The prayer book was used in Christian Orthodox services at the Monastery of St. Sabas in the
Judean desert for hundreds of years. In the 1800s, the book was placed in the library of the
Metochion of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Constantinople, where its presence was
noted in 1844 by Constantin von Tischendorf, who was most famous for “borrowing” the
Codex Sinaiticus from St. Catherine’s Monastery. He published observations made during his
visit to Constantinople in the book “Reise in den Orient,” which was published in German in
1846 and in English translation by W.E. Shuckard as “Travels in the East” in 1847. In the
book, Tischendorf noted that the bishop allowed him
“to make any use of the manuscripts I found. They were thirty in number, but
they were altogether without any especial interest, with the exception of a
palimpsest upon mathematics.” (Tischendorf, tr. by Shuckard, 1847, p.274)
It is quite likely that this citation refers to the Archimedes palimpsest. Tischendorf apparently
made use of the manuscript in a manner that was no doubt unforeseen by his host, since one
leaf from the codex was found among his papers after Tischendorf’s death and now resides in
the Cambridge University Library as Add. 1879.23. The prayerbook was catalogued as MS
355 in the library of the Metochion in 1899 by Athanasios Papadopoulos-Kerameus. His
reference noted the use of the book at St. Sabas and included a transcription of the Greek
characters of a few lines of the palimpsested text that he could read. The catalogue came to
the attention of the Danish philologist Johan Ludvig Heiberg, who recognized the source of
the palimpsested text and traveled to Constantinople to see the book for himself in 1906.
Heiberg’s only tools to assist his reading were his eyes, natural light, and probably an optical
magnifying lens. The binding of the book prevented him from reading any original text within
the gutter except on folios at the center of a quire, but he was still able to produce an excellent
transcription of the text. During his study, Heiberg had photographs taken of at least 102
pages of the prayerbook of a then-existing total of 354; the 65 photographs of these folios
survive as Ms. Phot 38 in the Royal Library in Copenhagen. Shortly after his viewing of the
palimpsest, Heiberg announced the discovery of new Archimedes text, an item deemed
sufficiently important to merit a front-page story in the New York Times of 16 July 1907.
Heiberg published his results from the Method in the journal Hermes in 1907 and in the
second edition of his three volumes of Archimedis Opera Omnia cum Commentariis Eutocii
published in 1910-1915; the first edition had been published in 1880-1881
