palimpsest

[pal-imp-sest]

palimpsest: see manuscript.

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia Copyright © 2004.
Licensed from Columbia University Press

A palimpsest is a manuscript page, whether from scroll or book that has been written on, scraped off, and used again. The word "palimpsest" comes through Latin from Greek παλιν + ψαω = ("again" + "I scrape"), and meant "scraped (clean and used) again." Romans wrote on wax-coated tablets that could be smoothed and reused, and a passing use of the rather bookish term "palimpsest" by Cicero seems to refer to this practice.

Development

Because parchment, prepared from animal hides, is far more durable than paper or papyrus, most palimpsests known to modern scholars are parchment, which rose in popularity in western Europe after the sixth century. Also, where papyrus was in common use, reuse of writing media was less common because papyrus was cheaper and more expendable than costly parchment. But some papyrus palimpsests do survive, and Romans referred to this custom of washing papyrus. The reed from which it was made did not grow in Italy.

The writing was washed from parchment or vellum using milk and oat bran. With the passing of time, the faint remains of the former writing would reappear enough so that scholars can discern the text (called the scriptio inferior, the "underwriting") and decipher it. In the later Middle Ages the surface of the vellum was usually scraped away with powdered pumice, irretrievably losing the writing, hence the most valuable palimpsests are those that were overwritten in the early Middle Ages.

Medieval codices are constructed in "gathers" which are folded (compare "folio", "leaf, page" ablative case of Latin folium), then stacked together like a newspaper and sewn together at the fold. Prepared parchment sheets retained their original central fold, so each was ordinarily cut in half, making a quarto volume of the original folio, with the overwritten text running perpendicular to the effaced text.

Modern decipherment

Faint legible remains were read by eye before 20th-century techniques helped make lost texts readable. Scholars of the 19th century used chemical means to read palimpsests that were sometimes very destructive, using tincture of gall or later, ammonium hydrosulfate. Modern methods of reading palimpsests using ultraviolet and photography are less damaging. Superexposed photographs exposed in various light spectra, a technique called "multispectral filming," can increase the contrast of faded ink on parchment that is too indistinct to be read by eye in normal light. Innovative digitized images aid scholars in deciphering unreadable palimpsests. Multispectral imaging, undertaken by researchers at the Rochester Institute of Technology and Johns Hopkins University, retrieved some four-fifths of the text of the Archimedes Palimpsest. More recently, at the Walters Art Museum where the palimpsest is now conserved, the project has focused on experimental techniques to retrieve the remaining fifth. One of the most successful of these techniques has proved to be x-ray fluorescence imaging, through which the iron in the ink is revealed, even under a forged overpainting.

As a form of destruction

A number of ancient works have survived only as palimpsests. Vellum manuscripts were over-written on purpose mostly due to the dearth or cost of the material. In the case of Greek manuscripts, the consumption of old codices for the sake of the material was so great that a synodal decree of the year 691 forbade the destruction of manuscripts of the Scriptures or the church fathers, except for imperfect or injured volumes. Such a decree put added pressure on retrieving the vellum on which secular manuscripts were written. The decline of the vellum trade with the introduction of paper exacerbated the scarcity, increasing pressure to reuse material.

Cultural considerations also motivated the creation of palimpsests. The demand for new texts might outstrip the availability of parchment in some centers, yet the existence of cleaned parchment that was never overwritten suggests that there was also a spiritual motivation, to sanctify pagan text by overlaying it with the word of God, somewhat as pagan sites were overlaid with Christian churches to hallow pagan ground. Or the pagan texts may have merely appeared irrelevant. Texts most susceptible to being overwritten included obsolete legal and liturgical ones, sometimes of intense interest to the historian. Early Latin translations of Scripture were rendered obsolete by Jerome's Vulgate. Texts might be in foreign languages or written in unfamiliar scripts that had become illegible over time. The codices themselves might be already damaged or incomplete. Heretical texts were dangerous to harbor: there were compelling political and religious reasons to destroy texts viewed as heresy, and to reuse the media was less wasteful than simply to burn the books.

Vast destruction of the broad quartos of the early centuries of our era took place in the period which followed the fall of the Roman Empire, but palimpsests were also created as new texts were required during the Carolingian renaissance. The most valuable Latin palimpsests are found in the codices which were remade from the early large folios in the seventh to the ninth centuries. It has been noticed that no entire work is generally found in any instance in the original text of a palimpsest, but that portions of many works have been taken to make up a single volume. An exception is the Archimedes palimpsest (see below). On the whole, Early Medieval scribes were indiscriminate in supplying themselves with material from any old volumes that happened to be at hand.

Some famous palimpsests

The Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris: portions of the Old and New Testaments in Greek, attributed to the fifth century, are covered with works of Ephraem the Syrian in a hand of the twelfth century
Among the Syriac manuscripts obtained from the Nitrian desert in Egypt, British Museum, London: important Greek texts
A volume containing a work of Severus of Antioch of the beginning of the ninth century is written on palimpsest leaves taken from sixth century manuscripts of the Iliad and the Gospel of St Luke, both of the sixth century, and the Euclid's Elements of the seventh or eighth century, British Museum
A double palimpsest, in which a text of St John Chrysostom, in Syriac, of the ninth or tenth century, covers a Latin grammatical treatise in a cursive hand of the sixth century, which in its turn covers the Latin annals of the historian Granius Licinianus, of the fifth century, British Museum.
The only known hyper-palimpsest: the Novgorod Codex, in which maybe hundreds of texts have left their traces on the wooden back wall of a wax tablet
The Ambrosian Plautus, in rustic capitals, of the fourth or fifth century, re-written with portions of the Bible in the ninth century, Ambrosian Library
Cicero, De republica in uncials, of the fourth century, covered by St Augustine on the Psalms, of the seventh century, Vatican Library
Codex Theodosianus of Turin, of the fifth or sixth century
the Fasti Consulares of Verona, of 486
the Arian fragment of the Vatican, of the fifth century
the letters of Cornelius Fronto
the Archimedes Palimpsest, a work of the great Syracusan mathematician copied onto parchment in the tenth century and overwritten by a liturgical text in the twelfth century
Sinaitic Palimpsest
the unique copy of a Greek grammatical text composed by Herodian for the emperor Marcus Aurelius in the second century, preserved in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna
Codex Zacynthius – Greek palimpsest fragments of the gospel of Saint Luke, obtained in the island of Zante, by General Colin Macaulay, deciphered, transcribed and edited by Samuel Prideaux Tregelles
Codex Dublinensis (Codex Z) of St. Matthew's Gospel, at Trinity College Dublin, also deciphered by Tregelles Other palimpsests (New Testament)

To the present day survived about sixty palimpsest manuscripts of the Greek New Testament. Uncial codices:

Guelferbytanus A, Porphyrianus, Guelferbytanus B, Nitriensis, Uncial 064, 065, 066, 067, 068 (double palimpsest), 072, 078, 079, 086, 088, 093, 094, 096, 097, 098.

Lectionaries:

Lectionary 1637.

Extended usages

The word palimpsest also refers to a plaque which has been turned around and engraved on what was originally the back.

In planetary astronomy, ancient lunar craters whose relief has disappeared from subsequent volcanic outpourings, leaving only a "ghost" of a rim are also known as palimpsests. Icy surfaces of natural satellites like Callisto and Ganymede preserve hints of their history in these rings, where the crater's relief has been effaced by creep of the icy surface ("viscous relaxation"). They are characterized by fast projectile which penetrates the cold, icy crust. Inward flow of slushy surface causes the surface to retain this upflowing of water from the past.

In medicine it is used to describe an episode of acute anterograde amnesia without loss of consciousness, brought on by the ingestion of alcohol or other substances: 'alcoholic palimpsest'.

The term is used in Forensic science or Forensic engineering to describe objects placed over one another to establish the sequence of events at an accident or crime scene.

Several historians are beginning to use the term as a description of the way people experience times, that is, as a layering of present experiences over faded pasts.

Palimpsest is beginning to be used by Glaciologists to describe contradicting glacial flow indicators, usually consisiting of smaller indicators (ie striae) overprinted upon larger features (ie stoss and lee topography, drumlins, etc).

Decipherment in architecture

Architects imply palimpsest as a ghost —- an image of what once was. In the built environment, this occurs more than we think. Whenever spaces are shuffled, rebuilt, or remodeled, shadows remain. Tarred rooflines remain on the sides of a building long after the neighboring structure has been demolished; removed stairs leave a mark where the painted wall surface stopped. Dust lines remain from a relocated appliance. Ancient ruins speak volumes of their former wholeness. Palimpsests can inform us, archaeologically, of the realities of the built past.

Thus architects, archaeologists and design historians sometimes use the word to describe the accumulated iterations of a design or a site, whether in literal layers of archaeological remains, or by the figurative accumulation and reinforcement of design ideas over time. An excellent example of this can be seen at The Tower of London, where construction began in the eleventh century, and the site continues to develop to this day.

Archaeologists in particular use the term to denote a record of material remains that is suspected of having formed during an extended period but that cannot be resolved in such a way that temporally discrete traces can be recognized as such.

Egyptologists use the word for texts and representations inscribed in stone that have been scraped away, either completely or partially, often with a plaster filling being applied, and then a new inscription carved on top.