Archimedes of Syracuse was born in Sicily around 287 BCE and lived for 75 years. During that time, he revolutionized many different areas of knowledge is a way that nobody before or sense really has.

He was a polymath and was able to provide lasting contributions to math, physics, engineering, philosophy, and much more.

The vast majority of what we have from Archimedes is in the form of copies and transcripts, which are great. There are a total of three original manuscripts from the man himself, and one of them was very nearly never found.

Its story is worth hearing.

The story of this piece of parchment starts just like virtually every other piece of parchment that was made in the third century BCE. It got interesting when it was used by Archimedes, but it would still just be one of many pieces that the genius would use in his life.

After he had used it, there is no way to track what happened to it for about 1200 years. Somehow it made its way to the monastery of St. Sabas, which is near Jerusalem.

While there, nobody knew what it was, nor did they really care. It was likely kept as a piece of parchment that could be reused. Parchment was, after all, quite expensive. So, people in that day often used a technique called palimpsesting to scrape old text off parchment so that it could be reused.

This is exactly what a monk named Johannes Myronas did. He then used that apartment to create a copy of the Euchologion, which is a book of prayer and worship directions used for the Byzantine Catholic Churches.

For about 700 years, that parchment survived and finally made its way to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Istanbul.

In 1906 a professor of the history of mathematics from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark happened to come across it and noticed a few faded and scraped away lines as being from the iconic Archimedes.

After that, the parchment again disappeared, then resurfaced, only to become untraced again. At some point over the following century, some art forgers got ahold of it and added faux-medieval gold paint to try to make it more valuable.

Finally, in 1998, an anonymous collector who is known as Mr. B purchased it at auction for $2 million.

When he agreed to have the piece displayed at the Walters Art Museum, it got noticed by Nigel Wilson, who was a Cambridge scholar who was asked to analyze it.

While the content about religious instructions could still be read, he was more interested in the part that was scraped away.

He told New Scientist in an interview:

“I realized at once that if you could apply even an ultraviolet lamp to the manuscript, you’d be able to read a great deal more than was read in 1907.”

It worked well, and that let him see more of what was written, but certainly not all of it.

In 2006, Wilson gave an interview to NPR where he said:

“I read that there is still some significant text missing, and that there are forgeries and that there’s iron in the ink. When I read the word ‘iron,’ I said, ‘Wait a minute, we are studying iron in spinach.’ I thought we should be able to use the same method and just then do imaging with it.”

So, he had the idea of bombarding the manuscript with X-ray photons at nearly the speed of light using a synchrotron. He did this at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in California.

This process causes anything with iron in it to fluoresce, and it worked.

Of the moment he saw the text light up, he told NPR:

“I wished I could read ancient Greek. Very beautiful looking characters all over the place.”

Once translated, it was found that the parchment had some never-before-seen text including a version of On Floating Bodies, which is the first known work on hydrostatics. An original statement of Archimedes’s eponymous Principle. There were also parts of The Method of Mechanical Theorems, a groundbreaking mathematical treatise, and more.

There was even evidence that Archemes was considering the concept of infinity, something that had not previously entered Greek thought. Finally, there was the Stomachion, which is a look at a mathematical puzzle that was not solved until 2003.

Needless to say, this parchment was invaluable and shed huge amounts of new information about one of the most influential thinkers of all time.

While some people may be tempted to be angry at the monk who scraped away the writing in 1229 CE, it is actually a good thing that he did. Noel explains to NPR:

“What a gift he gave us. The great advantage of having them wrapped up in a Christian prayer book is that they were treasured and looked after for centuries.”

What an incredible series of events.

If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about the mysterious “pyramids” discovered in Antarctica. What are they?