In a 13th-century book written on parchment, fragments of texts by the ancient Greek orator Hyperides were discovered, shedding light on important episodes in the military history of Athens – Battles of Salamis and Chaeronea. This discovery was made during the clearing of the “palimpsest of Archimedes” already known to scientists.
The authorship of Hyperides in the palimpsest of Archimedes was established by a researcher from Riga Natalie Tchernetska. She managed, in particular, to read that in the naval battle of the Greeks with the Persians at Salamis (480 BC), 220 ships took part on the Hellenes’ side.
About the Battle of Chaeronea (338 BC), when the Macedonians under the command of King Philip II and his son Alexander (the future Alexander the Great) defeated the combined forces of Athens and Boeotia, Geperides wrote that the Athenian defeat was accidental and not the result of a strategic miscalculation.
Hyperides was a supporter and follower of the greatest Athenian orator and politician Demosthenes. From the newly discovered text it follows that the trial of Demosthenes took place after the Battle of Chaeronea, and not before it, as was previously believed.
Archimedes’ palimpsest (reused parchment) is part of a large manuscript book created in Constantinople in the 13th century. Scientists learned about the existence of the work of the great mathematician “On the method of mechanical proof of theorems”, erased by a medieval scribe, using the modern method of X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy in the early 2000s. Then it turned out that among the texts scraped from the parchment there were not only fragments from Archimedes, but also other works: the speeches of Hyperides, a philosophical commentary on Aristotle, a Neoplatonic text, scattered pages from the life of a certain saint. Their reading and attribution took years, with final publication scheduled for 2008.
Palimpsest of Archimedes was first discovered in 1906. In the 1920s, he disappeared without a trace and reappeared only in 1998. An anonymous collector donated the book to the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore for restoration and reading. Lenta.ru reports this with reference to The New York Times.
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