A missing folio of the 10th century Archimedes Palimpsest identified in France
A page long presumed lost from the Archimedes Palimpsest – one of the most celebrated Greek manuscripts in existence – has been identified at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Blois (France) by Victor Gysembergh, a researcher at the Centre Léon Robin (CNRS/Sorbonne Université). The discovery was published on 6 March 2026 in the Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik.
A famous palimpsest of Byzantine origins.
The Archimedes Palimpsest is a tenth-century Greek manuscript, produced squarely within the Byzantine cultural sphere, and preserving several treatises by Archimedes of Syracuse. Like many Byzantine codices, it fell victim to the widespread medieval practice of palimpsesting: the original mathematical text was partially erased so that the expensive animal-skin parchment could be reused for other writings, in this case liturgical content. The reuse of pergamena was common throughout the Byzantine world, where the cost of vellum made recycling an economic necessity, and the Archimedes Palimpsest stands as one of the most consequential – and most lamented – instances of this practice.
The manuscript’s later history reflects the broader turbulences of the post-Byzantine Mediterranean. It was held in Jerusalem and subsequently in Constantinople before passing, in the early twentieth century, into a private collection in France. In 1996, the French Ministry of Culture authorised its export and sale at auction; it is now in private ownership and held on deposit at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.
A missing folio recovered.
During the manuscript’s long journey to its current owner, three pages attested in early photographs went missing and were considered definitively lost. The folio now identified in Blois is one of these: Gysembergh was able to confirm unambiguously, by comparison with photographs taken by the Danish philologist Johan Ludvig Heiberg in 1906 (today held at the Royal Library of Denmark), that the leaf corresponds to folio 123 of the palimpsest. It contains an extract from On the Sphere and Cylinder, Book I, propositions 39 to 41.
The physical state of the folio is characteristic of the complex layering that defines palimpsest manuscripts. On one face, a text of prayers partially overlays geometric figures and the Archimedean text – which remains largely legible. The other face, however, is concealed beneath an illumination added in 1942 by the manuscript owner – who thus tried to increase the mercantile value of the manuscript. It depicts the prophet Daniel flanked by two lions, rendering the underlying ancient text inaccessible to conventional observation.
Prospects for future analysis.
Gysembergh intends, subject to the necessary authorisations, to conduct multispectral imaging campaigns within approximately one year, combined with X-ray fluorescence analysis on a synchrotron, in order to attempt to reveal the text masked by the illumination. This approach mirrors, and would surpass in power, the multispectral imaging campaign conducted on the full palimpsest in the early 2000s – a campaign that successfully recovered major Archimedean texts and previously unknown fragments of ancient literary and philosophical works, but left several pages unread.
The Blois discovery accordingly renews the broader case for re-examining the entire Archimedes Palimpsest with the more powerful imaging technologies now available, with a view to producing a new and more complete reading of the manuscript.
A note on significance.
For students of Byzantine manuscript culture, this find is a reminder of how much remains to be recovered from the material record of Byzantine book production and its aftermath. The palimpsest’s tenth-century copyist, working within the learned environment of middle Byzantium, could not have anticipated that the text he chose to efface would one day be more sought-after than the prayers he wrote in its place — nor that the leaf would resurface, centuries later, in a museum in the Loire Valley.
However, and worth noting, the illustration was added in 1942 by the owner of the manuscript,
Source: CNRS press release, 9 March 2026.
Full article: Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, published 6 March 2026.
Photography credit: © Blois, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Inv. 73.7.52. Photographie IRHT-CNRS
