Author: Jessica Leigh Hester / Source: Atlas Obscura
Some ancient texts are lost to the ages. Others are hiding in plain sight, and technology can bring them back to life on the page.
Take the so-called Galen Palimpsest. The parchment leaves of the leather-bound manuscript carry hymns dating to the 11th century.
Beneath these inscriptions, though, is an earlier medical treatise—a 6th-century Syriac translation of a text by Galen of Pergamon, a physician and anatomist who attended to Roman emperors. “Little of Galen’s advice would stand up to modern scrutiny,” the New York Times noted in 2015. (The article also quoted a scholar who summed up Galen’s philosophy, which included theories about balancing the body’s humors, as “completely bonkers.”) No matter: Researchers still want to glean as much as possible from his writings, which were foundational strata in the bedrock of Western medicine.Historically, parchment was a pricey commodity, and it was common practice for a scribe to scuff away earlier text and then lay down fresh lettering. But that doesn’t mean the bottom-most layer is gone forever.
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