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At SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, scientists from across the globe are using X-rays to uncover text that was erased more than 1,000 years ago in hopes of finding a long-lost map of the galaxy by Greek astronomer Hipparchus. Researchers say the effort will help scientists better understand the birth of modern science.
Scientists at SLAC are using beams from a synchrotron, a circular particle accelerator, to detect traces of the original ink by analyzing how it reacts to high-energy X-rays.
“If you take high-energy X-rays and hit iron, it absorbs them and then radiates X-rays at a lower wavelength. We detect those wavelengths and get a picture of where that metal is,” said Keith Knox, an imaging scientist with the U.S.-based nonprofit Early Manuscripts Electronic Library.
In this case, much of the original text was written with ink containing more calcium than later inks, allowing researchers to identify older writing beneath newer text.
While the work is still preliminary, there have already been promising results. On Jan. 23, a SLAC spokesperson said researchers had identified full illustrations believed to be part of the star map.
“It sheds new light on many aspects of early astronomy, from its highest achievements to its reception in poetry, art and myth,” said Victor Gysembergh, a researcher at the French research institute Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and lead scholar on the project in an email on Feb. 11 about their findings.
“This material would have remained entirely inaccessible otherwise,” he added.
For centuries, scientists have known Hipparchus’ star catalog existed from references to it but haven’t been able to find a reproduction. Hipparchus likely wrote his star catalog in around 100 BCE on papyrus, which rarely survives the way parchment made of animal hides does.
But sometime in the eight to 10th centuries, an unknown scribe created a copy of it which scientists believe may have been reused in the creation of the Codex Climaci Rescriptus, a manuscript of monastic traditions.
Back then animal hide, which was used to record texts, was expensive, especially in the middle of the Sinai Desert in Egypt where monks at St. Catherine’s Monastery – built around 548, it’s the oldest continuously-inhabited Christian monastery – used the material to create manuscripts like the Codex Climaci Rescriptus.
To reuse these precious pages, monks would soak it in liquid, often milk, then use pumice stones to scrape off the writing and finally sprinkling the material with flour to make it look white and new. These reused texts are called palimpsests. Some documents were written on and erased repeatedly.
Unfortunately for modern-day scholars, when monks at St. Catherine wrote the Codex Climaci Rescriptus, they apparently wrote over a reproduction of Hipparchus’ star catalog.
Scientists say recovering this lost catalog will help modern scholars better understand the birth of science.
“It’s the oldest attempt to catalog all the stars in the sky. The goal is to basically recover as many as possible of these coordinates, and this will help us answer some of the biggest questions on the birth of science: How and why did they start doing science 2,000 and more years ago? How did they do that? How did they get so good at it so fast?” said French scientist Gysembergh.
“The coordinates we are finding are incredibly accurate for something that is done with the naked eye, with no magnifying instruments, and the influence of that continued by later astronomers like Ptolemy, the Roman astronomer,” Gysembergh added.
Researchers and scholars from the Museum of the Bible in Washington D.C. (which owns the Codex Climaci Rescriptus), University of Washington, CNRS and Stanford University spent a week scanning 11 pages of the codex, working 24 hours a day while staying on SLAC premises.
Now, researchers have left SLAC and are analyzing their findings. If the effort is successful, more pages of the codex and other manuscripts may be next. Scholars are hoping to publish a paper about the technology.
The writing they have already uncovered has helped scientists settle a longstanding dispute: Did Ptolemy plagiarize Hipparchus?
“Ptolemy is sometimes accused of having just copied out Hipparchus’ catalog and claimed that data as his own. We can now show that’s not the case,” Gysembergh said. “We can compare the data from this manuscript with the data in Ptolemy’s star catalog that is preserved, and we can show that Ptolemy did indeed sometimes use Hipparchus’ data, but he also used other sources. So that’s not plagiarism, that’s actual science. That’s what we still do today, to combine data sources to get the best data possible.”
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