Almost Lost

In 1229, a scribe at a monastery in Palestine unbound an old copy of Archimedes, scraped the ink off the pages, and wrote prayers on them. Not hate. Parchment was expensive. The monastery needed a prayer book.

Under his prayers lay the only known copy of the Method of Mechanical Theorems. Archimedes wrote it to show how he found his results: imagined shapes balanced on a lever. The world kept his answers. The reasons were under the prayers.

Then it kept nearly dying. It vanished from its library in Istanbul in the 1920s. Decades in a Paris cellar, damp and mold. A forger painted four gold-leaf portraits over the pages to raise the price. The only Method, under gold.

Getting him back took a century of new light: 1906 photographs, ultraviolet and infrared at the Walters, X-rays at Stanford in 2005 that read through the gold.

The words were never gone. They were waiting for light nobody had invented yet.

It is not finished. In March, a long-lost leaf was identified in a museum in Blois, France. Its back: Daniel and two lions, painted in the twentieth century. Under the lions, more Archimedes. The book is not done being found.