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It's already a known fact that women in monasteries worked as copyist and miniaturist.

Case in point, the following https://art.thewalters.org/det... is a work of noun Claricia, in 12th - 13th century.

And this is a list of female copyists: http://edu.let.unicas.it/womed... from year 750 to 1550.

Note: the attribution to a male or to a female is difficult because copyist and miniaturist rarely signed their works, especially in the earlier centuries. One can try to trace the monastry of production of the manuscript but, quite often, monastries hosted both friars and nuns in separate wings of the same complex of buildings. So, even this method is not guaranteed to ascertain the gender of the miniaturist / copyist.

This palimpsest is made of parchment, not vellum. And the new text wasn't quite "holy", it was mostly a list of instructions for how to carry out local rituals.

The "medieval mind" created by the Church through centuries of indoctrination, purges, and thought police, did indeed create an economy and culture as you described. No wonder there was so little surplus value, and meager activity in traveling, medicine and "employment", creating such demand for the "charity" which kept the people dependent on the Church.

The Archimedes restoration project itself manages to hint at the real story of the "coverup", though its respect for the Church keeps it from stating the clear implications for the manuscript:

""The Fourth Crusade had got there and instead of proceeding directly to the Holy Land, they stopped and sacked the city. The destruction of books and other historic monuments was immense, and was indeed a major disaster for the history of European culture."

The specifics really underscore the context. The Christians tear in, destroy the complex christian/"pagan" balance in the area, and local monks purge the scary old science books in favor of safe Christian manuals. The more they uncover of this story, the more "palimpsests" look like imposed amnesia, rather than the desperation of poverty we've been led to believe.

This palimpsest is made of parchment, not vellum. And the new text wasn't quite "holy", it was mostly a list of instructions for how to carry out local rituals.

The "medieval mind" created by the Church through centuries of indoctrination, purges, and thought police, did indeed create an economy and culture as you described. No wonder there was so little surplus value, and meager activity in traveling, medicine and "employment", creating such demand for the "charity" which kept the people dependent on the Church.

The Archimedes restoration project itself manages to hint at the real story of the "coverup", though its respect for the Church keeps it from stating the clear implications for the manuscript:

""The Fourth Crusade had got there and instead of proceeding directly to the Holy Land, they stopped and sacked the city. The destruction of books and other historic monuments was immense, and was indeed a major disaster for the history of European culture."

The specifics really underscore the context. The Christians tear in, destroy the complex christian/"pagan" balance in the area, and local monks purge the scary old science books in favor of safe Christian manuals. The more they uncover of this story, the more "palimpsests" look like imposed amnesia, rather than the desperation of poverty we've been led to believe.

http://www.thewalters.org/archimedes/frame.html [thewalters.org]

Classical Greek thought was rooted in deductions based on first principles. Think of the elegant abstractions of Euclidean geometry. Archimedes was very much the outsider in his taste for experiment and in learning from the imperfections of the real world.

That makes it all the more striking that Archimedes was known and read in Christian Byzantium for 900 years, 300-1200 AD, and influced the design the great 6th C. church of the Hagia Sophia.

The Archimedes Palimpsest rested somewhere in the libraries of Constantinople for 200 years before being erased in the years of chaos which followed the sacking of the city in the Fourth Crusade of 1204 Archimedes Palimpsest.

You could forgive the surviving scriptoriums for thinking that the civilizing influence of their prayer books was more urgently needed than instruction in higher mathematics.

I was hoping someone would tell more info, so went looking. The manuscript is owned by a Baltimore, MD art museum. Some of it is on display there and you have access to the manuscript because you "...may turn on an ultra-violet light on one of the leaves of the book." and see hidden text. There is lots (by no means complete) information there.

http://www.thewalters.org/archimedes/frame.html

The use of multispectral imaging (MSI) to view ancient papyri has been going on for some years now, with the following being some of the most interesting projects:

- recovering text from a manuscript containing 10th century copies of some of Archimedes works which had been erased and over-written in the 12th century. http://www.thewalters.org/archimedes/frame.html

- similar to the project above, this is the recovery of carbonised Roman papyri found in Herculaneum (which was covered in 100 feet of lava during the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD) http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-14522 44_1,00.html

There are also lots of other artefact imaging projects, such as that being carried out by the Digital Hammurabi Project (http://www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi/), who want to digitise (make high-res 3D computer models of) ancient cuneiform tablets or the work at the University of Kentucky which may allow text to be 'read' without the artefact being touched at all - using a CT scan which can be decoded on a computer http://www.research.uky.edu/odyssey/fall04/seales. html

Awesome stuff...

Seeing how Archimedes did his thing with volumes simply through deduction and observation, I find it hard to believe that others in the universe wouldn't have the same basic powers of observation and logic. Archimedes almost discovered integral calculus through what amounts to puzzling out how to calculate volumes of strange objects. Its a leap of logic and happened in the absence of advanced mathematics as we know them. I suppose its possible that our way of doing math is very different, however at the lowest level I can't see how it would matter, ie. on/off binary logic. Charge, absence of charge. That happens all over the universe doesn't it?

Bingo. The key factor is that 12th century Europe was The Dark Ages, when the Church was Life and knowledge was scarce. Paper was a terribly difficult and expensive commodity to manufacture, so recycling old non-religious (i.e. non-useful) paper to make more hymnals was a brilliant move at the time.

I saw the Archimedes Palimpsest last year at The Walters Art Gallery. Note that the paper was not written directly by Archimedes, or even by his students. It's a (presumably) good copy made by later scribes which seems authentic.

The pages had been washed, scraped, cut in half, and rotated 90 degress to make a relatively clean surface for the prayers, then bound with stitching. When you reassemble the parts in the right order and look at it with UV light, the original is mostly visible. If only the ancient Greek and Chinese civilizations had survived and continued their scientific progress, we'd be on interstellar colony ships by now.