Just over 100 years ago in the summer of 1906, a Danish scholar called Johan Ludvig Heiberg travelled to the famous Metochion library of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Constantinople. He had got wind of an intriguing medieval prayer book that had recently been found at the library, and which contained a series of Christian prayers written on parchment recycled from older books. But underneath the scrawlings of a 13th-century medieval monk, the battered manuscript also appeared to contain some strange Greek writing as well as mysterious drawings and mathematical symbols. When Heiberg saw the book, he soon realized that the hidden material in fact contained the thoughts of Archimedes of Syracuse (287–212 BC) — one of the greatest thinkers of the ancient world.

The script hidden under the medieval prayers was not written by Archimedes himself; sadly none of his own handwritten texts survive. However, it does contain seven of Archimedes’ treatises, including the only surviving copy of On Floating Bodies in its original Greek, plus two other treatises — The Method of Mechanical Theorems and the Stomachion — that had never been seen before in Greek or any other language. Scribes had made the first copy of Archimedes’ texts not long after he died and it is believed that the manuscript, which was written in about AD 950, is only about the fifth copy of his original writing.

Having photographed the pages and transcribed as well as he could the text that lay obscured, Heiberg used the manuscript to create an entirely new edition of the complete works of Archimedes, which he published between 1910 and 1915. However, Heiberg was not able to read all of the hidden text in the prayer book. Worse was to come when the book — for reasons that we still do not know — disappeared after it was removed from the library in 1908. It did not resurface for another 90 years, when it was put up for auction at Christie’s in New York.

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