A palimpsest is a manuscript page, scroll, or book that has been written on, scraped off, and used again. The word palimpsest comes through Latin from two Greek roots (palin + psEn) meaning "scraped again." Romans wrote on wax-coated tablets that could be reused, and a passing use of the rather bookish term "palimpsest" by Cicero seems to refer to this practice. A manuscript (Latin manu scriptus, written by hand), strictly speaking, is any written document that is put down by hand, in contrast to being printed or reproduced some other way. ... A scroll is a roll of parchment, papyrus, or paper which has been written upon. ... Brockhaus Konversations-Lexikon, 1902. ... The Roman Forum was the central area around which ancient Rome developed. ... Cicero at about age 60, from an ancient marble bust Marcus Tullius Cicero January 3, 106 BC – December 7, 43 BC) was an orator, statesman, political theorist, and philosopher of Ancient Rome. ...

Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus from Bibliothèque nationale de France

Download high resolution version (1024x570, 245 KB) This image has been released into the public domain by the copyright holder, its copyright has expired, or it is ineligible for copyright. ... Download high resolution version (1024x570, 245 KB) This image has been released into the public domain by the copyright holder, its copyright has expired, or it is ineligible for copyright. ... Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus, at the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus is an early 5th century Greek manuscript of the Bible, the last in the group of the four great uncial manuscripts of the Greek Bible (see Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Alexandrinus and Codex Vaticanus). ... The new buildings of the library. ...

Development of palimpsests

Because parchment and vellum, both prepared from animal hides, are far more durable than paper or papyrus, most palimpsests known to modern scholars are parchment, which rose in popularity in western Europe after the sixth century. Also, where papyrus was in common use, reuse of writing media was less common because papyrus was cheaper and more expendable than costly parchment. Some papyrus palimpsests still survive, and Romans referred to this custom of washing papyrus ^[1]. The reed from which it was made did not grow in Italy. German parchmenter, 1568 Parchment is a material for the pages of a book or codex, made from fine calf skin, sheep skin or goat skin. ... Vellum was originally a translucent or opaque material produced from calfskin that had been soaked, limed and unhaired, and then dried at normal temperature under tension, usually on a wooden device called a stretching frame. ... A common understanding of Western Europe in modern times. ... Papyrus plant Cyperus papyrus at Kew Gardens, London Papyrus is an early form of paper made from the pith of the papyrus plant, Cyperus papyrus, a wetland sedge that grows to 5 meters (15 ft) in height and was once abundant in the Nile Delta of Egypt. ...

With the passing of time the faint remains of the former writing that had been washed from parchment or vellum, using milk and oat bran, would reappear enough so that scholars can make out the text (which they call the scriptio inferior, the "underwriting") and decipher it. In the later Middle Ages the surface of the vellum was usually scraped away with powdered pumice, irretrievably losing the writing. Therefore the most valuable palimpsests are those that were overwritten in the early Middle Ages. The Middle Ages formed the middle period in a traditional schematic division of European history into three ages: the classical civilization of Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modern times, beginning with the Renaissance. ...

Modern decipherment

Scholars of the nineteenth century used chemical means to read palimpsests that were sometimes very destructive, using tincture of gall or later, ammonium hydrosulfate. Modern methods using ultraviolet and photography are less damaging. Superexposed photographs exposed in various light spectra, a technique called "multispectral filming," can bring up the contrast of faded ink against parchment that is too indistinct to be read by eye in normal light. Innovative digitized images have come to aid scholars in deciphering unreadable palimpsests. In medicine, a tincture is an alcoholic extract (e. ... Kalanchoë infected with crown-gall using Agrobacterium tumefaciens. ... Ultraviolet (UV) light is electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength shorter than that of visible light, but longer than soft X-rays. ... Digitizing, or digitization, is the process of turning an analog signal into a digital representation of that signal. ...

The palimpsest as a form of destruction

Pagan manuscripts have often only survived as palimpsests. Much of the cultural heritage of Antiquity that is commonly said to have been preserved by the Church was actually transmitted inadvertently, through palimpsests.^{[citation needed]} The primary cause of the purposeful destruction of vellum manuscripts was the dearth or cost of material. In the case of Greek manuscripts, so great was the consumption of old codices for the sake of the material, that a synodal decree of the year 691 forbade the destruction of manuscripts of the Scriptures or the church fathers, imperfect or injured volumes excepted. Such a decree put added pressure on retrieving the vellum on which secular manuscripts were written. The decline of the vellum trade with the introduction of paper exacerbated the scarcity, which was only to be made good by recourse to material already once used. first page of the Codex Argenteus A codex (Latin for block of wood, book; plural codices) is a handwritten book, in general, one produced from Late Antiquity through the Middle Ages. ... Events The building of the Dome of the Rock is completed People Theuderic III succeeded by Clovis III Wilfrid, Bishop of Northumbria, expelled to Mercia See also Unterseeboot 691 Categories: 691 ... Many religions and spiritual movements hold certain written texts (or series of spoken legends not traditionally written down) to be sacred. ... The Church Fathers or Fathers of the Church are the early and influential theologians and writers in the Christian church, particularly those of the first five centuries of Christian history. ...

Cultural considerations combined with such economic ones to motivate the creation of palimpsests. The demand for new texts might outstrip the availability of parchment in some centers, yet the existence of cleaned parchment that was never overwritten suggests that there was also a spiritual motivation, to sanctify pagan text by overlaying it with the word of God, somewhat as pagan sites were overlaid with Christian churches to hallow pagan ground. Or the pagan texts may have merely appeared irrelevant. Texts most susceptible to being overwritten included obsolete legal and liturgical ones, sometimes of intense interest to the historian. Early Latin translations of Scripture were rendered obsolete by Jerome's Vulgate. Texts might be in foreign languages or written in unfamiliar scripts that had become illegible in time. The codices themselves might be already damaged or incomplete. Heretical texts were dangerous to harbor: there were compelling political and religious reasons to destroy texts viewed as heresy, and to reuse the media was less wasteful than simply to burn the books. The Vulgate Bible is an early 5th century translation of the Bible into Latin made by St. ... Heresy, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is a theological or religious opinion or doctrine maintained in opposition, or held to be contrary, to the Catholic or Orthodox doctrine of the Christian Church, or, by extension, to that of any church, creed, or religious system, considered as orthodox. ...

Vast destruction of the broad quartos of the early centuries of our era took place in the period which followed the fall of the Roman Empire, but palimpsests were also created as new texts were required during the Carolingian renaissance. The most valuable Latin palimpsests are found in the codices which were remade from the early large folios in the seventh to the ninth centuries. It has been noticed that no entire work is generally found in any instance in the original text of a palimpsest, but that portions of many works have been taken to make up a single volume. An exception is the Archimedes palimpsest (see below). On the whole, Early Medieval scribes were indiscriminate in supplying themselves with material from any old volumes that happened to be at hand. Quarto has several meanings: In bookbinding and publishing, quarto indicates the book size which results when four leaves of the book are created from a standard size sheet of paper. ... The Roman Empire is not the Holy Roman Empire (843-1806). ... Sample of Carolingian minuscule, one of the products of the Carolingian Renaissance. ... Latin is an ancient Indo-European language. ...

Some famous palimpsests

• The Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris: portions of the Old and New Testaments in Greek, attributed to the fifth century, are covered with works of Ephraem the Syrian in a hand of the twelfth century
• Among the Syriac manuscripts obtained from the Nitrian desert in Egypt, British Museum, London: important Greek texts
• A volume containing a work of Severus of Antioch of the beginning of the ninth century is written on palimpsest leaves taken from sixth century manuscripts of the Iliad and the Gospel of St Luke, both of the sixth century, and the Euclid's Elements of the seventh or eighth century, British Museum
• A double palimpsest, in which a text of St John Chrysostom, in Syriac, of the ninth or tenth century, covers a Latin grammatical treatise in a cursive hand of the sixth century, which in its turn has displaced the Latin annals of the historian Granius Licinianus, of the fifth century, British Museum.
• The only known hyper-palimpsest: the Novgorod Codex, in which maybe hundreds of texts have left their traces on the wooden back wall of a wax tablet
• The Ambrosian Plautus, in rustic capitals, of the fourth or fifth century, re-written with portions of the Bible in the ninth century, Ambrosian Library
• Cicero, De republica in uncials, of the fourth century, covered by St Augustine on the Psalms, of the seventh century, Vatican Library
• Codex Theodosianus of Turin, of the fifth or sixth century
• the Fasti Consulares of Verona, of A.D. 486
• the Arian fragment of the Vatican, of the fifth century
• the letters of Cornelius Fronto
• the Archimedes Palimpsest, a work of the great Syracusan mathematician copied onto parchment in the tenth century and overwritten by a liturgical text in the twelfth century
• Sinaitic Palimpsest
• the unique copy of a Greek grammatical text composed by Herodian for the emperor Marcus Aurelius in the second century, preserved in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna

Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus, at the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus is an early 5th century Greek manuscript of the Bible, the last in the group of the four great uncial manuscripts of the Greek Bible (see Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Alexandrinus and Codex Vaticanus). ... The new buildings of the library. ... Ephrem the Syrian (Syriac: , ;Greek: ; Latin: Ephraem Syrus; 306–373) was a deacon, prolific Syriac language hymn writer and theologian of the 4th century. ... The centre of the museum was redeveloped in 2000 to become the Great Court, with a tessellated glass roof by Foster and Partners surrounding the original Reading Room. ... Severus, patriarch of Antioch (AD 512 - 519), a native of Sozopolis in Pisidia, by birth and education a pagan, baptized in the martyry of Leontius at Tripolis (Evagr. ... The Iliad (Ancient Greek , Ilias) is, together with the Odyssey, one of the two principal ancient Greek epic poems. ... The Gospel of Luke is the third of the four canonical Gospels of the New Testament, which tell the story of Jesus life, death, and resurrection. ... The frontispiece of Sir Henry Billingsleys first English version of Euclids Elements, 1570 Euclids Elements (Greek: ) is a mathematical and geometric treatise, consisting of 13 books, written by the Hellenistic mathematician Euclid in Egypt during the early 3rd century BC. It comprises a collection of definitions, postulates... Saint John Chrysostom John Chrysostom (347 - 407) was a notable Christian bishop and preacher from the 4th and 5th centuries in Syria and Constantinople. ... Syriac ( Suryāyā) is an Eastern Aramaic language that was once spoken across much of the Fertile Crescent. ... Granius Licinianus was a Roman annalist, believed to have lived in the age of the Antonines (2nd century AD). ... First page of the Novgorod Codex Novgorod Codex (Russian Новгородский кодекс) is a name for the oldest book of Rus’, unearthed on July 13, 2000 in Novgorod. ... Titus Maccius Plautus (born at Sarsina, Umbria in 254 B.C.) was a comic playwright in the time of the Roman Republic. ... For other uses, see Bible (disambiguation). ... Cicero at about age 60, from an ancient marble bust Marcus Tullius Cicero January 3, 106 BC – December 7, 43 BC) was an orator, statesman, political theorist, and philosopher of Ancient Rome. ... De re publica is a work by Cicero, written in six books 54-51 BC, in the format of a Socratic dialogue, that is to say: Scipio Africanus Minor (who had died a few decades before Cicero was born) takes the role of wise old man, that is an obligatory... The Book of Kells, c. ... For the first Archbishop of Canterbury, see Saint Augustine of Canterbury Aurelius Augustinus, Augustine of Hippo, or Saint Augustine (November 13, 354 – August 28, 430) was one of the most important figures in the development of Western Christianity. ... Psalms (Hebrew: Tehilim, תהילים) is a book of the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh. ... The Vatican Library (Latin: Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana) is the library of the Holy See, located in Vatican City. ... The Codex Theodosianus (Book of Theodosius) was a compilation of the laws of the Roman Empire under the Christian emperors since 312. ... Turin (Italian: ; Piedmontese: Turin) is a major industrial city in north-western Italy, capital of the Piedmont region, located mainly on the west bank of the Po River. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... Map of Italy showing Verona in the north Verona (population est. ... Marcus Cornelius Fronto (c. ... The Archimedes Palimpsest is a palimpsest on parchment in the form of a codex which originally was a copy of an otherwise unknown work of the ancient mathematician, physicist, and engineer Archimedes of Syracuse. ... The Sinaitic Palimpsest of Saint Catherines Monastery, Mount Sinai is a late 4th century manuscript of the four canonical gospels of the New Testament. ... For the grammarian, see Aelius Herodianus. ... Imperator Caesar Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus (April 26, 121[1] – March 17, 180) was Roman Emperor from 161 to his death. ...

Alternate usages

The word palimpsest also refers to a plaque which has been turned around and engraved on what was originally the back side. The word plaque or placque may mean: Wiktionary has related dictionary definitions, such as: plaque, placque Dental plaque, a yellowish film that builds up on the teeth Atheromatous plaque, a buildup of fatty deposits within the wall of a blood vessel Mucoid plaque, a supposed thick coating of plaque in...

In planetary astronomy, ancient lunar craters whose relief has disappeared from subsequent volcanic outpourings, leaving only a "ghost" of a rim are also known as palimpsests. Icy surfaces of natural satellites like Callisto and Ganymede preserve hints of their history in these rings, where the crater's relief has been effaced by creep of the icy surface ("viscous relaxation"). Planetary science, also known as planetology or planetary astronomy, is the science of planets, or planetary systems, and the solar system. ... Tycho crater on Earths moon. ... Atmospheric characteristics Atmospheric pressure trace Carbon dioxide 100% Callisto (kə-lis-toe, IPA: ; Greek Καλλιστώ) is a moon of the planet Jupiter, discovered in 1610 by Galileo Galilei. ... Atmospheric characteristics Atmospheric pressure trace Oxygen 100% Ganymede (gan-ə-meed, IPA: ; Greek Γανυμήδης) is Jupiters largest moon, and indeed the largest moon in the entire solar system; it is larger in diameter than Mercury but only about half its mass. ...

In medicine it is used to describe an episode of acute anterograde amnesia without loss of consciousness, brought on by the ingestion of alcohol or other substances; 'alcoholic palimpsest'

Architects, archaeologists and design historians sometimes use the word to describe the accumulated iterations of a design or a site, whether in literal layers of archaeological remains, or by the figurative accumulation and reinforcement of design ideas over time. An excellent example of this can be seen at The Tower of London, where construction began in the 11th century and the site continues to develop to this day. The Tower of London, seen from the river, with a view of the water gate called Traitors Gate. ...

Uses in culture

• Gore Vidal titled his memoirs Palimpsest
• A few frames at the beginning of the film version of Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose refer to the film as a palimpsest.
• Palimpsest is an online arts discussion forum.
• George Benjamin has written a major orchestral work titled "Palimpsests"
• Orwell's revenge : the 1984 palimpsest, book by Peter W. Huber, ISBN 0-02-915335-2
• The film adaptation of Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose calls itself "A palimpsest of Umberto Eco's novel." A misuse it seems, but a nice pretension.

Gore Vidal, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1948 Eugene Luther Gore Vidal (born October 3, 1925), known as Gore Vidal, is a prolific and versatile American writer of novels, stage plays, screenplays, and essays and has been a public and often controversial figure on both the American literary and political... Photo of Umberto Eco by Robert Birnbaum Umberto Eco (born January 5, 1932) is an Italian medievalist, philosopher and novelist, best known for his novel The Name of the Rose and his many essays. ... For the 1980 novel and 1986 movie of very similar name, see The Name of the Rose. ...

Notes

1. ^ According to Suetonius, Augustus, "though he began a tragedy with great zest, becoming dissatisfied with the style, he obliterated the whole; and his friends saying to him, What is your Ajax doing? He answered, My Ajax met with a sponge." (Augustus, 85).

This article is about the Roman historian. ... Augustus (Latin: IMPERATOR CAESAR DIVI FILIVS AVGVSTVS;[1] September 23, 63 BC – August 19, AD 14), known as Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus (in English Octavian) for the period of his life prior to 27 BC, was the first and among the most important of the Roman Emperors. ... // Ajax can refer to: Mythology and literature Ajax (mythology), also known as Telamonian Ajax or Ajax the Great, a Greek hero and legendary king of Salamis who plays an important role in Homers Iliad Ajax the Lesser, or Oilean Ajax, a Greek hero and legendary king of Locris who...

External links

• OPIB Virtual Renaissance Network activities in digitizing European palimpsests
• Brief note on economic and cultural considerations in production of palimpsests