Context

In the 1840s, Constantin von Tischendorf, a biblical researcher, was consulting ancient texts in a library in Constantinople when he saw in a parchment rewrite, a manuscript in which the original text had been erased and new content is written, some Greek text on mathematics in the negative. At the end of the 19th century, Greek expert Athanasios Papadopoulos-Kerameus copied lines from those Greek texts in a catalog of manuscripts compiled for the same library. Neither von Tischendorf nor Papadopoulos-Kerameus, however, knew the origin of the Greek text on the manuscript. It would have taken a man who happened to have a deep knowledge of the contents of those Greek texts.

In 1906, one such person appeared, the Danish scholar Johan Ludvig Heiberg, who was not only an antiquarian and historian but also an experienced researcher of ancient Greek mathematics. 

To find out, in the summer of 1906, Heiberg went to Constantinople and consulted the rewritten copy of the manuscript with the Greek text remaining on it. He found seven full texts or fragments of Greek versions of Archimedes' works at the bottom of the manuscript. Of course, the Greek editions that Hebert found were not perfect, either, as some were illegible or incomplete.

The Archimedean Palimpsests are not Archimedes' manuscripts, but they are in Greek and contain many more things than other editions, so they are very important. Heiberg asked the Turkish government to lend it to him but was refused. He took photographs of Archimedes' manuscript with the best photographic techniques of the time, and returned to Denmark, using a magnifying glass as a tool for his research. In 1910, Hebert began to publish the Greek edition of his research, which was completed in 1915. The original copy of Archimedes' rewrite, which remained in Constantinople, went missing until 1998 when an anonymous American buyer acquired a copy of the prayer book for $2 million. The resulting Archimedes was deposited for research at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, USA.