With the fall of the Roman Empire, a blanket of silence fell over my life and works. With the exception of a small number of Byzantine scholars, such as the famous Mathematical Lion to whom I shall never cease to be indebted, and a few other willing Arab mathematicians come to mind, the three brothers Muhammad, Ahamad and al-Hasan (known as the Banu Musa).

So until the thirteenth century the Latin West knew relatively little of what I had been and what I had done. Even my name faded into oblivion: the sources distorted it into forms derived from Arabic, such as “Ersemides” or “Arsamithes”.

History, however,  also lives through epochal upheavals. It is to one of these that we owe the rediscovery of the undersigned in Europe: the conquest and sacking of Constantinople.

In April 1204, crusaders on their way to the Holy Land to liberate Jerusalem stopped en route to raid the capital of the Byzantine Empire. Its inhabitants considered themselves the sole repositories of classical Romanity and the city held the most important literary treasures of the ancient world, many of them from the ancient Library of Alexandria in Egypt. Among them were some of my writings.

Unlike the hundreds of thousands of volumes that were destroyed, three books containing some of my writings miraculously survived the devastation, probably stolen: what were later called, with little imagination, Codices A, B and C.

Of these three books, most likely written between the ninth and tenth centuries, apparently at the instigation of Leo the Mathematician.  The first, the so-called Codex B, was last seen in 1311 in the Pontifical Library of Viterbo. Then it was the turn of Codex A, which in 1564, before disappearing, was still preserved in Venice. It was thanks to copies of these two manuscripts and their transcription that the masters of the Renaissance, such as dear Leonardo da Vinci who is my permanent guest here, had the opportunity to study some of my work.

Ultimately, by the end of the 1360s, all my legible works were available in Latin, with the exception of the Arenario and the Metodo.

Nothing was known of the third book, the famous Codex C, known today as the   “Archimedes Palimpsest”, a manuscript with an incredible history, which I will discuss in a moment.

Returning to Codices A and B, which arrived in the West in 1269, it was the Flemish chaplain William of Moerbeke, a Dominican residing at the papal court in Viterbo, who translated them into Latin. I thank William for his painstaking work, which was of fundamental importance for the subsequent dissemination of my studies and inventions, which thus at least in part reached some of the most talented men of the Humanism and the Renaissance period, awakening a new interest in my works. Around the middle of the fifteenth century the humanist Tommaso Parentucelli, Pope Nicholas V creator of the Vatican Library, commissioned Jacopo da San Cassiano (also known as Iacobus Cremonensis) to translate Codex A before his final demise.

This copy was in turn transcribed by none other than the great Piero della Francesca, and probably also passed into the hands of Leonardo. The veil that shrouded the mythical Archimedes was definitely torn. The advent of the press did the rest. My works began to circulate throughout Europe, feeding and inspiring scientists of such caliber as Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton. Which is another story.

The Codex C : Archimedes’ Palimpsest

The famous Codex C deserves a separate chapter. Reconstructing at least part of its history is a fascinating journey through the centuries. I will start with the epilogue.

Thursday 29 October 1998: Codex C, 174 parchment folios in which some of my works are transcribed, was auctioned at Christie’s in New York. Given its poor state of preservation, I would never have thought that it could be bought for the incredible sum of $2 million dollars (plus $200,000 in auction fees) by a London book dealer acting on behalf of an anonymous  client.

However, that Codex is really precious. It is the only one to contain two texts of extraordinary value, of which I am very proud: the Method and the Stomachion.

Shortly afterwards, the mysterious buyer entrusted Codex C to the care of William Noel, head of the Antiquarian Books Section of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, offering the book to be studied on the condition that  it would sustain the costs.

Thus ended the fascinating story of the precious Palimpsest, which in its eleven centuries of life had touched three continents, and began an exciting scientific investigation that over the past 20 years has seen the cooperation of paleographers, restorers, analysts, computer scientists and physicists, philologists and historians of mathematics.

You can not enjoy history, however, if you do not know what a palimpsest is and how it is made. From the Latin palimpsestus, a word borrowed from the Greek παλίμψηστος meaning “scraped again”. In the Middle Ages, given the enormous cost of parchment, which at that time was a privileged writing medium, it was quite common practice to reuse written sheets, eliminating the original text no longer considered of interest by washing and scraping it, and then replacing it with another arranged in the same direction (usually in the inter-lineations of the first), or transversal to the first.

Codex C had also undergone this treatment. The amanuensis monk Johannes Myronasche in 1229 had – I feel sick just thinking about it – erased my text and replaced it with transcriptions of prayers and exorcisms.

At this point it is useful to rewind the tape further and follow the traces of Codex C from its disappearance in 1204 to its discovery, from Constantinople to Baltimore, where it arrived after a thousand vicissitudes.

Like A and B, it was miraculously saved from the sacking of the Byzantine capital as I have mentioned. From here the manuscript was taken to Jerusalem and mercilessly transformed into a prayer book. From there it later arrived at the monastery of St Sheba in the Judean desert, where it remained for an unknown length of time.

In 1846 the Codex mysteriously reappeared in the Library of the Holy Sepulchre in Constantinople: the Metochion. In that year the philologist Konstantin von Tischendorf found it and recognised it as a Greek mathematical work. However, he did not understand that it was me. He simply removed a sheet of paper and took it with him to Cambridge, where it remains today. It was Professor Heiberg in Copenhagen who discovered its precious contents. In 1906 he managed to identify the Doric dialect I spoke in the eroded and overwritten text of the palimpsest.

But the vicissitudes of Codex C were not yet over.  From Asia Minor we move on to Europe. Due to the turmoil in Turkey at the end of the First World War, many manuscripts were transferred from the Metochion in Constantinople to the National Library in Athens. Codex C never reached the Greek capital. It disappeared, possibly stolen and sold, only to reappear in the 1930s in Paris, in the hands of the famous Jewish antiquarian, Samuel Guerson, who had bought it from the Armenian Dikran Kelekian, one of the most famous art dealers of the 20th century. When the Nazis entered Paris in 1940, Guerson found himself in difficulty and tried to flee. His possessions had already been seized and only the Palimpsest remained. He suggested to his friend Marie Louis Sirieix that he should buy it. In order to convince him of the value of the manuscript, he made some false miniatures of holy images. Sirieix bought the book and Guerson managed to escape. In all likelihood the manuscript remained hidden in a damp cellar for decades until Anne Sirieix, Marie Louis’ daughter, tried to have it restored, causing further damage. This brings us to your time, and to the New York auction.

We who see the infinite web of things, the regularities and associations that escape others, who unveil them in complicated languages, who use them and turn them into tools to tame nature, people call us geniuses. These rare gifts, for which we can thank the gods, are a property that transcends spatial and temporal boundaries, creating a dense network of relationships, links and connections between people who lived in very distant times and places.

This kinship is definitely, what binds me to Leonardo da Vinci, spanning no less than 17 centuries. Leonardo gave me his deepest admiration, and I had the honor of inspiring many of his creations and studies.

What connects us? Both of us similarly embodied, the aspiration for knowledge of the real world through reasoning and experience. Mankind recognized that  our insatiable and creative curiosity expressed something universal: the deep desire to push our own limits through observation and experimentation.

The imagination of posterity has been greatly impressed by my exploits, all those legends of me, a sage person, who astounded his fellow citizens and opponents with a kind of science spectacle.

This would not have been enough for Leonardo. His fascination must have been the conformity between science and technology, between theory and its practical applications, which I had demonstrated by combining the science of a pure mathematician with the profession of mechanic and inventor of prodigious machines. The continuous and multiple references to me in Leonardo’s writings, drawings and studies give the idea of a pupil studying the master’s texts in the hopes, not always fulfilled, of grasping his master’s secrets and reproducing them. This must be why Leonardo was trying to be rid   of the label of ‘craftsman’ that he received from his training in Verrocchio’s workshop. Instead, he wanted to be recognized as a scientist. Inspiration from classical models gave cultural prestige to his enterprise, just as in the art world the models of the past had become the archetypal reference. Beginning with Humanism, and through the Renaissance, there had been a powerful revival of interest in the science of my time, the Hellenistic period (4th-1st centuries B.C.).

Like some before him, and many more after him, Leonardo wished to reclaim knowledge already present in ancient scientific texts transcribed and translated from Greek, which in those very years began to circulate copiously in Italy. Maybe, just maybe (and Lucio Russo agrees ) the Renaissance “intellectuals” were not able to fully understand our science. They were more interested in the practical and concrete achievements of their illustrious predecessors (perspective, pneumatic machines, hydraulics, anatomy, war machines). My environment was actually full of advanced and highly refined scientists. Alexandria was the driving force, where all disciplines met at the highest level. Something like your MIT, an MIT ad litteram. Just think of my friend Eratosthenes, the first mathematician who managed to provide an extraordinarily precise measurement of the Earth’s meridian. Euclid and his axiomatic method that constructed all geometry. Aristarchus of Samos, inventor of heliocentric astronomy. Hipparchus, the forerunner of trigonometry. We were all protagonists of a scientific revolution so rich that Renaissance men interested in science appeared to be somewhat confused apprentices, even if they were sharp and full of good intentions.

This museum is my home where Leonardo is my favorite guest; it is the best place to delve into our bond. Which is a great way to get to know us both better.

Text freely adapted from Leonardo e Archimede, Encounter of Geniuses by Gastone Saletnich