How a 13th-Century Monk Created a Prayer Manuscript by Writing Over—and Accidentally Preserving—Archimedes’ Groundbreaking Mathematical Works

in History, Math | July 29th, 2026 Leave a Comment

In Jerusalem of the year 1229, there lived a Greek Ortho­dox monk named Johannes Myronas. Need­ing some parch­ment for a prayer book, he grabbed some already-used pages, erased their exist­ing con­tent, and over them wrote down “prayers for the dead, prayers for repen­tance, bless­ings for the loaves at East­er, and even a prayer for those who were unrea­son­ably exclud­ed,” says math-and-sci­ence YouTu­ber Ben Syversen in the video above. Myronas may have ful­filled his reli­gious duty with­out using too much valu­able parch­ment, but he could­n’t have known the even greater rel­e­vance his actions would turn out to have had in the realm of math­e­mat­ics. For the pages he’d scrubbed were a Greek com­pi­la­tion con­tain­ing the only known copy of cer­tain works by the ancient poly­math Archimedes.

As it turns out, Myronas com­mit­ted per­haps the most notable act of inad­ver­tent preser­va­tion in the his­to­ry of math­e­mat­ics. We get the word palimpsest from the medieval prac­tice of over­writ­ing a page after first eras­ing what had been on it before, though incom­plete­ly; hence the mean­ing of mul­ti­ple lay­ers that have remained leg­i­ble over time.