Table of Contents
Table of Figures
This book is dedicated to Lynn,
to Maya, Darya, and Tamara,
and to Ioannes Myronas
Preface
Nicetas Choniates, the brother of the Archbishop of Athens, witnessed the greatest calamity that ever befell the world of learning. In April 1204, Christian soldiers on a mission to liberate Jerusalem stopped short of their goal and sacked Constantinople, the richest city in Europe. Nicetas gave an eyewitness account of the carnage.The sumptuous treasure of the great church of Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom) was broken into bits and distributed among the soldiers. Mules were led to the very sanctuary of the church to carry the loot away. A harlot, a worker of incantations and poisonings, sat in the seat of the Patriarch and danced and sang an obscene song. The soldiers captured and raped the nuns who were consecrated to God. Oh, immortal God, cried Nicetas, how great were the afflictions of the men. The obscene realities of medieval warfare crashed upon Constantinople, and the hub of a great empire was shattered.
The looted city had many more books than people. It was the first time that Constantinople had fallen in the 874 years since Constantine the Great, Emperor of Rome founded it in AD 330. Its inhabitants still considered themselves Romans, and the city held the literary treasures of the ancient world as its inheritance. Among the treasures were treatises by the greatest mathematician of the ancient world and one of the greatest thinkers who had ever lived. He approximated the value of pi, he developed the theory of centers of gravity, and he made steps toward the development of the calculus 1,800 years before Newton and Leibniz. His name was Archimedes. Unlike hundreds of thousands of books that were destroyed during the fall of the city, three books containing Archimedes texts survived.
Of the three books, the first to disappear was Codex B; it was last heard of in the Popes library in Viterbo, north of Rome, in 1311. Next to disappear was Codex A; it was last recorded in the library of an Italian humanist in 1564. It was through copies of these books that Renaissance masters such as Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo knew the works of Archimedes. But Leonardo, Galileo, Newton and Leibniz knew nothing about the third book. It contained two extraordinary texts by Archimedes that were not in Codices A and B. Next to texts such as these, Leonardos mathematics look like childs play. Eight hundred years after the fall of Constantinople, this third book, the Archimedes Codex, technically known as Codex C, walked on stage.
This is the true and remarkable story of the book and the texts it contains. It reveals how these texts survived the centuries, how they were discovered, how they disappeared again, and how they eventually found a champion. This is also the story of how patient conservation, cutting-edge technology, and dedicated scholarship brought the erased texts back to light.When they started in 1999, the members of the team working on the book had little idea of what they would uncover. By the time they finished, they had discovered completely new texts from the ancient world and had changed the history of science.
Archimedes in America
Archimedes for Sale
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
Felix de Marez Oyens. What a great name! I dont know him, but I saw him on TV once. His name and demeanor together seemed tailor-made to suggest a distinguished and international pedigree, a pedigree that quite naturally produced deep learning, refined taste, excellent judgement, and total integrity. He clearly had a vast knowledge of books, and he was extraordinarily good at selling them. Thats why he was the international director of the Books and Manuscripts Department for Christies auction house in New York.
Thursday, October 29, 1998 was an exceptionally busy day for Felix. Most of it was devoted to the auction of the final part of the phenomenal collection of books on science and medicine from the collection of Haskell F. Norman. Among the 501 lots were some treasures. In the morning, he sold Marie Curies doctoral thesis, which she had signed for Ernest Rutherford, the man who discovered the nuclear structure of the atom; a first edition of Darwins On the Origin of Species; and a copy of Einsteins 1905 publication on Special Relativity. In the afternoon, further extraordinary books were under the hammer: a copy of the first edition of James Clerk Maxwells Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, which had been won as a prize by J. J. Thompson, the man who discovered the electron; Wilbur Wrights first published account of the trial flights at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina; and Nicolai Lobachevskiis On the Principles of Geometry, the first published work on non-Euclidian geometry. Great books, all of them, and a great day for Felix.
Sandwiched between the morning and afternoon sessions of the Norman sale was a separate mini-auction devoted to just one book. It was not a printed book but instead a handwritten one, and it had not belonged to Norman. In fact, the impressive catalogue that Felix had prepared for the occasion, with the splendid sale code Eureka9058, didnt record to whom it did belong. It didnt even look like a great book. It was charred by fire, devoured by mold, and it was almost illegible.To make matters worse, just the day before, the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem had sought a restraining order against Christies in the US District Court, Southern District of New York, Judge Kimba Wood presiding. The patriarchate argued that the manuscript had been stolen from one of its libraries. Christies successfully defended their right to auction the book the next day, but it was clear that the case of the rightful ownership of the book would be pursued after the sale. Even with the smart catalogue, the book itself was going to be a hard sell. Who would want an illegible manuscript, in appalling condition, with an ongoing court case attached to it? Nonetheless, at 2 p.m. on that day Felix was determined to sell it for an astronomical sum, and he set the reserve price for the manuscript at $800,000.
Felix hoped that the book would be worth that much because, barely visible underneath thirteenth-century Christian prayers, were the erased words of an ancient legend and a mathematical genius: Archimedes of Syracuse. Incomplete, damaged, and overwritten as it was, this book was the earliest Archimedes manuscript in existence. It was the only one that contained Floating Bodiesperhaps his most famous treatisein the original Greek, and the only versions of two other extraordinary textsthe revolutionary Method and the playful Stomachion.You could barely read them but, as Felix was very quick to point out, there was the possibility that the most modern imaging techniques might help.There were other erased texts in the book too, but they were almost invisible. No one could read them, and no one had given them much thought. What mattered was that this book contained the extremely battered material remains of the mind of a very great man. If this was a big day for Felix, it was a huge day for the history of science.
The auction room was in Christies offices on the corner of Park Avenue and 59th Street in New York City. The room was lined by large contemporary paintings, which provided the splendid visual setting that the manuscript could not. The manuscript itself was strapped to a book cradle and secured inside a dramatically lit cage to the right of the auctioneers podium. Reporters arrived as the minutes before the sale counted down. They stood at the back of the room with their cameramen who trained their lenses on the book and tried in vain to make it look as photogenic as one of the paintings. The rows furthest from the podium were full, but mainly with academics like the Professor of Mathematics at West Point, Fred Rickey. He was passionate about the manuscript and deeply interested in its fate, but could not possibly afford it. The seats at the front, where one might expect the most seriously interested customers, were still alarmingly empty. Felix may have been a little worried. But Felix was lucky. His lucky number was two, because the market value of an object is always determined by how badly more than one person wants it.
