Byzantium · 10th century AD · Blois, Centre-Val de Loire, France
Lost page of Byzantine Archimedes manuscript found in French museum
The 10th-century leaf, identified in Blois by CNRS researcher Victor Gysembergh, carries part of On the Sphere and the Cylinder and is half hidden under a painting added around 1942.
Peer-reviewed paper
Blois, France A leaf missing for decades from the Archimedes Palimpsest has been identified in the collection of the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Blois, central France. The Palimpsest is a 10th-century Greek manuscript that preserves several treatises by the mathematician Archimedes of Syracuse. The page, folio 123 of the codex, carries part of the treatise On the Sphere and the Cylinder. One of its sides is covered by a painting of the prophet Daniel with two lions, added around 1942.
Victor Gysembergh made the identification. He is a researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). He is affiliated with the Léon Robin Centre for Research on Ancient Thought, a joint unit of the CNRS and Sorbonne University.
He published the finding in the 6 March 2026 issue of the German journal Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik. According to the Spanish science site La Brújula Verde, Gysembergh recognised the leaf through his own expertise. He did not find it through a systematic search of the museum's holdings. The leaf is registered in Blois under inventory number 73.7.52.
Matched to photographs taken in Constantinople
A palimpsest is a manuscript whose original text was scraped off so that the parchment could be reused. In this case, the copy of Archimedes was overwritten with religious texts during the Middle Ages. Parchment was costly then, and reuse was common. Specialists had already listed folio 123 as lost after comparing old photographs of the manuscript with its present state.
The rest of the codex is kept at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore and belongs to a private owner. The French government authorised its export in 1996, after a long judicial and administrative process.
The decisive evidence was a set of photographic plates. The classical philologist Johan Ludvig Heiberg made them between 1906 and 1908, while the manuscript was still in Constantinople, modern Istanbul. The plates are now in the Royal Danish Library.
Until a few years ago, the plates were the only reliable record for studying the text. The manuscript itself had been badly damaged and rewritten over the centuries. Gysembergh compared one of these plates directly with the Blois leaf. He concluded that they show the same page.
It is not known exactly when the leaf was separated. It was removed at some point in the 20th century. In that period the manuscript passed from Constantinople through private collections in Paris and elsewhere to Baltimore. How the leaf reached the museum in Blois has not been reported.
A prayer on one side, a painting on the other
On one side of the leaf, propositions 39 to 41 of the first book of On the Sphere and the Cylinder can still largely be read. A medieval prayer partly covers the Greek text. The geometric figures that accompany the treatise remain visible, as does much of the original writing. This made the first identification possible.
The other side is harder. There the text of Archimedes is hidden under the image of Daniel and the lions. According to the notes kept with the piece and the research by Gysembergh's team, the image was painted directly onto the parchment. This was done at the initiative of the man who owned the manuscript at the time.
The team's hypothesis is that he wanted to raise the codex's commercial value or make it more attractive. Beneath the paint, the text cannot be read with conventional methods.
The manuscript was last studied in depth in the early 2000s. A multidisciplinary team then used multispectral imaging. That campaign recovered texts by Archimedes that had been thought lost. It also recovered fragments of other classical authors.
Gysembergh has said he will seek the necessary permissions to analyse the leaf within about a year. The plan combines advanced multispectral imaging with X-ray fluorescence analysis using light from a synchrotron.
The aim is to see through the 1942 paint. The analysis should tell the chemical make-up of the inks apart from the pigments of the painting. This covers the inks of both the Archimedes text and the medieval prayer. The goal is to read the full text on that side again.
The researchers also argue that current techniques are considerably more powerful than those of twenty years ago. Applying them to the whole manuscript, they say, could improve the reading of passages that the earlier campaign left partly undeciphered.
Sources
- A Lost Page of an Archimedes Manuscript Is Found, with an Enigmatic Image Added Over the Ancient Text (La Brújula Verde)
Paper: Victor Gysembergh, "A leaf from the Archimedes palimpsest rediscovered in Blois", Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, 6 March 2026.
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