Old Manuscript for $2.2 Million

The Beck publishing house, which will first publish the German edition on Sept. 17, is also heavily promoting the book. With a scheduled initial printing of 20,000 copies, Beck is advertising the book as an "important work." "Our scientific view of the world is turned upside down," the publisher raves in the press release.

The fuss revolves around a manuscript that caused an uproar once before, in October 1998, when a fragile, handwritten manuscript with mold spots and blackened edges was offered for sale in an auction at Christie's in New York. After a contentious bidding war, the auctioneer's hammer fell at a price of $2.2 million.

An anonymous "billionaire from the computer industry" had apparently purchased the rare work. But who was it? Neither the auction house nor the new owner was willing to answer that question. Insiders are now certain that it was Jeffrey Bezos, the founder and CEO of online book retailer Amazon.

The cloak-and-dagger operation makes sense, given the dark suspicions attached to the Archimedes manuscript. Legal papers suggest that the wood-bound math tome was stolen in the Middle East. The Greek Orthodox patriarch of Jerusalem has gone to court twice, both times unsuccessfully, in an effort to gain control over the document. But the conflict continues to simmer.

At least the wealthy US buyer was accommodating enough to lend the manuscript to the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. As a museum employee recalls, "Mr. B." carried the booklover's gem in a "blue bag" up the marble staircase and into the columned foyer of the building, which is built in the style of a Genovese Renaissance palace.

The loan has triggered a flurry of excitement at the Walters, which also features Egyptian funeral papyrus and Napoleon's diaries in its collection. Greek scholars, physicists and digital photographers are attempting to decode the tattered work. According to curator William Noel, the work is "not much bigger than a box of sugar cubes" and consists of 174 "rigid and warped" pages. "The book," says Noel, "was on the verge of disintegrating."

Bombarded with X-Rays

Part of the problem lies in the fact that the parchment is a palimpsest (from the Greek: scrape clean again). The texts, formulas and drawings by Archimedes, executed in brown ink, were erased in the Middle Ages and overwritten with a religious text. Specialists at the museum irradiated the pages, made of goat leather, with UV light. Then they were bombarded with X-rays in the particle accelerator at Stanford University to bring out the traces of iron in the Byzantine ink. NASA experts were also involved in analyzing the work.

What, if any, are the fruits of all this labor? Has it revealed Archimedes "in a completely new light," as the Beck publishing house has proclaimed? Absolutely not.

The US researchers certainly discovered a few exciting details. For example, they managed to correctly interpret the "Stomachion," a document that until now existed only in the form of a fragment in Arabic. The title of this treatise on numbers is the name of a children's game Archimedes invented, but it can also signify the beginning of combinatorics.

The researchers were also able to determine the source of the handwriting. A scribe at the court of the emperor of Byzantium apparently wrote the parchment manuscript around 950 A.D. He used various older mathematics books by Archimedes and selected seven important treatises, which he copied.

But science eventually took a turn for the worse in the Byzantine Empire. In 1229, a monk picked up the primer on mathematics, not to study it but to recycle its valuable pages made of animal hide. Using a sponge and lemon juice, he rubbed off the ink. Then he cut the cleaned pages in half, rotated them by 90 degrees and bound them together to make a new book, which he proceeded to fill with prayers and liturgies.