ABSTRACT

On 29th April, 1229 AD, a scribe working in the Holy Land wrote a prayerbook. The parchment he used contained unique texts from the ancient world. The scribe erased these texts and wrote over them. Since 1999 an international group of conservators, scientific imagers, and scholars have been retrieving these texts. They have trancribed seven treatises of Archimedes, three of which are unique to this book, and their readings have changed the history of science. They have also recovered Unique speeches by the Athenian orator Hyperides, and an early commentary on Aristotle's Categories. William Noel, the Director of the Project, will present the results of ten years of research, concentrating on the imaging techniques used to recover the texts.