Introduction

Archimedes was a Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, inventor, and astronomer. He is the pioneer scientist in classical antiquity and contributes to the areas in modern calculus, surface area, and volume of a sphere, serving an accurate approximation of pi, etc. 

The Archimedes Palimpsest is a medieval parchment manuscript that contains both scientific ideas from Archimedes and a Byzantine prayerbook. It is a palimpsest that words on the manuscript's pages are scraped off so the pages can be reused for writing for another document. The original context of this manuscript was the Byzantine prayerbook written in Greek that was completed by April 1229 and probably made in Jerusalem, which is called a euchologion. Then words of seven treatises by Archimedes covered the original texts and Archimedes manuscript was copied in the second half of the tenth century, almost certainly in Constantinople. 

The Archimedes Palimpsest has experienced a drifting journey for centuries, which is inevitably damaged and makes the manuscript endangered. The main damages demonstrate in three forms: pages are missing, suffering from very severe mold and four paintings of the Evangelists were added to the book. Due to the lack of parchment in the Byzantine Empire, the original prayerbook was recycled to write for Archimedes treatises and then its journey started here. It was not found again until the 1840's when scholar Constantine Tischendorf discovered this manuscript in Metochion. Gradually, more and more scholars found the secrets of this manuscript and use different advanced technologies to make more content visible. For now, The Archimedes Palimpsest is researched and exhibited in The Walter Art Museum, Baltimore.