site: reviews — Saugerties Lighthouse, Agloe, The Archimedes Palimpsest (graduate from finds)

src/content/find/2026/08/archimedes-palimpsest/index.mdx

@@ -1,14 +1,15 @@
 ---
 name: "The Archimedes Palimpsest"
-subtitle: "A prayer book written across the only surviving copy of two Archimedes works"
+subtitle: "A prayer book written across the only surviving Greek copy of three Archimedes works"
 date: 2026-08-01
 shortlist: true
+promotedTo: "archimedes-palimpsest"
 link: "https://www.openculture.com/2026/07/how-a-13th-century-monk-created-a-manuscript-that-erased-archimedes.html"
 linkText: "openculture.com"
 source: "Open Culture"
 topics: [history-and-archives, learning-and-reference]
 tags: [manuscript, mathematics, archive, imaging]
-description: "In 1229 a monk scraped a Greek codex for parchment and wrote a prayer book across it at right angles. The codex was Archimedes, and the mathematics survived underneath."
+description: "A prayer book finished in 1229 was written across seven scraped manuscripts. One was Archimedes, and the mathematics survived underneath the liturgy."
 ---
 
-In Jerusalem in 1229 a monk named Johannes Myronas needed parchment, so he scraped an old Greek codex clean, cut the leaves down and wrote a prayer book across them at right angles. The codex was Archimedes. Scraping, it turns out, is not erasing: the mathematics stayed on the page as a ghost beneath the liturgy, and imaging has since recovered from it two treatises that exist in no other copy anywhere.
+A prayer book finished by April 1229, probably in Jerusalem, was made the ordinary way: seven older manuscripts taken apart, scraped back, split down the middle, turned ninety degrees and written across. One of the seven was Archimedes. Scraping, it turns out, is not erasing — the mathematics stayed on the page beneath the liturgy, and imaging has since pulled out of it two treatises that exist in no other copy in any language, plus the only Greek text of a third.