A page long believed to be missing from the famed Archimedes Palimpsest has been rediscovered at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Blois, France, offering scholars new opportunities to study one of antiquity’s most important mathematical manuscripts.
The folio was identified by Victor Gysembergh, a researcher with the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), during work at the Blois museum. Initial analysis confirms the page corresponds to folio 123 of the Archimedes Palimpsest and contains passages from Archimedes’ treatise On the Sphere and Cylinder, Book I, specifically propositions 39 to 41. The discovery was detailed in a study published March 6, 2026, in the journal Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik.
The Archimedes Palimpsest is a 10th-century Greek manuscript that preserves several works by the ancient mathematician Archimedes of Syracuse. In the Middle Ages, portions of the text were erased so the costly parchment could be reused for religious writings—a common practice known as palimpsesting.
The manuscript was once held in Jerusalem and later Constantinople before being photographed in 1906 at the request of Danish philologist Johan Ludvig Heiberg. Those photographs became essential references for scholars after the manuscript later entered a private collection.
Today the palimpsest is housed at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. Multispectral imaging conducted in the early 2000s revealed previously unread portions of Archimedes’ works and fragments of other ancient texts. However, three pages documented in the 1906 photographs disappeared during the manuscript’s journey through private collections and were considered lost.
Gysembergh confirmed the Blois folio by comparing it with Heiberg’s archival photographs held at the Royal Danish Library. One side of the page shows a prayer text partially covering geometric diagrams and Greek text that remain largely legible. The other side is obscured by a 20th-century illumination depicting the biblical prophet Daniel between two lions.
“This discovery revives interest in re-examining Archimedes’ complete palimpsest using more powerful techniques than those used in the 2000s, in order to consider a new reading of the pages that remained illegible during this first campaign,” said CNRS.
Header Image Credit : Blois, Musée des Beaux-Arts
Sources : CNRS
