been destroyed by
       | religious zealots over the centuries?
        
         | _a_a_a_ wrote:
         | Absolute fucktons.
         | 
         | Now I've answered your as-good-as-rhetorical question, where
         | are you going to go with this? What's your point, your
         | proposal, your next step?
         | 
         | (NB, I'm an atheist too)
        
         | andrepd wrote:
         | Immense amounts. Christian monasticism in particular was
         | responsible for the loss of the vast majority of classical
         | texts in the late roman and early medieval periods. It was only
         | by the ~12th century that the image of the "wisdom-loving monk
         | copying the classics" truly existed, in the almost a millennium
         | prior they were almost always zealots bent on destruction of
         | non-christian heritage.
        
       | liendolucas wrote:
       | There's a book (I believe it is "The Archimedes Codex : Revealing
       | The Secrets Of The World's Greatest Palimpsest" by William Noel
       | and Reviel Netz), that I read many years ago exactly about this
       | topic. In the book they describe that they used a similar
       | approach to the one used for the vesuvius challenge: they x-rayed
       | the whole palimpsest and then looked for imprints below the pages
       | for traces of the original treat that was copied by a previous
       | scribe. Very interesting read.
        
         | rob74 wrote:
         | The approach may be similar, but in this case you can at least
         | separate the individual pages, whereas the Herculaneum scrolls
         | are lumps of carbonized papyrus (lower quality than parchment)
         | where you can't even be sure where the writing is located, so a
         | much bigger challenge...
        
           | Bayart wrote:
           | There's been a lot of progress on unrolling with a
           | combination of X-ray scanning and 3d modelling. Nowadays AI
           | is being added to the mix.
        
       | marcodiego wrote:
       | > All images and transcriptions are now freely available on the
       | web at the Archimedes Digital Palimpsest under the Creative
       | Commons License CC BY.
       | 
       | The transcriptions... why aren't them under public domain?
        
         | kimixa wrote:
         | Many jurisdictions don't have the concept of "Public Domain",
         | so I'm sure they appreciate a defined but not particularly
         | restrictive license.
        
       | kiliantics wrote:
       | So an unknown "high-tech" person bought it in 1998 for $2
       | million, because a New York court ruled that the Greek church had
       | no legitimate claim to it, despite possessing it for over 900
       | years. And since then, all this research has been performed to
       | reveal the contents of the document but we still don't know who
       | the unknown buyer is? Bizarre world.
        
         | NoZebra120vClip wrote:
         | Greek Church:palimpsest::Amazon customer:eBook
        
       | lukehollis wrote:
       | I worked in St Catherine's Monastery where these manuscripts are
       | stored to make a 3d scan of the monastery, museum, and Mount
       | Sinai summit if interesting: https://stcatherines.mused.org/en/
       | 
       | This place is seriously inspiring, and the monks and teams from
       | Greece that do the manuscript scanning are awesome people.
       | 
       | Recommend going in early December for the Feast of Saint
       | Catherine (they go on the old calendar).
        
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       (page generated 2023-04-12 23:02 UTC)