As shown on PBS’s NOVA, the ancient book is not exactly in pristine shape. “The manuscript was heavily damaged by mould,” Abigail Quandt, senior conservator of manuscripts and rare books at the Walters Art Museum told NOVA. “The parchment is perforated where the fungi have actually gone through and digested the collagen, and it means that the Archimedes text is just totally missing in these areas.”

But the larger problem with the book is that Archimedes’ text was hidden some 800 years ago by a medieval monk who ran out of paper for his prayer book. The monk took pages out of the Archimedes book, turned them sideways, washed away the ink, and wrote over it. Still, there is a faint trace of the Archimedes text, and some 900 years later, a team of scientists is teasing the two texts apart.

"We are trying to take advantage of the very slight differences in colour of the two inks, of the inks from the Archimedes text and the later ink,” explained Roger Easton, associate professor of optical sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology. “So we did that by taking images at a wide variety of wavelengths."

Pages were scanned into a computer and then looked at in blue and red light. Then the computer processed those together and came up with a "false colour" image in which the two different texts appeared as different colours that were easier to distinguish. "I was amazed by the fact that now for the first time I can look at pages that look hopeless with the naked eye and begin to use them as text from which you just read,” said Reviel Netz, assistant professor of classics at Stanford University...