Archimedes in a prayer book

Archimedes was the greatest Greek mathematician. He was born in Syracuse in 287BCE. He was also an astronomer, a physicist, an engineer and an inventor.

All Western science is a series of footnotes to Archimedes. He used mathematics to study and understand nature and the cosmos. He invented a variety of machines and fields of science like hydrostatics, combinatorics, and mathematical physics. His writings were essential for the rebirth and evolution of science. Since the Renaissance, scientists have been looking up to Archimedes.

Archimedes lived in the 3rd century BCE, probably the golden age of Greek science. This is a period that crowned the global conquests of Alexander the Great in the 4th century BCE. Alexander and his successors spread Hellenic civilisation throughout Asia and the Middle East while uniting Greece for the first time.

The Greek kings of Alexander’s empire, especially those who ruled Egypt, created the infrastructure for a rational commonwealth characterised by scientific exploration, state-funded research, the scholarly study of earlier Greek culture and the editing of the Greek classics.

They also founded and supported great scientific institutions like the Library of Alexandria, known in Greek as the Mouseion or the Home of the Muses, goddesses of learning. Lucio Russo, Italian mathematician and historian of science, concluded that from the late 4th to the late 2nd century BCE, the Greek-speaking countries brought into being “an explosion of objective knowledge about the external world”.

Archimedes contributed a lot to that explosion of knowledge. In fact, he was one of the founding fathers of the Greek scientific revolution. He probably did his advanced studies in Alexandria that was, next to Athens, the leading centre of science and Hellenic culture. He then became the science advisor to the King of Syracuse, Hieron II, employing his engineering and scientific skills for the construction of powerful weapons in order to defend Syracuse against Roman aggression.

Thanks to the ingenuity of Archimedes, Syracuse was invulnerable. The Romans, however, were waging a life and death war against the Carthaginians and Syracuse, they concluded, favoured their enemies. The Romans knew that Archimedes was the brain behind the defences of Syracuse. They wanted him, dead or alive. A traitor made that possible in 212BCE. The Romans captured Syracuse and, in the midst of looting and carnage, a Roman soldier killed Archimedes.

The works of Archimedes are models of brevity, conciseness and clarity. Scholars copied and spread them throughout the Greek world.

Rome and Christianity end the Greek scientific revolution

In 146BCE, the Romans obliterated Carthage and Corinth and occupied Greece. Some five and a half centuries later, an unprecedented event took place.

The Roman Emperor Constantine I, c.285-337, abandoned the traditional religion of the Greeks and Romans in favour of a Jewish heretical sect known as Christianity. Then he used his absolute power to abolish Greek and Roman polytheism in favour of Christianity, demanding the “conversion” of Greeks and Romans to the new Jesus religion, which he made state religion.

What followed in the 4th century and after had the force of a cataclysm, breaking apart the millennia-old Hellenic civilisation and turning the Greek world upside down. The Christian leaders of the Roman Empire outsourced the destruction of the Greek temples to northern European barbarians. Teams of black-robed monks guided Gothic troops to Eleusis and other Hellenic religious sites for the demolition of Greek temples. Emperor Theodosius abolished the Olympics in 393; in mid-6th century, Emperor Justinian shut down Hellenic schools in Greece and the empire, including the 900-year-old university of Athens founded by Plato; and imperial and Christian officials burned several public libraries, making Hellenic culture and its gods a sin.

Lucio Russo says that after the 4th century “obscurantism and stasis” smothered Europe, blocking “most avenues of intellectual development for a thousand years”.

This genocide, which would never have happened without the war Christianity fought against the Greeks, ushered in an era of darkness in Greece and Europe while it was responsible for the catastrophic loss of most of the scientific, literary, artistic and philosophical works of ancient Greek thinkers and scholars. As a result, many of the works of Archimedes did not make it to our day.

Fortunately, the Greeks of New Rome or Byzantium, which included Greece, did not have an Inquisition. The campaigns of the church against the classics were severe but sporadic. The educated people of Byzantium considered themselves Greeks, so, despite paroxysms of clerical intolerance, they protected enough of the classical texts for the continuation of their culture.

Christian and Muslim enemies, however, surrounded Byzantium. Not only was Byzantium largely Greek in culture, but it was also wealthy and, in contrast to Rome and Western Europe that had been taken over by barbarians, Byzantium had kept the barbarians at bay - until 1204.

During that year, 1204, Christian armies from Western Europe sacked Constantinople, burning and looting the city with the ferocity of barbarians.

The surviving ancient Greek culture in Constantinople took a devastating blow from the European crusaders. It never recovered. Perhaps, the plunder and occupation of Constantinople by Christian Europeans who hated Christian Greeks led to the export of Greek books to other “safe” heavens.

Putting Archimedes in a tomb

One such ancient Greek book was that containing “The Method”, “The Floating Bodies” and “The Stomachion” of Archimedes, which ended up in the library of a Greek monastery in Jerusalem. Yet, the fate of Archimedes’ book, copied in 975 in Constantinople, was almost worse than death.

In 1229, monks ripped the Archimedes book and other ancient Greek books apart, folding their large vellum folios to create an Euchologion or prayer book. The monks used orange juice to delete the original writing on the vellum or scraped off the ancient Greek text with a knife and then used the “clean” folios for writing their hymns and prayers, thus manufacturing a cultural nightmare, which, in Greek, palimpsest, captures this cultural disaster: creating a book by the violence of rubbing or scraping off again the original writing. In this case, a prayer book palimpsest came into being in 1229 after its clerical publishers trashed the wisdom of Archimedes and other Greeks.

Next, after centuries of quiet existence as a prayer book, the Archimedes palimpsest ends up in a monastery in Constantinople. In 1906, the Danish philologist Johan Ludvig Heiberg put the prayer book under a magnifying glass. He transcribed as much of the Archimedes text as he could. His study was of inestimable value, especially for any future decipherment of the palimpsest text.

The plunder of the buried Archimedes

We don’t know what happened to the Archimedes palimpsest after Heiberg studied it in 1906 and published his findings in the 1910s. World War I, 1914-1918, and the war between Greece and Turkey in the early 1920s provided the perfect excuse for the continued indifference of the scholarly community for Archimedes and the horrendous treatment of the palimpsest at the hands of its “owners”.

According to Reviel Netz, classics professor at Stanford University, and William Noel, curator of manuscripts at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, the worst damage to the Archimedes palimpsest occurred during the 20th century.

In the 1920s, dealers of antiquities bought or stole the palimpsest from the monks of the Metochion monastery in Constantinople. The “owner” of the palimpsest brought the book to France and sold it to a Frenchman who passed it to his daughter who, in 1998, sold it to an anonymous American (Mr. B) for $ 2 million.

Noel had the admirable insight of convincing this wealthy man to let the Walters Art Museum exhibit the palimpsest and, above all, use the latest imaging technologies to read the Archimedes text lying under the Christian prayers.

The good will, almost Renaissance-like philhellenism, and generosity of the rich Archimedes patron and especially the co-operation of Netz and Noel resulted in the 2007 book, The Archimedes Codex, an interesting and extremely important study about the Archimedes palimpsest and the technological trials, and they were extensive and difficult, in deciphering a manuscript in an appalling state of disintegration and appearance. For example, Abigail Quandt, a colleague of Noel at the Walters Art Museum, took four years in disassembling the folios of the manuscript. Noel documented how imaging experts and classical scholars, following the leads of Heiberg, managed to decode the hidden Archimedes text.

The Homer of mathematics

This text, still unpublished, and the known works of Archimedes as well as the writings of other Greek scientists leave little doubt the Greeks invented science and the scientific method.

This is a contested terrain because modern scientists deny the Greeks the invention of science. E.J. Dijksterhuis, Dutch professor of the history of mathematics and natural sciences and expert on Archimedes, explains the connections of modern science to Greek science this way.

Every inquiry about the sources of present-day knowledge is bound to lead ultimately to Hellas; it does so immediately where the foundation of mathematics and natural science are concerned, and in the latter case it will undoubtedly come up against Aristotle, who like no other Hellene, perhaps like no other scholar of any age, dominated the evolution of scientific thought.

Ancient Greek scholars like Polybios and Plutarch admired the mathematical insight of Archimedes, his technological innovations, and his patriotism. Plutarch was convinced that Archimedes was consumed with a passion for science, being “truly possessed by the Muses”.

Two thousand years later, Thomas L. Heath, the 19th-century British editor of Archimedes, had no doubt that Archimedes was “perhaps the greatest mathematical genius that the world has ever seen”.

In solving his geometry propositions, Archimedes brought together mathematics and physics, setting the foundations of calculus and, therefore, helping us to understand the meaning of infinity. This knowledge of measuring curves and, in general, using mathematics as a language of nature also explains the universe. Archimedes was thus instrumental for the reinvention of the sciences of the physical world, the kind of science that Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton developed.

Archimedes and the Greeks knew all about the actual infinity. Euclid, another mathematical genius who flourished around 300BCE, certainly did and, possibly, the philosopher Zeno of Elea, c.490-after 445BCE, was well acquainted with the concept of infinity.

Sometimes Greeks used infinity but, purposefully, they avoided it. The Greeks, Nets says, “were ahead of the infinity game … Archimedes was capable of producing the kind of science of physics that Galileo and Newton produced. He made the decision not to - other things occupied his mind.”

Galileo had a tremendous respect for Archimedes whose mathematical physics became the core and spark of his own science. He started studying Archimedes early on in his life. He admitted that he found “infinite astonishment” in the works of Archimedes.

In general, Archimedes measured curves, shaping calculus in the process. He invented combinatorics, counting and figuring out the number of possible solutions to a problem. This is at the core of our understanding of the theory of probability.

These, among many other great mathematical and technological achievements, form the underbelly of computer and imaging science that is, according to Netz, fundamentally, Archimedean. It was that science that, serendipitously, helped in the decipherment of the hidden and almost destroyed works of Archimedes.

In the extremely long and murky history of the survival of Greek thought, the decipherment of the Archimedes palimpsest is another victory against a ceaseless obscurantism trying to keep the Greeks buried in palimpsests. For that reason, the $2 million Mr. B spent for the Archimedes palimpsest was the best investment he ever made.

When we have a chance to read the excavated Archimedes, we will be able to appreciate reason, science and humanism even more. These are values of Hellenic culture that gave birth to Archimedes who gave birth to Western science.