Scientists and scholars in partnership

One of the advantages of living in the Washington, DC area is the wealth of cultural opportunities. Expositions of science, history and the arts are going on all the time. Our astronomer attended one of these recently, telling the story of how multicolor imaging allowed scholars to read a text that had been erased centuries ago.

Our astronomer writes:

The center of this story is a parchment palimpsest, words which will require a little explanation for some readers. Parchment is sheepskin, processed until it forms a thin (and fairly tough) sheet, much used for writing on in past centuries. But it takes many sheepskins to make a book, so parchment is precious stuff; especially if you’re a monk and your monastery doesn’t have its own flock of sheep. If you need to write something new you might just resort to scraping the writing off an old book (say, one that no one reads any more) and re-using the parchment. This repurposed manuscript is a palimpsest.

Sometimes the old writing (the “under-text”) is still faintly visible to the eye. Ink does soak into parchment, and getting it all out is tedious; scraping too hard might damage the material. But it’s not often that the under-text can really be read this way—sometimes the best a scholar can do is identify the language and a word or two.

Suppose, though, the old ink is a different color than the new ink. You could make reading easier by taking pictures in a specific color. And sometimes taking pictures in invisible light—the ultraviolet and infrared that our eyes can’t see, but cameras can—shows signs that our eyes miss. (That is, after all, the inspiration for our company’s name.) That’s the basic idea, refined and made much more sophisticated by this particular team of scientists.

This team took pictures of a palimpsest in thirty-odd colors, processing the resulting images by computer. This is an old document: the over-text dates probably from the eleventh century, the under-text from two centuries earlier. And they’re written in Syriac, a language common in the Middle East at that time but now understood mostly by a small number of scholars. Details of the project can be found on www.rbtoth.com, under “Syriac Galen Palimpsest.”  If you read Syriac, you might be interested in the pictures themselves, which are available at www.digitalgalen.net.

Now, science and scholarship are two different skill sets. Though both try to work things out based on a limited amount of information, they do it in different ways. I was impressed by the spirit of this particular collaboration: each trying to understand and speak in the other’s language, each expressing great respect for the other’s skills.

And—think about this for a moment—something that had been erased a thousand years ago is now being read. What other things that seem to be lost forever can be brought to light?