But what the team found was a piece of history: a long-lost page from a legendary manuscript by the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes that had been languishing, forgotten, in the archives of a French museum.
Archimedes, considered one of the greatest mathematicians and inventors in history, lived in the 3rd century BC in the city of Syracuse.
Among his many discoveries was the principle of buoyancy, which he discovered while getting out of a bathtub, prompting him to shout “Eureka!”
This treatise and many of his others survived through the centuries in a manuscript called the palimpsest, which changed hands many times.
A palimpsest is a handwritten scroll from which the original text has been scratched before being rewritten, sometimes several times.
Victor Gysembergh, the researcher at France’s CNRS research center who found the missing page from Archimedes’ palimpsest, told AFP it was a “treasure of lost texts from antiquity.”
In addition to Archimedes’ mathematical advances, the manuscript contains his “philosophical, literary and religious” writings, Gysembergh enthused.
The palimpsest itself was not written by the hand of Archimedes, but was copied during 900 AD
About two centuries later, the text was erased and reused as a Christian prayer book.
From Constantinople to Bezos?
That was just the beginning of the journey of this unique manuscript, whose fate followed the twists and turns of history.
In the 19th century, it was in the hands of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, including inside a library in Constantinople, modern-day Istanbul.
Danish historian Johan Ludvig Heiberg found the palimpsest there and took photographs of each page in 1906.
However, at some point during World War I, the document disappeared without a trace.
Somehow it ended up in the private collection of a French family, who finally auctioned it in 1998.
It was purchased by an anonymous Western businessman.
Sources cited by the German newspaper Der Spiegel stated that it was Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, although the true identity is unknown.
But three of the 177 pages of the palimpsest were missing.
This is where Gysembergh comes into play.
“I am interested in palimpsests because they are a way to discover lost texts,” says the lead author of a study published in the German Journal of Papyrology and Epigraphy.
Sometimes Gysembergh searches for palimpsests in libraries in different cities for fun.
The missing Archimedes page was discovered “partly because of a prank,” he said.
One day he was chatting with his office colleagues when he mentioned that the ancient kings of France had kept part of their library in the city of Blois, in central France.
“Hey, let’s see if there’s a palimpsest in Blois,” he told his colleagues.
“Very unexpected”
Gysembergh was surprised to find a hit about Arca (an online catalog of digitized manuscripts) at the city’s fine arts museum.
“It was very unexpected to come across a Greek manuscript,” Gysembergh said.
“And even more so finding a scientific treatise from the 10th century!”
The researcher then compared the pages with photographs of the Archimedes palimpsest taken in 1906.
The writing, the geometric figures and even the errors matched perfectly, he said.
One side of the page contains Archimedes’ treatise “On the Sphere and the Cylinder”, which was the first time that the surface of a sphere and its volume were described in such detail.
On the other side is a newer drawing, believed to have been added in the 20th century in an attempt to increase the value of the document.
To decipher the text beneath the drawing, Gysembergh hopes to conduct high-tech analyses, such as multispectral imaging and X-ray fluorescence, over the next year.
He also hopes this breakthrough will help find the other two missing pages of the palimpsest.
“Until this discovery, we had no reason to expect to ever find them,” he said.
“Now, if institutions or private collectors have this type of manuscript, they should think about whether it could be one of the other missing pages.”
