WTF is a Palimpsest?

What is a Palimpsest?

A palimpsest is a manuscript with reused pages that were scraped or washed to erase existing text. The word comes from palimpsēstos, Greek for “scraped again.” Most palimpsests are made of parchment, although some are made of papyrus.

So why would you want to reuse parchment pages? Because they were expensive as hell and laborious to make. Additionally, parchment was durable, so it could survive a good scraping. It was so common to recycle parchment manuscripts that in 691 CE, a synodal decree prohibited scribes from destroying Scriptures and other religious texts unless they were already damaged.¹

For a deep dive on parchment and vellum (the most luxe option), see the articles WTF is Parchment and WTF is Vellum?

Hidden Texts

Since medieval scribes were into recycling, we have fun little treasures to discover. You see, palimpsests often reveal the “hidden” original texts underneath, which in some cases don’t exist anywhere else. A secret, long-lost treatise from an ancient writer that no one’s ever seen before? Sign me up.

Because past scholars were so excited about these manuscripts, they often heated the parchment or used chemicals to reveal the hidden text. As a result, they damaged many a palimpsest or kicked its natural decay process into overdrive.² Oops!

Examples of Palimpsests

Now that we’ve examined what palimpsests are, let’s look at a few examples.

Archimedes Palimpsest

One of the most famous examples is the Archimedes Palimpsest, currently in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. Archimedes (c. 287–212 BCE) was a Greek mathematician and inventor from Syracuse, Sicily. He’s also the namesake of Merlin’s grouchy and sarcastic talking owl in Disney’s The Sword in the Stone.

Archimedes—the man, not the owl—invented a screw pump to raise water, supposedly coined the phrase “Eureka” (I’ve found it!), and wrote mathematical treatises on geometry. The latter is where the palimpsest comes into play, because it contains seven of his treatises, two of which exist nowhere else.

The Archimedes Palimpsest is a parchment manuscript, consisting of 174 leaves. On the surface, it’s a Byzantine prayer book in Greek (a euchologion), dating to 1229. The prayer book, however, consists of recycled parchment from seven separate manuscripts, all of which had their original texts erased for reuse.

Seven Books Into One

The scraped parchment came from:

• A 10^th-century book with seven treatises by Archimedes, likely written in Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul, Turkey). The seven treatises make up most of the Byzantine prayer book’s parchment. They are: The Equilibrium of Planes, Spiral Lines, The Measurement of the Circle, Sphere and Cylinder, On Floating Bodies, The Method of Mechanical Theorems, and the Stomachion.
  • The last two treatises only exist in the palimpsest; there are no copies anywhere else! Additionally, there is no other existing Greek version of On Floating Bodies, making this manuscript muy importante for studying our man Archimedes.
• A 4^th-century manuscript with speeches by the Athenian orator Hyperides (389–322 BCE). The speeches make up 10 folios of the prayer book. Before scholars discovered the palimpsest, they only knew of Hyperides’ work from papyrus fragments and references by other authors.
• 14 folios of the prayer book originate from a commentary on Aristotle’s Categories, by an unknown author dating to the 3^rd century.
• 20 folios are reused parchment from four other books, which scholars have yet to identify.

Modern imaging reveals the original texts and Archimedes’ geometric diagrams underneath the 13^th-century Greek prayer book. Cool, huh?

Christie’s auction house sold the palimpsest to an American private collector on October 28, 1998. The Greek government tried to stop the sale, stating the manuscript was stolen. Despite this mishap, the sale went ahead. In January 1999, the new owner deposited the manuscript at The Walters Art Museum for conservation, study, and imaging.

To learn more about palimpsest and Archimedes, see the Archimedes Palimpsest Project website. They’ve got lots of info and videos.

Codex Zacynthius – Palimpsest

Next up is the Codex Zacynthius, a Greek Gospel lectionary dating from the 1170s–1180s. A monk named Neilos copied the lectionary onto old parchment that once held the Gospel of Luke with commentary, called a “catena.” Dating to the 8^th century CE, the commentary included writings of the early church, many of which haven’t survived elsewhere.

The original manuscript would’ve had about 240 pages, but Neilos used only 86 full pages and 3 half pages to make his lectionary in the 12^th century. These pages held a preface, table of chapters, and 340 commentary extracts from the first 11 chapters of Luke’s Gospel, all in Greek. Scholars consider it the oldest copy of the New Testament with marginal commentary.

So, how do we see this very important religious text if it’s underneath 12^th-century writing? With modern technology, of course! The University of Cambridge and the University of Birmingham undertook a multispectral imaging project from 2018–2020, thanks to funding from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. Check out their video below to learn more.

Codex Nitriensis – Palimpsest

Let’s take a quick look at one more palimpsest codex. The Codex Nitriensis is a Syriac treatise against John of Caesarea (aka John the Grammarian) by Severus of Antioch. In the late 8^th–early 9^th century CE, Simeon, a monk in Kartamin (modern-day Turkey), copied Severus’ treatise onto old parchment that had been scraped or washed.

The original Greek texts on the parchment were Homer’s The Iliad from the 5^th century, the Gospel of Luke from the 6^th century, and a copy of Euclid’s Elements from the 7^th or 8^th century.³

The codex once lived in the convent library of St. Mary Deipara in the Nitrian Desert of Egypt, hence its name. It now lives, along with so many of the world’s treasures 🙄, in the British Library as Add MS 17211.       

If you’d like to learn more about the wonderful world of old books, check out the following posts:

• WTF is Papyrus?
• WTF is Parchment?
• WTF is Vellum?
• WTF is a Codex?
• WTF is a Book of Hours?
• WTF is a Psalter?
• WTF are Illuminated Manuscripts?
• WTF are Incunabula?

Footnotes

1. Cave, The History of the Book, 55. ↩︎
2. Cave, The History of the Book, 55. ↩︎
3. British Library, “Codex Nitriensis.” ↩︎

Bibliography & Further Reading

*One of the following links is an Amazon affiliate link, which means I earn a commission if you make a purchase, at no cost to you.

The Archimedes Palimpsest. Accessed June 3, 2025.

The British Library. “Codex Nitriensis.” Medieval Manuscripts Blog, March 3, 2010.

Cave, Roderick, and Sara Ayad. The History of The Book in 100 Books. Buffalo, NY: Firefly Books U.S., Inc., 2014.

University of Cambridge. “Codex Zacynthius.” Cambridge Digital Library. Accessed June 3, 2025.

University of Cambridge. Ghost Words: Reading the Past. Accessed June 3, 2025.