Last night, this post brought to mind a special I'd seen on NOVA a while back about the Archimedes Palimpsest.
Archimedes, if you remember from high school geometry, was the dude who came up with pi, among other things. He was a rare mathemetician for his day, and his life ended in 221 B.C. Now, in the way of things back then, some of his work was lost---and it was thought it had disappeared for the ages. Not so. In the library of a monastery in Constantinople a palimpsest was discovered. A palimpsest is a book where the pages are made of vellum, or animal skin parchment, where the text can be scraped off and used again for some other purpose. In this case, it was transformed into a prayer book. So, this palimpsest resides in Constantinople for near to a thousand years when a Danish philologist discovers it, photographs the entire thing, but cannot decipher all of the Archimedes text. The word is now out. About twenty years later, it's stolen from the monastery. It finds its way into the hands of a forger, who paints four of the pages with gold leaf, thinking it will make it more valuable, while not knowing what was underneath the prayers, until finally, it lands in the hands of a French collector who snatches it up and keeps it in the family for about seventy years, only selling it a few years ago.
As if that wasn't enough excitement for you, this is where it gets interesting. No one had the technology to see what exactly Archimedes had written entirely until recently. Of course it was big. Turns out that he'd pretty much invented Calculus...a full nineteen-hundred years before Newton and Leibniz---the generally credited inventors of that particularly horrible form of math---got their paws onto the problem.
During the NOVA episode, the scientists they consulted, while pleased about the document itself, lamented the fact it had been lost for so many years. They speculated about what it could have meant for society if Archimedes had not died when and how he did (he was killed by a soldier who stumbled into his house during a war) and the papers weren't lost, but instead published and disseminated for peer review. There are many things in our modern world that we would not have were it not for Calculus. It's not stretching it to say that these lost papers put Western Civilization back almost two thousand years.
With this in mind, try and wrap said mind around the possibilities that could flow forth from the Oxyrynchus Papyri. There could be equally huge discoveries lurking in those pieces of papyrus.
I, for one, cannot wait to see what is in there.
Posted by Kathy at April 19, 2005 11:19 PM